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Pronking for Programmers

paulbutcher.com

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Re: Pronking for Programmers

#11

Post by daleharvey »

Linell wrote: post #2

How can someone who has time and could be that "fit gazelle" get into contributing to open source? I have tried several times. At least, I've looked at a few of the suggestions on how to get started. All of the ideas don't quite work, though. Namely because most of the suggestions are things that I've either never even heard of or that I do not use. The gardening approach mentioned not long ago on this site seems ver…

There are several ways to get started and it depends a lot on your motivations and are of interest. However the main piece of advice is to jump in, dont be worried about upsetting someone system, some OS projects arent setup well for contribution and they will become easy to spot, but for the ones that are, doing something 'wrong' is a great way for a maintainer to come along and help introduce you to how to do it 'right'.

http://openhatch.org works a lot on making initial contributions easier, if you are interested in express then you dont need to work on the core framework, write a plugin and open source it, contributing is by far easier when you have a real need to do so, maybe someone will use your plugin and find a problem they want to fix, maybe you will use someones project and want to fix something.

Re: Pronking for Programmers

#13

Post by svisser »

gmac wrote: post #10
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #4

"Hiring is so hard, so burn your free time to help me!" Please don't contribute to OSS unless you really want to. It's great if you do. But making it a near-mandatory requirement just means that it drives yet more self-promotion (it isn't a real project unless you buy a domain!), more low quality contributions, and, ultimately, becomes yet another thing-you-really-should-be-doing.

It doesn't have to be contributing to existing open source projects. I always find it a bit surprising when other programmers have no code to show on Github or similar, for this reason: 1. most people who use computers day in, day out, encounter a pain point or two with the tools they use; 2. as a programmer, it seems natural to fix that pain point; 3. once fixed, it seems natural to share the fix, so that others are…

Legal / contract constraints may prevent people from publishing code written at work or even in their free time.

Re: Pronking for Programmers

#14

Post by ptr »

gmac wrote: post #10
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #4

"Hiring is so hard, so burn your free time to help me!" Please don't contribute to OSS unless you really want to. It's great if you do. But making it a near-mandatory requirement just means that it drives yet more self-promotion (it isn't a real project unless you buy a domain!), more low quality contributions, and, ultimately, becomes yet another thing-you-really-should-be-doing.

It doesn't have to be contributing to existing open source projects. I always find it a bit surprising when other programmers have no code to show on Github or similar, for this reason: 1. most people who use computers day in, day out, encounter a pain point or two with the tools they use; 2. as a programmer, it seems natural to fix that pain point; 3. once fixed, it seems natural to share the fix, so that others are…

You're forgetting the work that's needed to make it production (or at least more production) ready and the maintenance. A fix is often just made "good enough" for oneself in my experience. It's like sharing your dot files.

Re: Pronking for Programmers

#15

Post by feca »

luu wrote: post #8

When I look at the best programmers I know, none have them have done any open source work whatsoever. This group of people ranges from IBM fellows who created some of the earliest minicomputers to IMO medalists who are unbelievably fast problem solvers. I'm not going to say that's a generalizeable statement. It's not, and that's the point -- it's a side effect of spending a career working in teams where people care m…

You have probably seen code written by the best programmers you know, and I guess you are comparing their work with the code in open source projects. As the rest of us can't see their code, it's impossible to agree with you, so we can only trust you blindly. But "trust" with something so technical is a bad criteria, and that's why open source software is good for showing your approach to problem solving and your programming style.

I think the idea of "doing open source work" sounds a bit disproportionate. At least to me. Instead, think about people sharing some small tools they have built for themselves. Even if they work for IBM, they should be able to customize their environment by tweaking some tool or writing a script to make their lives easier. They only have to share that code, not to show off but to help others with similar problems.

Re: Pronking for Programmers

#16

Post by a3n »

badman_ting wrote: post #5

As noted, it's expensive. I've encountered potential employers who were lukewarm because I hadn't done enough work in open repos to impress them. That's understandable, it is rational to tend towards "no" instead of "yes" when evaluating developers. But to me it seems strange to do open source work just to be more attractive to employers. So I guess it really is an honest signal. I'm not going out of my way to do a b…

> But to me it seems strange to do open source work just to be more attractive to employers.

Particularly if it's an employer that doesn't itself contribute to open source.

Re: Pronking for Programmers

#17

Post by Nursie »

luu wrote: post #8

When I look at the best programmers I know, none have them have done any open source work whatsoever. This group of people ranges from IBM fellows who created some of the earliest minicomputers to IMO medalists who are unbelievably fast problem solvers. I'm not going to say that's a generalizeable statement. It's not, and that's the point -- it's a side effect of spending a career working in teams where people care m…

Agree. Very much.

Not everyone has a huge body of work they can put out there in the world of FOSS for a vast variety of reasons. Of the two best programmers I know, one is active and publishes, the other is a guy you would kill to have on any team, but whose work is all in pursuit of his closed source job.

Re: Pronking for Programmers

#18

Post by Bahamut »

badman_ting wrote: post #5

As noted, it's expensive. I've encountered potential employers who were lukewarm because I hadn't done enough work in open repos to impress them. That's understandable, it is rational to tend towards "no" instead of "yes" when evaluating developers. But to me it seems strange to do open source work just to be more attractive to employers. So I guess it really is an honest signal. I'm not going out of my way to do a b…

As someone who does contribute a bunch to open source, it does make me a bit wary - I've met some excellent developers who do very little open source development and who I have learned a lot from while working with them.

Personally, I contribute to open source because I want to see things fixed and generally want to move fast since that's how I operate. Sometimes this has meant figuring out fixes myself and opening up a pull request. I see this as a way of helping projects I like move forward since they can focus less on bugs and more on feature development.

Re: Pronking for Programmers

#19

Post by 33a »

I really hope this doesn't become a thing. We don't need a bunch of perverse incentives pushing people to write open source like academics are forced to churn out papers.

Re: Pronking for Programmers

#20

Post by elohesra »

QuantumChaos wrote: post #12

Is it dedication that is being signaled here, or intelligence? Open source can also be a signal that you get you work done quick enough that you have time for hobbies.

Or, to play devil's advocate, that you aren't putting in the level of work in your day job that you could be putting in. If I were an employer looking at a candidate and I saw they had huge amounts of open source contributions, the first thing I'd ask is "how did you have time for this and your day job?".

It also tells you something else about a candidate: that their previous job probably wasn't particularly hard or that they didn't have much in the way of responsibilities. If you're the lead developer on a several hundred thousand line codebase, it seems less likely that you have time to build an open source resume than if you were a junior developer.

Honestly, I think open source is a bit of a mixed signal. If the code shown in the repositories is great, then that's fantastic, but if it's merely average then I think it makes you look worse than just not having it there at all. This is really my biggest objection with open source: if you want to use it as some sort of resume, then you have to contribute huge amounts of time to it in order to make it representative of your skill. Then it's no longer an open source project you do for fun, but just a second day job. Additionally, when it gets good enough for an employer to see, what interviewer is going to have time to read through it? This problem is magnified especially when developers start treating open source as a form of resume, and interviewers have to wade through shockingly poor repositories from every candidate to determine the candidate's quality.

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