Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
1–10 of 67 posts
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#2I just started one of my first open source projects in the last few months and I've fixed ~3 issues so far. A thank you would be amazing. I'm not going to STOP fixing issues, but a thank you would really motivate me to keep it up. Kudos to this guy.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#3Yup, agreed. 100%
Whenever I find a blog post/video that has information particularly useful to me, or a side project that has come real handy - the first thing I do is whip up my mail client and thank the authors. I never realised how much of a positive impact this has on creators until people started mailing me thanking me for my work. Brightens up your day really :)
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#4This is a great reminder that simple manners and gratitude can go a long way.
What I hope is also apparent is that thank you notes will not be enough on their own to fix the unfortunate trend of entitlement, underfunding, and burnout that is attacking open source maintainers. Any step is progress, though, so long as we don't fool ourselves into thinking it's literally all we need to do.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#5Oh. Wow. This is something I haven't done near enough. Time to write a free emails!
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#6Irv Grousbeck, one of the legendary professors of entrepreneurship at Stanford GSB, says it over and over: thanks and praise cost you nothing but mean the world to colleagues.
And whenever possible, praise in public and critique in private.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#7Good idea to do for projects with a small number of users and a more "personal atmosphere", but like many things, does not scale --- I'm pretty sure Linus Torvalds would rather not have an additional million "thank you for Linux" emails on top of the volume of communication he normally receives, for example.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#8Good idea to do for projects with a small number of users and a more "personal atmosphere", but like many things, does not scale --- I'm pretty sure Linus Torvalds would rather not have an additional million "thank you for Linux" emails on top of the volume of communication he normally receives, for example.
Yea fuck Linux.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#9I did this once to one of the driver forces for an internal product i have been using daily. I learned from someone else that it made their day.
Appreciation, when it is well deserved, increases overall well-being of a person. We should not forget to do it.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#10This is a great reminder that simple manners and gratitude can go a long way. What I hope is also apparent is that thank you notes will not be enough on their own to fix the unfortunate trend of entitlement, underfunding, and burnout that is attacking open source maintainers. Any step is progress, though, so long as we don't fool ourselves into thinking it's literally all we need to do.
This, a thousand times this.
As an ex-contributor to some old school Apache projects, I know too well the over-whelming feeling that the marathon of maintenance can elicit. Open source becomes open-ended.
For sure, start with a thank you. People appreciate thanks for their efforts, no matter the result. It can make all the difference for some people.
Want to go beyond and be a little helpful? It's easy -- just take a look around a project and add a contribution. It doesn't have to be an earth-shattering feature; in fact, it's the mundane that can really make a project so much better. Add a unit test, fix a bug, update some documentation. There is always something that can be improved.