Contributing to Open Source on GitHub • Hacker News Board

Re: Contributing to Open Source on GitHub

#31

Post by sophacles » Sat, Apr 05, 2014, 5:39 PM UTC

joshlegs wrote: post #30

sophacles wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There are people who are just learning to code, who got the advice, find a simple open source project and help. There are people who have only done early stage classes for CS degrees that want to practice in real coding but haven't been exposed to real world development. There are people who have been coding forever but never paid attention to that stuff because they were always part of a team and didn't worry a…

>Ignorance and ability are not as correlated as people like to think they are. thank god there are people who understand that. It's amazing to me the number of people who equate the two. Equally ridiculous is the tendency of programmers to spew advice such as "Read the fucking wiki (or documentation)". That really doesnt help newbs who are just barely figuring out the right way to Google things. The thing about being…

Tangential, but I think that one of the greatest gifts of experience and age (not that I'm old, I'm 33 - just not a kid anymore) is a lot of exposure to things I know nothing about. I now know just enough to be able to google lots of different things well, and better, have learned how to discover more things I know nothing about. It's a skill we (humanity) should spend more time developing in youngsters - being a specialist is useful and great, but being a specialist who knows of other specialties is even better, because then it becomes easier to link knowledge sets into awesome solutions.

Re: Contributing to Open Source on GitHub

#32

Post by niels_olson » Sat, Apr 05, 2014, 5:51 PM UTC

jarofgreen wrote: post #24

GitHub can be a little to good at pushing this. I've been taken to task for not having docs for my Open Source project which is on GitHub. "But I do, they are on this website here and there is a link to them at the very top of the README!" Didn't matter, I got told off for what was really "you don't have docs in the usual place on GitHub." Very frustrating. @patio11 I think it was made a comment in a blog about don't…

So the real issue, it seems to me, is GitHub should be making it very clear, somehow, to users how to cite their sources? Most journals have a "suggested citation" blurb in every article's webpage.

Does git have built-in citation management?

That would be awesome, btw. That would arguably elevate git to the level of email: made by hackers for hackers, now universal to the fabric of modern life.

Re: Contributing to Open Source on GitHub

#33

Post by recursive » Sat, Apr 05, 2014, 9:42 PM UTC

teacup50 wrote: post #12

shurcooL wrote: post #8

What should I do if the open source project I want to contribute to isn't on GitHub?

Copy the project's code into a GitHub repository that uses the project's name and start hacking on it there, and then release your own fork. Oh, wait, that's exactly what you shouldn't do . :)

Why not? That's what I would have guessed.