Thank you for this. I have a USB desktop speaker whose volume controls don't work and I was thinking of writing a patch, but didn't know where to start; now I do.
My first contribution to Linux
61–70 of 92 posts
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#62This is the easiest way to hire engineers with high quality open source contributions with a public track record. All it takes is just to check that the commit shows up in upstream projects such as Linux and anyone can see the code, the reviews and the authors email in the AUTHORS file which verify that this contribution / patch is indeed from the author who committed that change. This is a very old form of social pr…
Be careful.. any measure becomes a target, and in doing so voids its usefulness. Getting a kernel patch in is probably already somewhat afflicted by this, but imagine the lkml if every Bay Area wannabe company started soft-requiring this as a screen!
> Be careful.. any measure becomes a target, and in doing so voids its usefulness.
Except, this tests for a wide range of tasks related to a typical SWE role: programming proficiency, reasoning through rigorous code-review, clean code, open-source and testing.
Given that Leetcode and Hackerrank tests can be cheated / beaten with LLMs, it not only has been gamed to death, but it tests for nothing that is related to the role.
> but imagine the lkml if every Bay Area wannabe company started soft-requiring this as a screen!
Then this saves time and the proof is on the interviewee to show high quality functional open source changes to high profile projects like the Linux kernel for example and the bar is set high on purpose.
Imagine if hundreds of candidates have "interview cheating" software installed, just to pass the coding interview. Both the interviewer and the interviewee lose.
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#63My favourite contribution to the Linux kernel, which I witnessed myself, was a 1-character fix to a macro that my boss found, related to reading ADC, and which we spent two weeks checking and double-checking and re-double-checking to be sure that it was actually a bug.
It was, he submitted it, and that one character fix got him into the contributors file .. we were all highly amused, because that particular boss didn't program much, but found the bug during testing and it was, nevertheless, a huge win for him .. ;)
EDIT: it was a 2-character fix. ;)
https://lkml.iu.edu/2103.2/08109.html
(W., if you read this, I still love telling the story of how you found this bug..)
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#64I am doing the same but with LLVM. For starters, I filtered issues with the "good first issue" label and found something to work on [1]. It took 2 months in review and about a month to research and write the code. Finally got merged yesterday. I am writing about it so that when someone else bumps into the same problem, they hopefully take 1 hour instead of 1 month. Compilers, like the kernel, are a lot of fun!
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#65This was really interesting! I've often wondered how one would do such a thing. Seeing your name in the Linux changelog must be awesome!
> Seeing your name in the Linux changelog must be awesome! Years ago when I was a teenager I had a couple patches accepted for ksnake and gedit. Certainly not as prestigious as a patch to Linux, but still the idea of code I'd written running on millions of PCs around the world felt amazing.
Same. I found serious bugs in a couple of games, exploited some, had fun, wrote a patch and sent it to whoever. Problem is, I was so anxious I did it under an alias. I have my different aliases in the changelog of some games. Nice to look at them, like "wow, that's my contribution", and then it hits "but no one will believe it was me, it was not under my name". God damn it. :(
You know, back when I confused "hash function" with "encryption" and whatnot.
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#66Re: My first contribution to Linux
#67congratulations. as someone who is a bit of a finnaboo and lives there, it's my dream to have had contributed something to the linux kernel. I was wondering if you used the same email for the commit as your github profile so that it shows up in the contributor list in the github mirror of the kernel and on your profile? I don't think I see the contribution when taking a quick glance at your github
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#68I've never really done anything with the kernel, and at this point it feels kind of overwhelming to start contributing. I'm sure if I went to the source tree and asked people for a low-hanging-fruit task someone would be kind enough to guide me to get started, but it's still kind of overwhelming to a point where I've just avoided it. I should probably should stop coming up with excuses and just do it, as I would like…
https://kernelnewbies.org/FAQ/WhereDoIBegin (and https://kernelnewbies.org/ in general) has some good pointers...
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#69This was really interesting! I've often wondered how one would do such a thing. Seeing your name in the Linux changelog must be awesome!
> Seeing your name in the Linux changelog must be awesome! Years ago when I was a teenager I had a couple patches accepted for ksnake and gedit. Certainly not as prestigious as a patch to Linux, but still the idea of code I'd written running on millions of PCs around the world felt amazing.
I got a patch to Debian’s vixie-cron accepted [0], which thus far has been my proudest achievement. It’s tiny and stupid, and should never happen to anyone reasonable, but nevertheless, you can now change your server’s TZ without restarting crond or waiting for a DST shift, and your jobs will fire at the new correct time.
Contributing to the kernel is definitely on my list of things to eventually do.
0: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1019716
Re: My first contribution to Linux
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seeing your name in the Linux changelog must be awesome! Years ago when I was a teenager I had a couple patches accepted for ksnake and gedit. Certainly not as prestigious as a patch to Linux, but still the idea of code I'd written running on millions of PCs around the world felt amazing.
I got a patch to Debian’s vixie-cron accepted [0], which thus far has been my proudest achievement. It’s tiny and stupid, and should never happen to anyone reasonable, but nevertheless, you can now change your server’s TZ without restarting crond or waiting for a DST shift, and your jobs will fire at the new correct time. Contributing to the kernel is definitely on my list of things to eventually do. 0: https://bugs.…
Congrats. I had a commit in the kernel but it got refactored out.