Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects • Hacker News Board

Re: Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects

#71

Post by Hitton » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #15

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #3

I think some combinations of items 6 and 9 are often missing from projects where there’s a quick rush to view issues and bug reports as nuisance instead of viewing them as a lifeline of critical feedback the project needs for survival. I’ve seen it so many times where open source projects have critical bugs, but the existing contributors rush to play the false defense along the lines of “pay us if you want this fixed…

> Obviously no contributor in an open source project _has to_ do anything. But at some level if you’re working on the project because you care about the project instead of burning the commons in a land grab for satisfying personal projects, then taking priority from reported issues and even thanking people for pointing out urgent bugs whose fixes should supercede the fun features of some planned release has to become…

I disagree. Unless the maintainer refuses to accept pull request adding new feature/fixing the issue, there is nothing wrong about working primary on things that concern the maintainer. Maintainer is not some sort of slave who must rush to fulfil every wish of the user.

Re: Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects

#72

Post by 6510 » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

spats1990 wrote: post #31

offtopic-ish but maybe somebody sees it: can anyone recommend places around the web to look for open source projects where I can help out as a writer? I write and edit professionally but am bad at code beyond some 101-level Java, and beyond that the usual html/css. I've always appreciated well-written help docs, manuals, FAQs, etc of any kind and would like to help out if I can and hopefully learn some things while d…

funny: I read my own spec after 6 months and it struck me as the worse technical writing I had ever seen. Maybe you can take a swing at it. http://go-here.nl/ess-and-nno

Re: Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects

#73

Post by nlfwhulsdhouv » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

ermir wrote: post #6

Open source projects (or any large collaboration) now have a new type of danger that many are unprepared to handle, in that there are people online who will shit on your work or make a giant spectacle that can ruin people just so that they can appear good in Twitter or make some kind of name for themselves in certain online circles. Similar to thieves who steal metal from railways, the damage they cause is far higher…

You're derailing a very reasonable discussion to make a political point. Instead of hiding your complaints with loaded language, be honest so we can actually discuss it on it's merits. Furthermore, it would benefit from some real-world examples. I'm frankly sick of these "The SJWs have gone too far and only care about internet cred" comments without any real analysis. It's on track to becoming much more annoying than the original problem, and stifles discussion just as much.

As it stands, all your comment is doing is contributing to the ideological echo-chamber on HN and derailing an otherwise non-political discussion.

Re: Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects

#74

Post by Ididntdothis » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

megous wrote: post #30

pjc50 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's infuriating to see those complaining about very real barriers to contribution or actual abuses smeared as "rail thieves". For example, the percieved gender of the submitter making a difference to pull request acceptance rates: https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/

...by a very small margin. It's hard to determine how maintainer preceived the submitter's gender, so they tested for how they could have perceived instead (availability of identifying information - and even that is very hard to determine and limited the sample size). Looking at the big picture, a lot of pull requests are accepted from both genders. I'd be concerned if the difference was >20%, but 4% with all the lis…

Agreed. 4% is probably as equal as things can get realistically. You probably can get the same margin if you compare people who wear glasses or short vs long hair.

Re: Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects

#75

Post by dataduck » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #20

ermir wrote: post #6

Open source projects (or any large collaboration) now have a new type of danger that many are unprepared to handle, in that there are people online who will shit on your work or make a giant spectacle that can ruin people just so that they can appear good in Twitter or make some kind of name for themselves in certain online circles. Similar to thieves who steal metal from railways, the damage they cause is far higher…

It's infuriating to see those complaining about very real barriers to contribution or actual abuses smeared as "rail thieves". For example, the percieved gender of the submitter making a difference to pull request acceptance rates: https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/

This study doesn't say what you think it does. Women gain significant advantage in being identified as women, except in the case of a first request, and only then by an amount on the edge of statistical significance. https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-exc...

Re: Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects

#76

Post by JohnFen » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

semiotagonal wrote: post #45

Confession: I've been a professional software developer for 24 years, and I've never been able to get my foot in the door for an open-source project (other than my own open-sourced license stuff). I think part of it is because the projects that are most worthwhile have no shortage of participants, so they don't need to extend any welcome to newcomers; and the projects that need participants often end up that way beca…

Yeah, I've been a professional dev for about 30 years and have commonly encountered a similar situation. Not always, though -- I have managed to make substantive contributions to projects.

But, to be honest, I've entirely given up on contributing to such projects a few years back, because so many have become unpleasant to work with due to nontechnical problems.

I largely only contribute to my own projects these days.

Re: Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects

#77

Post by UserIsUnused » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 6:25 PM UTC

ermir wrote: post #6

Open source projects (or any large collaboration) now have a new type of danger that many are unprepared to handle, in that there are people online who will shit on your work or make a giant spectacle that can ruin people just so that they can appear good in Twitter or make some kind of name for themselves in certain online circles. Similar to thieves who steal metal from railways, the damage they cause is far higher…

>Sadly, having an open and explicit CoC and governance structure gives these people a weapon to use against you.

Also, not having one also makes lots of people rally against you. You can't win on the CoC front

Re: Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects

#78

Post by fourthark » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

nlfwhulsdhouv wrote: post #73

ermir wrote: post #6

Open source projects (or any large collaboration) now have a new type of danger that many are unprepared to handle, in that there are people online who will shit on your work or make a giant spectacle that can ruin people just so that they can appear good in Twitter or make some kind of name for themselves in certain online circles. Similar to thieves who steal metal from railways, the damage they cause is far higher…

You're derailing a very reasonable discussion to make a political point. Instead of hiding your complaints with loaded language, be honest so we can actually discuss it on it's merits. Furthermore, it would benefit from some real-world examples. I'm frankly sick of these "The SJWs have gone too far and only care about internet cred" comments without any real analysis. It's on track to becoming much more annoying than…

My perception is that a few open source communities have blown up this way very visibly, and people are getting up in arms about it.

But I don’t think the problem is widespread; it’s just people getting excited about bad things that happened.

So I agree: more analysis, more facts please. It’s a good conversation to have; let’s keep it substantive.

Re: Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects

#79

Post by anjakefala » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 6:49 PM UTC

spats1990 wrote: post #31

offtopic-ish but maybe somebody sees it: can anyone recommend places around the web to look for open source projects where I can help out as a writer? I write and edit professionally but am bad at code beyond some 101-level Java, and beyond that the usual html/css. I've always appreciated well-written help docs, manuals, FAQs, etc of any kind and would like to help out if I can and hopefully learn some things while d…

We would also welcome you with open arms at https://github.com/saulpw/visidata =) Send us an email, or join us on freenode, twitter, etc, if you want to help out! I would love to onboard you.

Re: Helping newcomers become contributors to open projects

#80

Post by fourthark » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 6:50 PM UTC

organicfigs wrote: post #66

After being a subscriber to hn for the last decade, a post I'm affected enough by to create an account. After wanting to contribute to open source projects for my entire career (I've previously worked at FAANGs and am a technical lead now), I've had 0% success in attaining this goal. Here's been my experience: -reached out to the Apache Tomcat team -> silence -joined Linux Kernel Newbies -> code is such terrible qual…

You might want to look at smaller projects. But it’s generally true that maintainers don’t have a lot of time and you might get ignored for many reasons.

If there’s a project you use which has bugs, reporting them and submitting fixes is always a great way to start!