81–90 of 98 posts
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I get anxious about this too sometimes, but in my experience the "long lists of conditions that no one ever told me and assumed I knew" are hardly ever relevant.
I don't get anxious. I get tired of doing what people told me would work and having it go really badly.
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To sum all that in a nutshell: Collaborate.
I'm curious to see what others think about your comment, notyourwork. To me (maybe only me!) it looks like you're putting a pithy stamp on what the GP said. Going a little farther, it looks to me like you're taking credit for what the GP said. I do not see the value of saying, "To sum all that in a nutshell: Collaborate." I see a value in what the GP said. That said, this is the first time I've criticized this kind o…
What he was trying to do is summarize and give a one word interpretation/other way of looking at it, not trying to do something insidious and inane as trying to steal credit for an HN comment.
Sometimes it helps to have a point summed up in the briefest possible way. What never helps, though, is posting inane accusations of ulterior motives to HN comments.
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I don't get anxious. I get tired of doing what people told me would work and having it go really badly.
Complaining about freely volunteered advice people give you in a friendly and helpful spirit is a good way to avoid getting it.
This is a great start! Contributing can be a lot more than just PRs though: - answering questions on stack overflow, chat (irc, gitter, slack) - creating a minimal code repro, checking for duplicates, checking if a bug is fixed in a later release/master branch - writing tutorials/usage scenarios, giving talks, just using the project and providing feedback - helping with documentation + website - translations if possi…
helping with documentation + website I am not a programmer. I do copywriting for pay and I have run a bunch of different personal websites over the years (15+ years, I think). I know a little HTML and CSS. I am interested in getting involved in open source via first working on copywriting and website stuff, since that is what I already have a background in. I am finding it extremely opaque to figure out how on earth…
Sounds complex, but you should only spend like 10-20 minutes on this. If you can't find clear signs of activity in that amount of time, there's a good chance that the project is abandoned or only accepts contributions from a private group. It may take a couple of days or so to get a response to messages on less active projects, that's okay. If you can't see any activity or get any response from maintainers in a reasonable timeframe, then don't bother. If your contributions are wanted and have a good chance of being accepted into the project, then somebody should be willing to write a few sentences to you specifically telling you so, and outlining how to contribute or where to find a current contribution guide.
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To sum all that in a nutshell: Collaborate.
I'm curious to see what others think about your comment, notyourwork. To me (maybe only me!) it looks like you're putting a pithy stamp on what the GP said. Going a little farther, it looks to me like you're taking credit for what the GP said. I do not see the value of saying, "To sum all that in a nutshell: Collaborate." I see a value in what the GP said. That said, this is the first time I've criticized this kind o…
The response was a long winded way of saying collaborate with people and don't work in a closed box. I was merely trying to summarize that open source can be a simple and beautiful thing. It's not complicated to get involved but tossing pull requests over the wall isn't the way to do it which brings us back to precisely what I said. Sorry you didn't find value in it.
There is one very important tip that's missing: Follow the original coding style exactly . Not just spaces vs tabs or block styles, but idioms and other idiosyncrasies, too. Why? Imagine reading a source repo where every second block uses different bracket styles, mixing spaces with tabs and so on. It's going to look like a kludgy mess, and will be distracting to read. There is no correct style for most languages (pe…
> Follow the original coding style exactly. Personally I would take any formatting and just run an auto-formatter over the code section when I work on it the next time in case it bothers me. Correct and sane code are far more important than hassling someone else to conform to a particular style. In my opinion applying styles is a task for machines, not humans.
Even if I have the code checked out, I don't want to clutter my diff with hundreds of reformatted lines just to read it.
It sounds like formatting isn't important for your code comprehension. That's nice for you, but for many of us, that's just not how our brains work.
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I'm curious to see what others think about your comment, notyourwork. To me (maybe only me!) it looks like you're putting a pithy stamp on what the GP said. Going a little farther, it looks to me like you're taking credit for what the GP said. I do not see the value of saying, "To sum all that in a nutshell: Collaborate." I see a value in what the GP said. That said, this is the first time I've criticized this kind o…
Your 2 paragraph criticism of one a one sentence comment is way more obnoxious and contributes less. What he was trying to do is summarize and give a one word interpretation/other way of looking at it, not trying to do something insidious and inane as trying to steal credit for an HN comment. Sometimes it helps to have a point summed up in the briefest possible way. What never helps, though, is posting inane accusati…
A closer summary of what the OP said is "Don't waste the project maintainers time" which, while much better than "collaborate", is still a waste of time and misses the specific advice the OP gives.
Delish is justified in calling out notyourwork's comment for providing nothing useful. If I wrote a comment like the one notyourwork wrote I would be feeling guilty for writing a comment just for points. Also the size of a comment is not a good basis for criticism.
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It's more than that. I've had a patch rejected because my unit tests used the wrong verification manner (java assertTrue() instead of assertThat() in cases where the latter would report better error messages were the test to fail, as I recall). Automatic blah will never catch this kind of thing. Ditto for human-readable messages that have/lack full stops at the end. Ditto for if() foo vs if() { foo } and the ever-lov…
> Ditto for if() foo vs if() { foo } At least that one can be fixed automatically by eclipse. But sure, there are some things that are difficult to automate. What I'm saying that one should not hassle a contributor over all those things that that can be done by machines.
In my experience, not even bothering with style is a good indicator of careless "shotgun coding" and such PRs typically have far worse issues. It's also typical that such PRs won't have real issues fixed either.
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Your 2 paragraph criticism of one a one sentence comment is way more obnoxious and contributes less. What he was trying to do is summarize and give a one word interpretation/other way of looking at it, not trying to do something insidious and inane as trying to steal credit for an HN comment. Sometimes it helps to have a point summed up in the briefest possible way. What never helps, though, is posting inane accusati…
I have to agree with delish on this matter. Notyourwork's comment actually took away from the conversation. jhchen's assertions of, "be familiar with the project", "don't just start writingcode", and "your contribution is not free for the project" is not summed up nicely with the word "collaborate". To some people, collaborate might mean to put in a pull request without caring whether it is wanted or not, the exact o…