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There are people with jobs, families, and other hectic schedules that still walk their dogs, attend clubs, mow their lawns, put up Holiday lights, have hobbies,
by git-pull 9y ago
There are people with jobs, families, and other hectic schedules that still walk their dogs, attend clubs, mow their lawns, put up Holiday lights, have hobbies, even volunteer.
What I'm against is this crab mentality and envy that having contributions to open source is looked upon as if it's yacht sailing - when it's really hard work and quite thankless, heh.
I highly doubt every time I hear people saying "they don't have time", the person truly optimizes their schedule to be productive, or has forgone common "normal" timewasters.
Every time someone is playing video games, chatting, using social media, watching TV, and having spent on nothing productive: that is when open source can happen. You can do a lot in an hour of time.
If you look at my open source contributions (to other projects), more than half are:
- updating continuous integration / tests
- code styling
- documentation
- typos
How much time does it take to fix a typo? 1 minute.
To improve documentation? 5-25 minutes.
Code styling? 1 minute to 1 hour.
Updating CI? 10 minutes to 1 hour.
Those are all great stepping stones to help you gain momentum, instead of malingering with no direction. Nobody is going to come along and volunteer on your behalf, this is about your personal constitution.
A lot of my other patches come from work. In the natural course of duty, there's opportunity to send code back upstream.
My largest contributions span 2 days or more.
- drakonka 9y agoI've seen stuff like simple typos that would be really quick to fix in some open source projects, but then I start wondering if it's just going to be seen as one of those "cheap" contributions and choose to leave it. Having never contributed to open source, I sort of feel like I should prove my worth by contributing something that takes a bit more effort before feeling comfortable going for the lowest hanging of fruit (I don't mean a huge feature or anything, but maybe something that involves some actual coding vs a typo in documentation or in a variable name). Typing it out I realize this sounds kind of silly...
- matt_the_bass 9y agoIf you don’t start somewhere then you never start. I for one would love to have someone that followed me around and cleaned up my mess. Why would you discount that as a contribution?