I taught myself programming and I also help open source projects with documentation and translation. Gonna be a bit until I can really make PRs with code but slowly working towards it.
Way too many for my sanity! I write for the wiki of postmarketOS, I translated for fluffychat, I‘m in the process of porting bitwarden client flatpak to arm (current version is years old) and many more. I write issues for every app I encounter bugs in. Have accounts on at least 5 popular git forges for that reason (time for federation folks!).
How I find projects?
I transition my life away from proprietary software one app at a time. If it exists in foss I try it. If I can manage daily driving it I do so and move to the next. There are always bugs, wrong translations or missing features. I report them as I encounter them and if I desperately need an app that doesnt work I attempt a port.
I do this in strong opposition to some folks who have coding skills and who decide to shit on some open source apps because they‘re „broken“. The amount of energy it takes to spit hate would have sufficed to do something about it.
Thanks for asking. Feel free to join the hunt for bugs.
I’ve a noob user so over the year or so I’ve been learning to use git and read errors. This week I made my first PR patching a bug and it broke because I patched it in the wrong place, however, the project owner saw what I was doing and patched it himself. I’m trying my best here, hopefully I can gain enough experience to help out with more projects.
You don’t have to fix them, at least not all of them. You can just add an “open for contributions” or “help wanted” label on GitHub and let other people deal with it.
I sometimes wonder if you could make a name for yourself by being the Johnny Appleseed of FOSS. Go around to many projects and fixing a longstanding open ticket on each.
You’ll have tons of github repos and stars, if nothing else.
Literally all of them, but look at OpenSSL for a good example.
Literally everything runs off it these days, and it’s like 3 guys and a trenchcoat working on it most of the time.
It’s just how open source / the industry / people are. We all have our own stuff we want to do, so as long as the stuff your using works you don’t tend to care, and if it doesn’t you often don’t have the time or resources to do anything other than tell the owner to fix it.
I’ve heard some people take the approach of “merge everything”. Whatever people contribute, merge it. People like to feel like their time is valuable, and that their work is valued.
You can follow up the merge with polish or tweaks but if you merge contributions you’re more likely to see more.
😆 I don’t think you’re supposed to take it literally. And it’s advice for everyone’s pet open source projects that no one else ever seems to contribute to, not really good advice for software that holds up civilization.
There are people submitting code with wrong licenses or no attribution. There are people just submitting for the sake of submitting - I dare github profiles for this. There are people who could need some feedback on their code, so that future contributions have better quality.
And it can be very burdensome for a maintainer, assuming he maintains within its free time, to perfectly communicate and elaborate on each contribution.
Also, maybe the project has a feature freeze because in the aimed architecture the same solution would be implemented externally.
Its just not that simple and people generalizing or concluding too fast are mostlikely in the wrong. Bad PR travles faster and further though.
Oh for sure. I don’t think this advice applies to projects that already have a following. But many, perhaps most, projects don’t have much of a following even if you intended for others to use it. If you have a pet project that a reasonably small number of users, you might find you get occasional pull requests but they never meet the code standards, or you ask for changes but they never happen and the pull request sits there, or you reject them because you wouldn’t have structured it like that - well consider accepting the pull request and merging as is. Then you can follow up with changes to fix code quality with your own changes.
This approach shows you appreciate the contribution, even though it’s not perfect. If you find the same person contributing often but making the same errors, then for sure mention it in a way that’s easy for them to understand how to resolve it. But if you’re rigid then you probably won’t get so many contributions as people will think they aren’t up to your standards.
I’d also argue that merging then fixing up yourself later would be more time efficient than reviewing code and providing feedback on changes to be made 😆
I do this with my .net barcode parserbuilder project. I make a few comments on the pr for them to fix, merge it and then go over it myself to clean it up. This way they feel appreciated because its merged and the code stays clean and consistent :)
A good sign you’re hostile to potential contributors. Maybe have a clear readme that gets them a working dev environment in a command or two. Try not to shit on people in issues
I’m not sure that was the joke they were making, and I don’t think that is a majority consensus when OP’s picture happens. You may not agree and that’s ok.
I don’t know, there’s probably not a singular reason. For one, many are just consumers/users and not actual devs, they only want “open source” because people told them to want it, or they think it’s safer or has a better community or something, but many times they don’t actually want it for anything useful besides being able to say it’s open source, even though they never contribute anything. I think these are the kind of users who always demand ridiculous features and way too much time from the real devs.
I’ve also seen other devs that just had wildly different views on fundamental parts of a project, or had unrealistic expectations, or just lived in some kind of fantasy world that most people disagreed with.
Bro if you can’t understand development that you think you need someone to give you “a command or two” to setup your own shit when people from all kinds of devices (x86, arm, PPC, etc) and all kinds of OS (windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, etc) have potential to contribute;
Absolutely could be the case with things with specific tasks. It’s always a good idea to share what your development environment is so others can replicate and if they’re using something a bit different they probably know what they’re doing anyway
Ditto. I’m not going to put in the time to clean up a project working fine for me just to have it ignored or complained about. It’s all expectation, very little reward
And even if I did get volunteers, I’m not coordinating people on my personal projects. Sounds like a great way to take all the joy out of it…
Open source is just broken right now, it runs by draining the passion out of people
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