How to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Rock Star

http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/167051/14-Ways-to-Contribute-to-Open-Source-without-Being-a-Programming-Genius-or-a-Rock-Star

by Baustin • 14 years ago

121 20 14 years ago

blog.smartbear.com

8ig8• 14 years ago

Just a reminder:

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Baustin2• 14 years ago

Sorry about that, folks. I'll keep that in mind for all future posts.

sublimit2• 14 years ago

That seems awfully pedantic and useless as an official guideline. I mean, it's the same article nonetheless.

freework• 14 years ago

One thing I've learned about contributing to open source is that it's primarily a social achievement.

If I see a developer who has contributed to many oss projects, I don't think "wow this guy must be a great programmer", I think "this guy must have great communication/people skills".

Often (especially with popular oss projects such as apache, python, firefox), you can fix a bug, add it to the ticket tracker, and it'll just sit there and rot. Every day people fix bugs and upload patches. You have to contact someone and sweet talk them into merging your fix.

kyle_t• 14 years ago

You make a good point. For those just getting their feet wet with Open Source projects it makes sense to start first with a smaller yet active project.

reginaldo• 14 years ago

In the same area, OpenHatch[1] seems very nice. From their own landing page:

OpenHatch is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools, and education.

[1] http://www.openhatch.org

IridescentBlue• 14 years ago

How about contributing to Open Source by helping write the documentation for projects? Properly documented projects go a long way in helping developers get recognition and notice.

I, myself, have begun more thoroughly documenting projects, not only for my sake but for everyone else that comes along. I find that this book helped me get up to speed quickly: http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Style-4th-Edition/dp/0205...

bilalq• 14 years ago

Thanks for this. When I was first getting into programming, people would tell me and others like myself to "go contribute to open source projects". I don't think they realized just how daunting and impossible that seemed to us at the time. To be honest, none of us even knew where to begin.

sublimit2• 14 years ago

Well, many of us still don't. I don't think I have the necessary teamwork skills. I just want to code, I don't want to deal with people who do, or read thousands of lines of foreign code.

sanxiyn2• 14 years ago

You may not want to read code, but you need to read code. I don't really consider code reading to be teamwork skill. Code reading is an essential coding skill.

frozenport• 14 years ago

1. Find a project you like 2. Spend a weeks looking at the code

The daunting part is the time commitment.

zanny• 14 years ago

This. You invest in a project and find out with your first merge the maintainers are assholes and toss out fine commits. I've seen that happen a bunch. It is why there are so many freaking forks, and a lot of them end up atrophying because one person can't recreate an ecosystem.

FourthProtocol• 14 years ago

This is a good guide for a starter, but doesn't address dealing with rock stars themselves, which is what's required if your contribution is going to be merged.

And that usually requires the skin of a pachyderm, and the patience of a fox. The reality of today is that the world idolizes idols. Idols in turn become arrogant. Their worst trait is belittling others' contributions - especially when they're better than the rock star could've done.

I have no solution. I'm pointing out what I see as an omission from an otherwise useful post.

bane• 14 years ago

Something I think that's interesting and too often overlooked is that even non-programmers can provide lots of help to Open Source projects, sometimes the help they can provide can be critical to the project's success.

What kind of things? Everything from sane documentation to artwork is open and in need of lots of help in many projects.

lucian3032• 14 years ago

Awesome post but instead of writing a program to move all the tickets over, a better suggestion would be to follow Joel's advice (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html) and get rid of that clutter. I can almost guarantee you most of those tickets were useless, completed, or irrelevant.

petdance2• 14 years ago

I'm the author of the article, and throwing away the tickets was suggested many times by different people.

We had a pretty big discussion in #parrot about the value of this ticket set. People on the project plowed through the Trac database and closed tickets, and even with that we still hundreds that tracked all sorts of development. Many were bug reports, and many were effectively to-do items, and many were bug reports that had been resolved but still couldn't be closed for various reasons, such as needing an automated test to verify it.

It's nice to start over clean, but sometimes there's too much baby with the bathwater.

lucian3032• 14 years ago

Sounds like you guys did your due diligence. In that case, of course, writing the app to move them over is the right choice.

Thank you for the article, BTW. It may be obvious to some but not to most. Especially contributing to documentation. I'd say that most open source projects can benefit more from that than from new features ... and maybe even most bug-fixes, depending on severity.

sanxiyn2• 14 years ago

This post didn't mention internationalization, localization, and translation. Maybe because it was targeted to English speaking people?

Here in Korea, a lot (probably majority) of people who contribute to open source started from i18n, l10n, and translation.

Baustin2• 14 years ago

I love seeing the great discussion that this started (both positive and negative feedback). Thanks everyone for turning the post itself into an open source project.

How to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Rock Star

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