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Comment by rwallace | Hacker News Reader

To answer the question asked: I've been on the LLVM mailing list for a few months now, and been highly impressed both by the technical quality of the project and by the competence and supportiveness of the people involved.

To address a meta-question: I disagree with the people who claim that you shouldn't contribute to a project for any reason other than intrinsic interest in the product itself. Most people, after all, work for extrinsic reasons; it's a normal part of life. There is nothing wrong with contributing to an open source project to improve your programming skills, boost your resume or pay some of your karmic debt to your species for the gift of your life. These are all valid reasons, and all are flexible regarding the specific nature of the project.

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I guess the flip side of "don't contribute to a project unless you are intrinsically interested in it" is "don't contribute to a project you aren't interested in unless you are capable of significantly helping it."

Someone inexperienced but strongly interested in a project can be taught to be useful. And a knowledgeable resume-padder can very well spearhead useful changes. But if you are both uninterested in the project and incapable of helping it, you're more likely to hurt the project than help it. And, sorry to say, but if you don't know where to help, then you're most likely on the "not imminently useful" side and should be looking for things you're legitimately passionate about instead of wasting peoples' time.

EDIT: Does anyone remember an article or comment from a few weeks ago about how many open source projects tend to lose their focus and become more about justifying the existence of a social group than achieving a goal? It seems kinda relevant to me.

Another interesting aspect is someone may not realize they're interested in a project until they've spent sometime in the code.

That's a great point. I wonder if anybody has curated a list of projects that are good for learning how to work on software. As opposed to perhaps a broader list of projects that are simply good communities.

meta-meta-discussion: The question implies an ordering on priorities:

  1) kind
  2) supportive
  3) talented
  4) effective

Granted, the original poster may not have intended it quite that strongly, but it raises an important issue when evaluating open source projects.

Not necessarily. For example, OP might figure effectiveness is easy to judge from a quick Google search and it's the other things that benefit more from asking about personal experiences.

What about my post are you saying "not necessarily" to?

That the OP implies an ordering on priorities.

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