Comment by gregschlom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregschlom | Hacker News Reader

A piece of advice for my former self: contributing to open-source software is way easier than one would think.

For long, I was afraid to contribute to any project because I wouldn't understand the whole structure, and I didn't know where to ask.

Then I started using Qt and submitted my first bug report. The bug was fixed in like, 10 hours.

Wow.

Then I submitted another one, but this time I looked at the source to understand what was wrong and suggested a way to fix it.

Then I actually sent a patch.

Then I signed up to the mailing-list, and started talking to people on IRC.

But my real epiphany was with KDE. When I saw my first commit into KDE's trunk, even though it was a tiny one line bugfix, it felt so great. I started wondering : why didn't I do this before?

So, if you've never contributed to OSS, go ahead. Pick a project of interest. Get yourself on the mailing list and on the IRC channel. Ask questions. Find stuff that needs to get fixed. Help others. And get those bugs fixed.

Then I actually sent a patch.

One thing to note when contributing code, is the project maintainers probably won't commit it right in. Often they'll suggest small (or not so small) improvements (be it stylistic, to make the patch follow the coding style, or suggestions how to better organise the new code).

The important part is: they don't think your patch is bad; they would love it to hit the trunk/master; they are happy at having new people taking time and effort to contribute. Their initial "rejection" isn't, and don't get scared away by it.

This happened to me, to a T, when I submitted a patch to cloudfiles-python. The patch was beneficial to my employer (we really wanted to use server-side copying on RackSpace Cloudfiles), but I couldn't imagine that it wouldn't be useful to other people using the Python bindings in question.

I actually ended up not implementing one suggestion (it involved project-contextual knowledge that I didn't have time to look into; I figured the maintainer could make the change if he wanted it), but the patch was pulled in anyway (after many months... apparently the service was not available to all Cloudfiles customers at the time).

So this is more anecdotal evidence. Make contributions! I also made a fix to another project which involved 2 line changes. The fix does not have to be big to be significant in some way. New social coding websites make it easy. In particular, GitHub has very easy-to-use forking and pull-request functionality which I highly recommend using if a project you like is hosted there.

Indeed. I think that the king and The White Rabbit had a conversation that is appropriate:

  The White Rabbit put on his spectacles.
  'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked.
  'Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely,
  'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'

"The beginnging" is an appropriate place to begin, and most anybody reading this in this forum can likely find their own beginning, and start contributing there.

edit: for the unfamiliar, quotation is from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

My first "patch" to an open source project was libevent, it was a one character change in the kqueue event handling mechanism.

And it is amazing seeing my name all over the web now when searching for it because I got named as a thank you for letting the author know about the patch.

I think it was one of the best feelings in the world when that happened.

I agree. And let me retell the story from a different point of view: Even if you're a humble .Net (I know, I know.. You'll get a lot of interesting looks mentioning OS and .Net) developer by day, you can easily dive into very nice and cool OS projects.

I've (online only) met one of the coolest guys ever due to him maintaining a very nice project that I use a _lot_ and me being able to contribue a teeny tiny bit of code. Hey, although I'm a cross-platform guy (Windows during the day, Linux in the evening) I could help with experiences on both platforms. Don't hide behind "Not on Linux (or *BSD, to stay somewhat on topic), cannot help".

There's a downside though: If you like the contribution, like the people that do the actual work (i.e. the maintainer) than you might end up with a little guilt for not being more active. I know I do...

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