Ask HN: What was your first open source contribution?

Around 1988 or maybe it was 1989, we were using glass tty terminals (e.g., vt100s) connected to the ECN Encore MultiMax server at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, and there were so many students all trying to use the terminals that it was possible to go there, find a terminal, have to go to the bathroom, and then it would be taken by someone else when you got back. I was tired of always having to fight for a terminal.

I knew of some other students that were using simple terminal lock programs, but I wasn't impressed. I wanted something that was able of doing more, and with more configuration options. In the end, mine could give you a countdown timer to when your lock would expire and the next person could log in (maximum of 45 minutes for us regular students, which wasn't quite long enough to grab a terminal, go to class, and then come back and still have it locked), it could run a program of your choice every time it updated the screen (e.g., print out a fresh fortune every minute), and could even display simple character mode graphics that you stored in a file. It could be configured via the command line, environment variables, or a configuration file.

In the end, virtually everyone at OU in the EE/CS program was using it, and I contributed my sources to comp.lang.sources.c and comp.Unix, or something like that.

I found out that some of the senior system admins on those computer systems did not use my program, because they knew what system calls I was using, and they knew of some kernel bugs that could be exploited to cause the program to exit without actually logging you out. But I think they were the only ones who weren't using my "tl" program.

I think that may have been the last time I did anything I consider to be real, serious, programming. I've hacked on stuff since then, but nothing like that.

My first open-source contribution was a two-line patch for a bug I found in Eclipse while at work.

Eclipse is known as a Java IDE, but it also provides a widget toolkit and other libraries for developing desktop GUI apps. At the time I was working on a team that had a huge desktop app built on top of Eclipse.

The bug I found was pretty trivial; it was something related to incorrect sizing of one of the widgets in some corner case.

The process was a bit of a pain relative to the size of the change. I had to write a test case, sign a CLA (per Eclipse project rules), and of course one of my four different bosses had to review the change and sign off on it.

At the time I was a junior engineer still eager to prove myself, and I figured all of this effort would be worthwhile just so I could say I got a patch into a major open source project. Nowadays I wouldn't bother with so much process, and certainly wouldn't sign a CLA. Would rather work on my own projects. At most I might send a patch out to a mailing list.

When Linux was just getting its network stack happening, I wrote scripts that managed the modem, and being as reliable as modems were, ensured that if the link was lost, it would redial and re-establish the network. Basically it was "aware" if the network was down but shouldn't be.

There also weren't so many licenses around yet, so I just made it public domain with only a request that people who used it emailed me so I knew it was still useful and worth updating, etc.

My scripts were in the LSM (Linux Software Map), which was about as official as things got back then. They fell out of use once networking became more stable, and daemons were ... daemonizing properly.

Here's mine from 2013:

https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=49599

I was 13 years old and the comment was very evil, though you can probably see that didn't really affect me :)

I did some early documentation of the Linux advanced networking capabilities when they came out in 2.2; it was widely cited for a while. I couldn't grow it effectively and others supplanted it reasonably quickly. [1]

I don't work easily with others so I tend to publish projects in hope they're useful enough for others, then never revisit or update them. My python arrays / mmap slicer module [2] got into FreeBSD ports for several years and I was told was used in some of the early dedicated media player things.

Source available that I can point to would be my OpenSCAD box script [3], which some kind soul has taken on after I left it.

These contributions are not much to compare to the value, and joy, that has been given to me by others in the form of their freely shared work; but I hope that by contributing in the same spirit that I have done my part to help improve the world, as well as sharing my joy in geeking out over stuff others may not care about.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030601115204/http://www.snafu....

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20030317074418/http://snafu.free...

[3] https://github.com/sbambach/MarksEnclosureHelper