A 23-year-old first-time Firefox coder fixed a 22-year-old bug
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This guy gets it
The best debugger there is, and there ever will be. All hail: the printf!
Yup, he gets it.
There are at least 6 or 7 bugs and tiny missing features in the software I own at work that would improve the dev and support experience, but I always feel guilty stopping work on my main tasks to tackle them.
Well, I am a bit of a cowboy. But I’m fortunate enough to have a management chain who trusts me to prioritize and incorporate small fixes and features as part of regular development. Admittedly it’s easier when your customers are internal devs, because you know exactly what they want after fielding their stream of questions, support requests, and “would be cool if”s.
And if it's an internal tool, then those devs are your product owners.
The first principle of agile is people over process. A lot of people like to blame agile for processes that their own teams just made up instead of taking accountability.
My teams have quarterly "do whatever you want" sprints where bugs like this are targeted.
The most annoying parts would be familiarizing yourself with mercurial/phabricator and getting commit access for certain projects.
If you want to add a new feature with hundreds of lines of code, sure, that's going to be a more involved process.
also, here's the original submission of the bugzilla ticket: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827995
I liked the Ars Technica story in addition to the bugzilla ticket b/c of the information about the actual bug fixer themself.
Too much human potential is wasted in highly developed regions as well, but it's not a question of access to resources, it's a question of living in a dysfunctional society driven by a lot of things that aren't "hey, how do we make the world better?"