Show HN: Make your first open source contribution in 5 minutes

github.com

Upon seeing the title, I immediately got Hacktoberfest drama flashbacks; nice, and clever, for you to limit the scope of this project to one repository only.

The impact this project has on open source communities is something I often think about. To the point, I search on GitHub to see if there are random PRs to add names to Contributors list in other projects.

From those searches and getting feedback, I'm getting the feeling most users see this as a sandbox environment and real open source projects have different process.

I love the "hello world" aspect of this. It allows you to focus on getting the tools up and running without having to think about the actual patch you're trying to make.

On the other hand, I dislike the forces that incentivize developers to become shallow contributors to a lot of projects instead of deep contributors to one or a few projects. It feels toxic, just like the drive to get published paper counts up in academia without evaluating the quality of the publications or the contributions of the author.

That's not the fault of the people who make this tool at all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com