24 Pull Requests - Giving little gifts of code for Christmas

It taught me to love Github even more - with the file editing in the browser I could clone, make my change and submit my pull request all without ever cloning the repo locally.

* Documentation fixes - clarifications of parts you find confusing, inconsistencies with current behavior, etc.

* Convention fixes - are most binary checks names IsFoo() but one is named Foo_exists() ? do a quick refactor patch for it. Is one Exception named oddly, or have an unclear message? Patch is quick.

* Examples - does an example highlighting something you're confused about exist? Once you figure it out, whip up an example and contribute. Others are also confused about it - I promise.

* Code commenting - Do the comments contradict the code? Is there something in the code that confuses you? Once you figure it out, fix it and submit.

These are all things that are actually EASIER for newcomers to a project to do - once the quirk has been internalized by a dev, they frequently don't notice it anymore. Particularly with documentation and commenting stuff.

It is harder to do this with giant/super popular projects, but medium and smaller projects can always use this sort of support. For example - I decided to checkout Marionette a couple weeks ago. I was reading the docs and browsing the code to see how something was implemented, and noticed the docs and the code were not in sync. I created and submitted a patch within hours of first learning of the project. This was also a work day, so most of those hours were not spent on anything at all related. The patch was accepted - not a big deal thing, but it was nice to contribute, and it may save someone else half an hour of figuring out what was happening. The dev who merged it actually commented that he didn't realize the docs were out of date - because he knows the code.

Point being, little contributions like this abound. As a project owner, I don't care when contributions are major deals or little tweaks or documentation helpers. I'm just happy when someone contributes, it makes me feel that my project is worth the effort. Which I think may be the point of the idea anyway.

https://github.com/sheriff/24pullrequests/commit/738bba95f58...

We'll then be sending out regular emails with new suggested projects for people to work on.

Never rely on a one-person project unless you can support the code yourself if you find significant bugs. If that one person is busy or just plain unavailable and you can't investigate and possibly fix the problem yourself, you are out of luck.

Obviously there are a few exceptions to that, for instance if the project is very widely used then you will get good support from the wider community (though in most cases like that the official devloper pool has grown beyond one by this point too).

I'm not saying the above to put down single-person projects or their creators: there are some brilliant people out there working on them. But brilliant people are often busy and are not immune to illness, needing to work on other things to pay the bills, family matters, or just have other interests that sap their time, and sod's law says they will be otherwise occupied just when you need their attention most!

Don't ask. Just do it.

"The traditional [advent] calendar consists of two pieces of card stock on top of each other. Twenty-four doors are cut out in the top layer, with a number ranging from one to twenty-four on each. Beginning on the first day of December, one door is opened each day [containing a chocolate and/or showing an illustration related to Christmas], counting down the days remaining until Christmas Eve, from one to twenty-four where the 24th door often holds an extra surprise like an extra large piece of chocolate."

Edit: Perhaps you mean https://github.com/dkhenry/minestat