Hacker News Reader

Comment by einhverfr | Hacker News Reader

> If I can't judge you by your code, how should I judge you?

I judge a programmer by the contributions he or she has made to various open source projects. Now that sounds like judging by code, right? Well only partly. Other things that matter is how many projects someone has committed to, what the people of the project teams say, etc.

The thing is I can't know the context looking at the code. What I can do is look at how successful the open source projects are and what their co-committers have to say. Now, usually the co-committers will say something positive, but what they say is important.

View on HN

So how would you judge someone like me who has no open source projects? Work stuff is in house, and I don't have the time outside of work to contribute anything meaningful.

Do you use any open source libraries at work? Are they flawed? Write good bug reports and get involved in the community. It's not building up a patch portfolio (I should trademark that) but it shows that you're paying attention and care about quality.

Python libraries are usually rock solid. Perl modules in CPAN before that. Now I have been playing with Javascript recently, and that is a whole different story. Unfortunately my JS isn't good enough to improve what has been done.

Recently I had to hack the Django test runner, so I could use a copy of my prod database. I hacked it enough to do what I wanted, but I know that releasing that would probably cause people as many problems as it solved, giving them false hope in a solution that worked on my machine with my setup.

I had initially though it would be something the community would want (having googled around to get a solution), but the fact is, to do it an a quality way (one that I would expect to solve more problems than it creates for the average user) would take significantly longer. I don't wnt to pollute good quality projects like Django with crap hacks. I will however be happy to write a blog post or stack overflow answer explaining what I did and how someone else can do the same - with the full understanding it is a bit of a hack, and may or may not affect.

(I have put in the occasional bug report. Am I being too much of a perfectionist for the open source community, assuming that crap code is not better than no code?)

Don't worry about not having made many or even any open source code contributions. You probably don't want to work for or with any person or any organization that will judge you negatively based on that.

True open source software development is about sharing code because you want to do so. It's not about crafting reams and reams of crappy JavaScript or Ruby code just to be able to claim to be a "prolific contributor", or to brag about having made a large number of GitHub pull requests.

Writing closed-source code that solves real problems is more valuable and important than writing open source software that only serves to stroke one's ego.

All of the companies I have ever worked for directly or indirectly disallow open-source contributions through employment IP agreements. If you are working for somebody else in technology world, there is a good chance that you also have signed such an agreement already.

Yea. That is not to say we (generally people working for such companies) don't contribute to open source, it's just not gonna look like it's coming from you. We will routinely file internal bug reports on our open source tools, but our stuff is tweaked a bit. Also some of the open source stuff we use is actually developed 90% in house and open sourced by US - you'll definitely never see our contributions or bug reports then, because it's all done on our internal codebase & tools.

I would prefer to hire people I know than those who don't, but if you have worked on successful, related projects then I would ask for references including co-worker/developer references.

Interesting perspective. I both write code, and contribute fixes. I've had my code end up in screen, emacs, and other tools that people use but I've virtually never advertised that.

(To be honest I've probably lost track of projects that have taken a one-line bugfix/fixup, and if you put me on the spot I'd probably struggle to recall even the biggies.)

That's the kind of contribution I do (plus some translations). I don't even have it written down because it's so minuscule compared with the work people do on those projects I don't think it merits attention.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com