Yes, a year ago I'd never worked on any open source project, didn't use GitHub, Google Groups, Twitter, StackOverflow, or any of the other programmer social med

Yes, a year ago I'd never worked on any open source project, didn't use GitHub, Google Groups, Twitter, StackOverflow, or any of the other programmer social media sites, and was a total newbie about Julia, using git, and dealing with an open source community. Since I had convinced the other people at the startup where I am working that using Julia would be better for us than a mashup of Python, C, C++14, R or Octave, when I started encountering serious bugs and performance problems in areas that were critical to our development, I did get very insistent, esp. where I had lots of previous experience in the area. Instead of simply complaining about the problems, I submitted issues, wrote documentation, made PRs to fix the issues (in the Scheme parser code, in the core C code, in the C Unicode handling module, esp. to the string handling code in Base, and helped improve the coverage by adding a lot of unit tests). It was a major learning process for me, learning best practices for how to break apart a PR into smaller chunks (even though accepting huge PRs from other developers happens all the time), trying to focus on single issues in a PR, and trying to improve my own communications skills on social media. Between the time I started until early September when v0.4 was released, I'd even reached the point of being the #6 contributor to JuliaLang/julia (#26 all time out of some >400 contributors), so I don't think anybody could possibly accuse me of not having putting my time and effort where my mouth was, as far as fixing problems I encountered. Having gotten the critical issues fixed and into v0.4, so we had a reasonably stable base for our product, I was able to concentrate wholly on our product, and so stopped being so pushy about getting things fixed. ;) I still think there are some real systemic problems that need to be addressed, in how things are done, and hopefully some time will be spent to deal with that at this summer's JuliaCon 2016.