2 ms·

Don't ask permission. If you see something that needs a better design or documentation or whatever, make it. Put the docs up on your own site, find someone to

by _jal 10y ago

Don't ask permission. If you see something that needs a better design or documentation or whatever, make it. Put the docs up on your own site, find someone to help you do a demo-graft of your UI on to whatever it is, etc. Worst case is $in_group doesn't use it. Docs might help someone else, your UI can be a case study in your belt. Or maybe folks want various changes, and you work through that. Just keep in mind that functional projects and communities generally have most of the stuff essentials for immediate continuance sorted, otherwise they wouldn't exist, and they all have some surface tension, otherwise they wouldn't be distinguishable from everything else. Also, because they're made of humans, they're rife with hierarchies, official and otherwise, and they're full of all the other bullshit people get up to. And a lot of what is bemoaned in that essay applies to any group made of talking meatbags.

chris_st 10y ago
> Don't ask permission. I'd go a bit further... I'm a programmer, but I've done several contributions to projects where I just corrected the grammar of the README (which, I imagine, some folks would think kind of rude, but I think it helps). Every contribution was accepted, and I think I was even thanked once! Also, I've seen, both at my full-time day job and on open source projects that there are some people who feel that they need to be told, explicitly, what to work on, and some who just dive in and start on something. I think that the author of this article fits, to an extent, in the first category; sometimes, those people ask for something, and are told (occasionally, alas, brusquely) "Don't bother me, get something done!" Perhaps we need to figure out how to build a bridge to these people... without giving the impression to the "dive in" crowd that they will have to be full-time hand-holders of someone.
- pseudalopex 10y ago
  There are also people who are happy to self-direct but don't want to waste their time on things that will never be accepted. Some maintainers will sign off on proposals; others won't review anything that doesn't include a patch.

by _jal 10y ago

chris_st 10y ago

> Don't ask permission. I'd go a bit further... I'm a programmer, but I've done several contributions to projects where I just corrected the grammar of the README (which, I imagine, some folks would think kind of rude, but I think it helps). Every contribution was accepted, and I think I was even thanked once! Also, I've seen, both at my full-time day job and on open source projects that there are some people who feel that they need to be told, explicitly, what to work on, and some who just dive in and start on something. I think that the author of this article fits, to an extent, in the first category; sometimes, those people ask for something, and are told (occasionally, alas, brusquely) "Don't bother me, get something done!" Perhaps we need to figure out how to build a bridge to these people... without giving the impression to the "dive in" crowd that they will have to be full-time hand-holders of someone.

pseudalopex 10y ago
There are also people who are happy to self-direct but don't want to waste their time on things that will never be accepted. Some maintainers will sign off on proposals; others won't review anything that doesn't include a patch.