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I agree on the general concept of your post, however I cannot observe, at least for the things I maintain, that there is this pattern of "people starting small"

I agree on the general concept of your post, however I cannot observe, at least for the things I maintain, that there is this pattern of "people starting small". At least not small in the sense of trivial changes. They maybe start submitting a small PR but that is most of the times already at the level of the contribution that they'll make in the future. So people that will become core contributors will send a small PR with a core change, showing already that they can understand the core of the system. However the open source movement cannot only optimize for the raw code output. The "I changed this" feeling is also great for users to realize that there is space for everybody.

canadaduane 8y ago
Perhaps there is a community-wide phenomenon of progression, but not observable within single projects? I wonder if this may be similar to the "won't hire jr. developers" tragedy of the commons that many companies are party to: the economy as a whole would benefit from investing in jr. developers (by providing an environment in which they can advance to sr. developers), but for each company individually, there is risk in training someone up in a year or two only to have them leave and become a "mid-level developer" at another company.
steveklabnik 8y ago
Here's my first PR to Rust: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4305 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4305 Note that it was rejected because I sent it into the wrong branch (we do use master these days) and so I even had to resubmit it https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4308 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4308 I'm about to send in my 972nd PR now. The Rust book is 520 pages; that was the second version, the first of which was ~300 pages. Quite a big difference from +34/-2. I'm at +142,087/-166,524 lines to the main repo now, and #12 overall contributor. Yes, not everyone who sends in a small patch will become a core contributor. But some will. It's a numbers game.
- antirez 8y ago
  This is a great real world example. However I would rate your first PR as very good... Documentation improvement, with examples, is something which is very hard to get. Btw in general, I totally agree with the basic idea of trying to merge trivial patches. I go a step forward and I merge "just typos" PRs even if they have the bad effect of breaking other very important PRs sometimes, because a trivial break will be a trivial rebase anyway and typos cannot stay there forever. From this POV btw Github does a terrible job not telling maintainers: "merging this PR will result in the following PRs being no longer mergeable". Most of the times the list would be empty, making the merging of small PRs a lot more a non brainer.

canadaduane 8y ago

Perhaps there is a community-wide phenomenon of progression, but not observable within single projects? I wonder if this may be similar to the "won't hire jr. developers" tragedy of the commons that many companies are party to: the economy as a whole would benefit from investing in jr. developers (by providing an environment in which they can advance to sr. developers), but for each company individually, there is risk in training someone up in a year or two only to have them leave and become a "mid-level developer" at another company.

steveklabnik 8y ago

Here's my first PR to Rust: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4305 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4305 Note that it was rejected because I sent it into the wrong branch (we do use master these days) and so I even had to resubmit it https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4308 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/4308 I'm about to send in my 972nd PR now. The Rust book is 520 pages; that was the second version, the first of which was ~300 pages. Quite a big difference from +34/-2. I'm at +142,087/-166,524 lines to the main repo now, and #12 overall contributor. Yes, not everyone who sends in a small patch will become a core contributor. But some will. It's a numbers game.

antirez 8y ago
This is a great real world example. However I would rate your first PR as very good... Documentation improvement, with examples, is something which is very hard to get. Btw in general, I totally agree with the basic idea of trying to merge trivial patches. I go a step forward and I merge "just typos" PRs even if they have the bad effect of breaking other very important PRs sometimes, because a trivial break will be a trivial rebase anyway and typos cannot stay there forever. From this POV btw Github does a terrible job not telling maintainers: "merging this PR will result in the following PRs being no longer mergeable". Most of the times the list would be empty, making the merging of small PRs a lot more a non brainer.