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The best advice for starting out is just to start hacking on your own projects. This is the first stepping stone for being able to jump in and positively contri

The best advice for starting out is just to start hacking on your own projects. This is the first stepping stone for being able to jump in and positively contribute to other's projects later, I think.

Levitz 3y ago
Is it really? I'd posit this isn't even really "open source" 99% of the time. Github is absolutely littered with hundreds of thousands of repos that nobody but their original creator has ever looked at. "Make your own project" sounds good, but in practice it almost always means "Make a personal project and make it public". You don't reach the point in which you have to handle issues, or contributions, or pull requests or anything because the vast majority of the time, projects get nowhere, it's open source only in the most literal sense. Also I'm not sure I see the logic even if the expectation is to make a successful project. How can someone who has a hard time meaningfully contributing to a project possibly manage a whole project?
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  Is that bad in any way? People do their projects for their own motivation. If nobody else cares so be it.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  Yes it is really, I think. The self-motivation is one thing. If you build it yourself it's because you either need it or want it enough. If you build something you get self confidence based in reality and experience based in something. It is expected that only few of the personal projects are ever interesting to someone else. Maybe hacking on some small stuff for four years is what you need to be able to graduate to know enough real world stuff to contribute to bigger projects in practice, then that's just how it is. Now I think of neovim and it's ecosystem right now because I'm in that phase, but most of the small plugins are driven by single people alone, and they can still have a ton of users. Is it still open source? Yes, it's open source if it has an open source license. You are correct that an open project and open source are not the same thing and don't need to be.
- sgarland 3y ago
  Yep. Most of the stuff I make is this way. It is open source (usually MPL-2.0), but it’s also highly opinionated and designed for me, and my specific need. If someone wants to fork it for themselves, I am all for that. The one and only time I built something that got a PR, the contributor wanted to make breaking changes that suited them. I had to politely decline, and explain the above.
slothtrop 3y ago
I'm leaning this direction as it would allow me to get a ground-up familiarity with certain stacks and technologies, whereas with open source at the outset I never know where to look or what to prioritize. It's obtuse. You have to sift through an overwhelming number of projects, most of which I have little interest in, then look at issues for bugs or features with no context.

Levitz 3y ago

Is it really? I'd posit this isn't even really "open source" 99% of the time. Github is absolutely littered with hundreds of thousands of repos that nobody but their original creator has ever looked at. "Make your own project" sounds good, but in practice it almost always means "Make a personal project and make it public". You don't reach the point in which you have to handle issues, or contributions, or pull requests or anything because the vast majority of the time, projects get nowhere, it's open source only in the most literal sense. Also I'm not sure I see the logic even if the expectation is to make a successful project. How can someone who has a hard time meaningfully contributing to a project possibly manage a whole project?

johannes1234321 3y ago
Is that bad in any way? People do their projects for their own motivation. If nobody else cares so be it.
kzrdude 3y ago
Yes it is really, I think. The self-motivation is one thing. If you build it yourself it's because you either need it or want it enough. If you build something you get self confidence based in reality and experience based in something. It is expected that only few of the personal projects are ever interesting to someone else. Maybe hacking on some small stuff for four years is what you need to be able to graduate to know enough real world stuff to contribute to bigger projects in practice, then that's just how it is. Now I think of neovim and it's ecosystem right now because I'm in that phase, but most of the small plugins are driven by single people alone, and they can still have a ton of users. Is it still open source? Yes, it's open source if it has an open source license. You are correct that an open project and open source are not the same thing and don't need to be.
sgarland 3y ago
Yep. Most of the stuff I make is this way. It is open source (usually MPL-2.0), but it’s also highly opinionated and designed for me, and my specific need. If someone wants to fork it for themselves, I am all for that. The one and only time I built something that got a PR, the contributor wanted to make breaking changes that suited them. I had to politely decline, and explain the above.

slothtrop 3y ago

I'm leaning this direction as it would allow me to get a ground-up familiarity with certain stacks and technologies, whereas with open source at the outset I never know where to look or what to prioritize. It's obtuse. You have to sift through an overwhelming number of projects, most of which I have little interest in, then look at issues for bugs or features with no context.