9 ms·

I found the article to be terrible, and his school building analogy falls flat on its ass. Both junior and senior developers can and should contribute to open s

I found the article to be terrible, and his school building analogy falls flat on its ass. Both junior and senior developers can and should contribute to open source, for a variety of good reasons and there are good ways to go on about it.

8372049 2y ago
Did you read the last 2/3 of the article?
bee_rider 2y ago
I don’t think the article is terrible, but it does lean on that analogy a little bit too much IMO. It is worth inspecting where schools and programs differ. If you could clone a school essentially for free, and also a poorly constructed school was not at risk of killing a bunch of kids, I guess we’d be much less skeptical of amateurs building schools. I do think people write programs best when they are the primary audience, so the idea of just, like, going around with the explicit intent of finding open source projects to contribute to seems a bit misguided. But the stakes are not very high. If nothing else I imagine most open source projects must be able to ignore non-useful contributions, right?
kelnos 2y ago
I think you missed the point, and didn't actually read (or, more charitably, understand) what the author said. Your last sentence is actually a good summary of the article! The problem is when someone wants to contribute primarily because they think it will be good for their resume, or even just for a more amorphous "I feel like I should give back" type reason. These sorts of motivations often result in contributions that end up being a drag on a maintainer's time, with little upside. People coming at it from this angle usually don't become dedicated contributors who grow and improve over time. They become a time and energy sink. I've unfortunately witnessed this firsthand many times in my 20+ years of open source involvement.
- newswasboring 2y ago
  why are we inspecting the intentions of the contributor so much? Why do we need to show this piousness in our reasons to get a PR merged? Don't you see the unnecessary barrier here? Edit: Changed author to contributor as it can be confused as the author of the article.
- erikbye 2y ago
  It's more that I don't agree with what he considers the four or so proper ways to contribute. I also know of longstanding and highly valued contributors who started out in ways the author disapproves of.

8372049 2y ago

Did you read the last 2/3 of the article?

bee_rider 2y ago

I don’t think the article is terrible, but it does lean on that analogy a little bit too much IMO. It is worth inspecting where schools and programs differ. If you could clone a school essentially for free, and also a poorly constructed school was not at risk of killing a bunch of kids, I guess we’d be much less skeptical of amateurs building schools. I do think people write programs best when they are the primary audience, so the idea of just, like, going around with the explicit intent of finding open source projects to contribute to seems a bit misguided. But the stakes are not very high. If nothing else I imagine most open source projects must be able to ignore non-useful contributions, right?

kelnos 2y ago

I think you missed the point, and didn't actually read (or, more charitably, understand) what the author said. Your last sentence is actually a good summary of the article! The problem is when someone wants to contribute primarily because they think it will be good for their resume, or even just for a more amorphous "I feel like I should give back" type reason. These sorts of motivations often result in contributions that end up being a drag on a maintainer's time, with little upside. People coming at it from this angle usually don't become dedicated contributors who grow and improve over time. They become a time and energy sink. I've unfortunately witnessed this firsthand many times in my 20+ years of open source involvement.

newswasboring 2y ago
why are we inspecting the intentions of the contributor so much? Why do we need to show this piousness in our reasons to get a PR merged? Don't you see the unnecessary barrier here? Edit: Changed author to contributor as it can be confused as the author of the article.
erikbye 2y ago
It's more that I don't agree with what he considers the four or so proper ways to contribute. I also know of longstanding and highly valued contributors who started out in ways the author disapproves of.