8 ms·

GitHub and my open source life

85 points by jenandre 13y ago

af3 13y ago
"She likes hacking code and occasionally hacking text"... hacking text, WTF?
- kondro 13y ago
  The true hacking ethos is one about creation and isn't specific to code.
  - agravier 13y ago
    Here, it does sound like a more trendy way to say "writing". Except if her creativity and ingenuity are expressed in her writing style. Otherwise, it's just used as a buzzword.
- asparagui 13y ago
  writing, i assume?
- tylermac1 13y ago
  I'm totally hacking this comment.
  - sergiotapia 13y ago
    Disrupting the comment industry!
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      In my time we called it trolling.
- KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
  It's probably more of a joke than any pretentiousness...
- saraid216 13y ago
  I don't actually know what "hacking code" means, either.
- moocowduckquack 13y ago
  A hack writer is a term that massively pre-dates the usage of the word hack in technology, often used to describe journalists or pulp novelists, so I would assume that it is a deliberate play on words marrying more than one meaning of hack. Which would also mean that the term "hacking text" in this context is itself a bit of a hack. ... edit - I went for a look at old uses of the word hack as it pertains to writing and found that there is another variation in meaning, that of "hack words". Here it is in use from the 1858 periodical, "The Ladies' Companion", in a passage that as chance would have it is discussing the creative usage of words - "Of the influence which German literature Jean Paul and others has had on Carlyle enough has been said elsewhere. This influence certainly shows itself markedly in his style though by no means detracting from its originality. It has given to him a somewhat burdensome richness of compound words and a few unfamiliar derivations. He is fond of seizing upon the primary meaning of a word and bringing out that meaning forcibly by contrast and repetition. He introduces innovations of foreign words to a great extent and not unfrequently uses simple ones in an obsolete or new sense. These may be looked upon as faults but it will be found that his foreign introductions are mostly from languages which form the basis of English having an affinity to accepted English words and that they invariably have a peculiar significance which could not have been given by more common expressions. His obsolete or new senses too show generally an evident reason for their adoption. He is fond of hack words - a kind of slang of the day; for instance, "sham", "jargon", "gigmanity". He uses such words as watchwords of the time wherein he writes, as bearing in them a nineteenth century view of things." from here - http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gLIRAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22hack%20words%22&pg=PA69&ci=470%2C384%2C432%2C276#v=onepage&q=%22hack%20words%22&f=false http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gLIRAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22hack%2...
unknownian 13y ago
And yet I see plenty of famous developers who don't contribute to open source at all and it somewhat sickens me (cough Tapbots).
- minimaxir 13y ago
  There's no reason to invoke No True Scotsman here. There are valid justifications for both open-source development (as described in the article) and closed-source development (e.g. IP).
  - unknownian 13y ago
    >There's no reason to invoke No True Scotsman here Where do I do that? >There are valid justifications for both I didn't mean to imply that there wasn't. It's just the smug business-only outlook from some developers I find weird.
- nmi32 13y ago
  Why should people have to work for free? I have a skill, I expect to get paid. I don't see my plumber doing pro bono work at the weekend. Not everyone has to adhere to your philosophy. You license your code for me to use, that's your prerogative. Don't complain when people don't give anything back.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Who said anything about working for free?
    - nmi32 13y ago
      Fine, give away my work for free. It's a competitive advantage. If your employer pays you to write open source code, so be it. Most don't; let's face it, Open Source does not lead to a strong business. Proprietary software makes money hand over fist in comparison.
      - 13y ago
babarock 13y ago
I'm a huge fan of Github. I recognize the huge effect they've had, transforming the Open Source community, and I'm grateful for it. I also love how they run their company, how open and talkative they are about their organization. Their blog holds many gems. However, I cannot work on Github. In my opinion, the Pull-Request mechanism is weak because it fails to address a major point: It's highly improbable that I accept the PR on the first try. There's going to be a lot of back and forth discussion, reviews, remarks, etc. Standard PRs I deal with on Github usually end up with several redundant commits. When I ask people politely to rebase all the commits they're sending into one, most don't know how to do it. (It's okay not to know. It's weird when someone with several contributions per day never had to do it before). If I `git commit --amend`, my PR is actually overwritten and I lose the history of the first patch I've sent. I started disliking working with Github ever since I started working on OpenStack. The process to send a patch there might seem a bit daunting at first, but it's really not that complicated. Using Gerrit (https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/ https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/) for code review has many advantage, like limiting your patch to one commit, keeping a detailed log history of successive patch sets, and generally making reviewing more inviting. On top of that, the whole suite of tests is ran against each submitted patch in a virtually never resting CI server. And finally, I don't find Github's Pull Request that "easy, simple and fast". My workflow with OpenStack is a lot faster. 1 command: $ git review A colleague of mine says it a lot better than I do: http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2013/rant-about-github-pull-request-workflow-implementation http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2013/rant-about-github-pull-r... If I recall correctly, Linus Torvalds went on a highly publicized rant against Github PRs not that long ago. I'm not arguing that every Open Source project should have a complete QA infrastructure, and Github is a great place to deal with your first Pull Requests. However, I do argue that you can very quickly reach the limit of what Github can give to you in terms of collaborative tools. My rule of thumb: If you have more than 10 contributors, at least 4 of which are active daily, it may be worth it to invest in some real infrastructure.
- prezjordan 13y ago
  > When I ask people politely to rebase all the commits they're sending into one, most don't know how to do it. Very easy solution to this problem. 1) Make note of it in CONTRIBUTING.md. 2) Do it for them. Check out their branch, rebase/squash/fix whitespace/etc and merge.
revskill 13y ago
I think Github made a huge effect on Ruby On Rails movements ( or revolutions). So many peopole use it (instead of mysterious Python community before), brought theories into reality. Thank you, Github.
quadrangle 13y ago
GitHub may be a good service, but THEY ARE PROPRIETARY. Thus, it is absurd to talk about them as important proponents of Open Source without mentioning this hypocrisy.
- GuiA 13y ago
  Not completely contradicting you, but just pointing out- they've open sourced a lot of stuff: https://github.com/github https://github.com/github
  - hackula1 13y ago
    I would go so far as to say that MOST open source contributions come from developers and companies that also work on proprietary systems. I really do not see a problem with this. There are legitimate business, legal, security, and technical reasons for this. Personally, I open source whenever I can, but much of the work I do would not be feasible in an open source model (highly custom systems, competitive advantage, legal restrictions on code or data, code that would be of little value for anyone but me and my clients, etc.).
- unknownian 13y ago
  That is true, but they do that so they can continue to serve their business easily. Would you rather them be open source and take away all the free hosting? Furthermore, they are easily the best product in their category. If you want an open source Git Service, use gitorious or something.
bgar 13y ago
It would be amazing to see a site that pairs experienced developers (especially women developers) with less- experienced women to sherpa them into contributing to open source. Is there really a need to give women special treatment or help when it comes to open source development? Wouldn't that reinforce the (unbased) idea that there's a disparity between genders in tech? Or is there?
- hackula1 13y ago
  I would say this is a great idea for the same reason having more minority male english teachers in minority schools is a great idea. For whatever historical reasons, certain groups are underrepresented. This snowballs when youth try to get a foothold into the field, since they see no one like them succeeding. Is it logical to have more confidence (a huge indicator of success in just about anything) when the teacher looks like you? Probably not, but that does not stop it from being effective.
  - bgar 13y ago
    Yeah, I guess in a way having a mentor from the same minority/background helps be more confident, especially if there aren't many like you in a field.
    - moocowduckquack 13y ago
      I think of it as social hacking. There are plenty of people in the world (not all of them men) who think that women should not be in education, should only be child carers, should not talk over men, etc, so if you just take the approach that you personally will be completely unbiased, then while you are not adding to that problem, you are also not doing much to assuage it. Neutrality is all very well, but it often takes a lot more than neutrality to get somewhere if a lot of society is pushing back the other way from where you would like to get to.
- mbrock 13y ago
  I don't have a strong opinion about this particular thing, but it seems like a decent idea. But let me speak more generally. Sometimes it seems like some people have a very "logical" way of looking at ideas. It's like every idea is interpreted according to some metaphysical schema and judged by whether or not it's conceptually harmonious and untainted. In this case, the schema is "equality," which ironically means that any concrete idea that addresses disparity is prematurely judged as faulty or tainted. It's stunningly obvious that the open source community is dominated by males, even if it's not more so than the programming community at large. This is a matter of statistics, it's not complicated. This paper http://jitm.ubalt.edu/XXI-4/article3.pdf http://jitm.ubalt.edu/XXI-4/article3.pdf cites a figure of 1.5% OSS developers being women, which doesn't seem entirely implausible. This simple statistical fact should mean that some women who do want to pursue an interest or career doing open source work might indeed have use for the kind of thing we're discussing. So why not? There IS a disparity between genders in tech. This is so obvious. Why on earth would you call this an unbased idea? That there is a disparity doesn't mean that there is an "essential" or "necessary" disparity. It just means that at this point in human history, women are extremely underrepresented in this particular section. In that situation, it seems more than appropriate to set up various measures to support diverse engagement.
johnpaulettefr 13y ago
I have pulled no fewer than 15 freelance contracts from my personal Github.Just from code that I have thrown out there because I don't have a commercial reason not to. One of the cool things is that deploying code on Github forces you to make at least some sort of effort of documenting it (a README, generally) and cleaning it up a bit to be reusable. It has helped me reuse my own code, because of that. It improves code quality, makes friends, helps people and drives work. Sharing is a worthwhile business activity.
alxndresp 13y ago
Does anyone have any tips on getting started contributing to open source? I'm looking to get into it but I just don't know where to start or even how to find projects where I could contribute.
- stared 13y ago
  It may be easiest to look at small projects you are already using (but want to fix something... or just, write better documentation, which may be the best start).

85 points by jenandre 13y ago

af3 13y ago

"She likes hacking code and occasionally hacking text"... hacking text, WTF?

kondro 13y ago
The true hacking ethos is one about creation and isn't specific to code.
- agravier 13y ago
  Here, it does sound like a more trendy way to say "writing". Except if her creativity and ingenuity are expressed in her writing style. Otherwise, it's just used as a buzzword.
asparagui 13y ago
writing, i assume?
tylermac1 13y ago
I'm totally hacking this comment.
- sergiotapia 13y ago
  Disrupting the comment industry!
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    In my time we called it trolling.
KaoruAoiShiho 13y ago
It's probably more of a joke than any pretentiousness...
saraid216 13y ago
I don't actually know what "hacking code" means, either.
moocowduckquack 13y ago
A hack writer is a term that massively pre-dates the usage of the word hack in technology, often used to describe journalists or pulp novelists, so I would assume that it is a deliberate play on words marrying more than one meaning of hack. Which would also mean that the term "hacking text" in this context is itself a bit of a hack. ... edit - I went for a look at old uses of the word hack as it pertains to writing and found that there is another variation in meaning, that of "hack words". Here it is in use from the 1858 periodical, "The Ladies' Companion", in a passage that as chance would have it is discussing the creative usage of words - "Of the influence which German literature Jean Paul and others has had on Carlyle enough has been said elsewhere. This influence certainly shows itself markedly in his style though by no means detracting from its originality. It has given to him a somewhat burdensome richness of compound words and a few unfamiliar derivations. He is fond of seizing upon the primary meaning of a word and bringing out that meaning forcibly by contrast and repetition. He introduces innovations of foreign words to a great extent and not unfrequently uses simple ones in an obsolete or new sense. These may be looked upon as faults but it will be found that his foreign introductions are mostly from languages which form the basis of English having an affinity to accepted English words and that they invariably have a peculiar significance which could not have been given by more common expressions. His obsolete or new senses too show generally an evident reason for their adoption. He is fond of hack words - a kind of slang of the day; for instance, "sham", "jargon", "gigmanity". He uses such words as watchwords of the time wherein he writes, as bearing in them a nineteenth century view of things." from here - http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gLIRAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22hack%20words%22&pg=PA69&ci=470%2C384%2C432%2C276#v=onepage&q=%22hack%20words%22&f=false http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gLIRAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22hack%2...

unknownian 13y ago

And yet I see plenty of famous developers who don't contribute to open source at all and it somewhat sickens me (cough Tapbots).

minimaxir 13y ago
There's no reason to invoke No True Scotsman here. There are valid justifications for both open-source development (as described in the article) and closed-source development (e.g. IP).
- unknownian 13y ago
  >There's no reason to invoke No True Scotsman here Where do I do that? >There are valid justifications for both I didn't mean to imply that there wasn't. It's just the smug business-only outlook from some developers I find weird.
nmi32 13y ago
Why should people have to work for free? I have a skill, I expect to get paid. I don't see my plumber doing pro bono work at the weekend. Not everyone has to adhere to your philosophy. You license your code for me to use, that's your prerogative. Don't complain when people don't give anything back.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Who said anything about working for free?
  - nmi32 13y ago
    Fine, give away my work for free. It's a competitive advantage. If your employer pays you to write open source code, so be it. Most don't; let's face it, Open Source does not lead to a strong business. Proprietary software makes money hand over fist in comparison.
    - 13y ago

babarock 13y ago

I'm a huge fan of Github. I recognize the huge effect they've had, transforming the Open Source community, and I'm grateful for it. I also love how they run their company, how open and talkative they are about their organization. Their blog holds many gems. However, I cannot work on Github. In my opinion, the Pull-Request mechanism is weak because it fails to address a major point: It's highly improbable that I accept the PR on the first try. There's going to be a lot of back and forth discussion, reviews, remarks, etc. Standard PRs I deal with on Github usually end up with several redundant commits. When I ask people politely to rebase all the commits they're sending into one, most don't know how to do it. (It's okay not to know. It's weird when someone with several contributions per day never had to do it before). If I `git commit --amend`, my PR is actually overwritten and I lose the history of the first patch I've sent. I started disliking working with Github ever since I started working on OpenStack. The process to send a patch there might seem a bit daunting at first, but it's really not that complicated. Using Gerrit (https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/ https://code.google.com/p/gerrit/) for code review has many advantage, like limiting your patch to one commit, keeping a detailed log history of successive patch sets, and generally making reviewing more inviting. On top of that, the whole suite of tests is ran against each submitted patch in a virtually never resting CI server. And finally, I don't find Github's Pull Request that "easy, simple and fast". My workflow with OpenStack is a lot faster. 1 command: $ git review A colleague of mine says it a lot better than I do: http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2013/rant-about-github-pull-request-workflow-implementation http://julien.danjou.info/blog/2013/rant-about-github-pull-r... If I recall correctly, Linus Torvalds went on a highly publicized rant against Github PRs not that long ago. I'm not arguing that every Open Source project should have a complete QA infrastructure, and Github is a great place to deal with your first Pull Requests. However, I do argue that you can very quickly reach the limit of what Github can give to you in terms of collaborative tools. My rule of thumb: If you have more than 10 contributors, at least 4 of which are active daily, it may be worth it to invest in some real infrastructure.

prezjordan 13y ago
> When I ask people politely to rebase all the commits they're sending into one, most don't know how to do it. Very easy solution to this problem. 1) Make note of it in CONTRIBUTING.md. 2) Do it for them. Check out their branch, rebase/squash/fix whitespace/etc and merge.

revskill 13y ago

I think Github made a huge effect on Ruby On Rails movements ( or revolutions). So many peopole use it (instead of mysterious Python community before), brought theories into reality. Thank you, Github.

quadrangle 13y ago

GitHub may be a good service, but THEY ARE PROPRIETARY. Thus, it is absurd to talk about them as important proponents of Open Source without mentioning this hypocrisy.

GuiA 13y ago
Not completely contradicting you, but just pointing out- they've open sourced a lot of stuff: https://github.com/github https://github.com/github
- hackula1 13y ago
  I would go so far as to say that MOST open source contributions come from developers and companies that also work on proprietary systems. I really do not see a problem with this. There are legitimate business, legal, security, and technical reasons for this. Personally, I open source whenever I can, but much of the work I do would not be feasible in an open source model (highly custom systems, competitive advantage, legal restrictions on code or data, code that would be of little value for anyone but me and my clients, etc.).
unknownian 13y ago
That is true, but they do that so they can continue to serve their business easily. Would you rather them be open source and take away all the free hosting? Furthermore, they are easily the best product in their category. If you want an open source Git Service, use gitorious or something.

bgar 13y ago

It would be amazing to see a site that pairs experienced developers (especially women developers) with less- experienced women to sherpa them into contributing to open source. Is there really a need to give women special treatment or help when it comes to open source development? Wouldn't that reinforce the (unbased) idea that there's a disparity between genders in tech? Or is there?

hackula1 13y ago
I would say this is a great idea for the same reason having more minority male english teachers in minority schools is a great idea. For whatever historical reasons, certain groups are underrepresented. This snowballs when youth try to get a foothold into the field, since they see no one like them succeeding. Is it logical to have more confidence (a huge indicator of success in just about anything) when the teacher looks like you? Probably not, but that does not stop it from being effective.
- bgar 13y ago
  Yeah, I guess in a way having a mentor from the same minority/background helps be more confident, especially if there aren't many like you in a field.
  - moocowduckquack 13y ago
    I think of it as social hacking. There are plenty of people in the world (not all of them men) who think that women should not be in education, should only be child carers, should not talk over men, etc, so if you just take the approach that you personally will be completely unbiased, then while you are not adding to that problem, you are also not doing much to assuage it. Neutrality is all very well, but it often takes a lot more than neutrality to get somewhere if a lot of society is pushing back the other way from where you would like to get to.
mbrock 13y ago
I don't have a strong opinion about this particular thing, but it seems like a decent idea. But let me speak more generally. Sometimes it seems like some people have a very "logical" way of looking at ideas. It's like every idea is interpreted according to some metaphysical schema and judged by whether or not it's conceptually harmonious and untainted. In this case, the schema is "equality," which ironically means that any concrete idea that addresses disparity is prematurely judged as faulty or tainted. It's stunningly obvious that the open source community is dominated by males, even if it's not more so than the programming community at large. This is a matter of statistics, it's not complicated. This paper http://jitm.ubalt.edu/XXI-4/article3.pdf http://jitm.ubalt.edu/XXI-4/article3.pdf cites a figure of 1.5% OSS developers being women, which doesn't seem entirely implausible. This simple statistical fact should mean that some women who do want to pursue an interest or career doing open source work might indeed have use for the kind of thing we're discussing. So why not? There IS a disparity between genders in tech. This is so obvious. Why on earth would you call this an unbased idea? That there is a disparity doesn't mean that there is an "essential" or "necessary" disparity. It just means that at this point in human history, women are extremely underrepresented in this particular section. In that situation, it seems more than appropriate to set up various measures to support diverse engagement.

johnpaulettefr 13y ago

I have pulled no fewer than 15 freelance contracts from my personal Github.Just from code that I have thrown out there because I don't have a commercial reason not to. One of the cool things is that deploying code on Github forces you to make at least some sort of effort of documenting it (a README, generally) and cleaning it up a bit to be reusable. It has helped me reuse my own code, because of that. It improves code quality, makes friends, helps people and drives work. Sharing is a worthwhile business activity.

alxndresp 13y ago

Does anyone have any tips on getting started contributing to open source? I'm looking to get into it but I just don't know where to start or even how to find projects where I could contribute.

stared 13y ago
It may be easiest to look at small projects you are already using (but want to fix something... or just, write better documentation, which may be the best start).