

How to contribute to open source without being a programming rock star - petdance
http://www.softwarequalityconnection.com/2012/03/14-ways-to-contribute-to-open-source-without-being-a-programming-genius-or-a-rock-star/

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marijn
> Projects need contributions from everyone of all skills and levels of
> expertise.

I disagree. I find that politely rejecting or rewriting contributions from
people with little experience or clue is a serious time drain for a maintainer
(as well as a trial of patience). This goes even for documentation, which,
when written by people without a clear view of the software, tends to be
confused and misleading.

I try to handle such contributions gracefully anyway, with the idea that some
of these people will use the feedback to grow into better programmers, but
even that is unlikely to benefit the project -- the time span it takes to go
from clueless to good is probably longer than the period in which the person
is involved in my project.

~~~
petdance
Rejecting code and docs is a fine strategy for the short term. In the long
term, people and enthusiasm are the scarce resources. Taking the time to
cultivate them as members of the community pays off down the road.

I don't agree with your assumption that "the time span it takes to go from
clueless to good is probably longer than the period in which the person is
involved in [the] project." If I can spend some time shepherding the new
person, who is probably more naive than unqualified, it will pay off in spades
later.

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toyg
The problem with all this stuff is always the same: it's incredibly, utterly,
mind-numbingly boring, which is why even rockstar developers (who are the ones
who will get all the credit for the project anyway, and who have the famous
sky-high productivity that Spolsky measures in multipliers) can't be bothered
to do it.

And I say that after having done some of it here and there.

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wmat
Similar to 'Improve the website' is to contribute to the project wiki. Many
open source projects use wikis as a major part of their community
documentation and are only useful when updated. Most wiki engines, such as
MediaWiki even provide functions to list 'wanted pages' or similar.

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DanBC
I'm pleased that they mention documentation. They don't mention translation
(and internationalisation) or accessibility.

{meta} the guidelines ask to avoid "14 ways to" style headlines, and to have
instead "Some ways to" or even just "Ways to".

~~~
petdance
There were about 30 items I left out for the sake of article length.

I'm going to be expanding all of them into a website that will have a page for
each of them.

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gaius
I wasn't aware that open source software came with a musical accompaniment.

