

How to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Rock Star - Baustin
http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/167051/14-Ways-to-Contribute-to-Open-Source-without-Being-a-Programming-Genius-or-a-Rock-Star

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freework
One thing I've learned about contributing to open source is that it's
primarily a social achievement.

If I see a developer who has contributed to many oss projects, I don't think
"wow this guy must be a great programmer", I think "this guy must have great
communication/people skills".

Often (especially with popular oss projects such as apache, python, firefox),
you can fix a bug, add it to the ticket tracker, and it'll just sit there and
rot. Every day people fix bugs and upload patches. You have to contact someone
and sweet talk them into merging your fix.

~~~
kyle_t
You make a good point. For those just getting their feet wet with Open Source
projects it makes sense to start first with a smaller yet active project.

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8ig8
Just a reminder:

> If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective,
> we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to
> "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is
> meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

~~~
Baustin
Sorry about that, folks. I'll keep that in mind for all future posts.

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FourthProtocol
This is a good guide for a starter, but doesn't address dealing with rock
stars themselves, which is what's required if your contribution is going to be
merged.

And _that_ usually requires the skin of a pachyderm, and the patience of a
fox. The reality of today is that the world idolizes idols. Idols in turn
become arrogant. Their worst trait is belittling others' contributions -
especially when they're better than the rock star could've done.

I have no solution. I'm pointing out what I see as an omission from an
otherwise useful post.

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bane
Something I think that's interesting and too often overlooked is that even
non-programmers can provide lots of help to Open Source projects, sometimes
the help they can provide can be critical to the project's success.

What kind of things? Everything from sane documentation to artwork is open and
in need of _lots_ of help in many projects.

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sanxiyn
This post didn't mention internationalization, localization, and translation.
Maybe because it was targeted to English speaking people?

Here in Korea, a lot (probably majority) of people who contribute to open
source started from i18n, l10n, and translation.

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bilalq
Thanks for this. When I was first getting into programming, people would tell
me and others like myself to "go contribute to open source projects". I don't
think they realized just how daunting and impossible that seemed to us at the
time. To be honest, none of us even knew where to begin.

~~~
frozenport
1\. Find a project you like 2. Spend a weeks looking at the code

The daunting part is the time commitment.

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zanny
This. You invest in a project and find out with your first merge the
maintainers are assholes and toss out fine commits. I've seen that happen a
bunch. It is why there are so many freaking forks, and a lot of them end up
atrophying because one person can't recreate an ecosystem.

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reginaldo
In the same area, OpenHatch[1] seems very nice. From their own landing page:

 _OpenHatch is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software
contributors with communities, tools, and education._

[1] <http://www.openhatch.org>

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Baustin
I love seeing the great discussion that this started (both positive and
negative feedback). Thanks everyone for turning the post itself into an open
source project.

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IridescentBlue
How about contributing to Open Source by helping write the documentation for
projects? Properly documented projects go a long way in helping developers get
recognition and notice.

I, myself, have begun more thoroughly documenting projects, not only for my
sake but for everyone else that comes along. I find that this book helped me
get up to speed quickly: [http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Style-4th-
Edition/dp/0205...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Style-4th-
Edition/dp/0205313426/?_encoding=UTF8&keywords=Elements%20of%20style&tag=produc05-20&linkCode=ur2&qid=1356985769&camp=1789&sr=8-1&creative=9325)

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lucian303
Awesome post but instead of writing a program to move all the tickets over, a
better suggestion would be to follow Joel's advice
(<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/07/09.html>) and get rid of that
clutter. I can almost guarantee you most of those tickets were useless,
completed, or irrelevant.

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petdance
I'm the author of the article, and throwing away the tickets was suggested
many times by different people.

We had a pretty big discussion in #parrot about the value of this ticket set.
People on the project plowed through the Trac database and closed tickets, and
even with that we still hundreds that tracked all sorts of development. Many
were bug reports, and many were effectively to-do items, and many were bug
reports that had been resolved but still couldn't be closed for various
reasons, such as needing an automated test to verify it.

It's nice to start over clean, but sometimes there's too much baby with the
bathwater.

~~~
lucian303
Sounds like you guys did your due diligence. In that case, of course, writing
the app to move them over is the right choice.

Thank you for the article, BTW. It may be obvious to some but not to most.
Especially contributing to documentation. I'd say that most open source
projects can benefit more from that than from new features ... and maybe even
most bug-fixes, depending on severity.

~~~
petdance
I'm glad you liked the article, and it seems to have struck a chord. One of
the things I've found very handy is that I now have a place to point people
on, say, StackOverflow when someone asks "How do I get started in open
source?" I started 89starts.com as an offshoot of the article, but I haven't
yet gotten it ready for prime time.

Agreed about documentation, and at the top of my to-do list for today is
making final edits to another article for them on open source documentation.
Should be out in a week or two I think.

