

FreeBSD is looking for some fresh hackers - Tsiolkovsky
http://miwi.bsdcrew.de/2011/03/freebsd-needs-fresh-blood/

======
gregschlom
A piece of advice for my former self: contributing to open-source software is
way easier than one would think.

For long, I was afraid to contribute to any project because I wouldn't
understand the whole structure, and I didn't know where to ask.

Then I started using Qt and submitted my first bug report. The bug was fixed
in like, 10 hours.

Wow.

Then I submitted another one, but this time I looked at the source to
understand what was wrong and suggested a way to fix it.

Then I actually sent a patch.

Then I signed up to the mailing-list, and started talking to people on IRC.

But my real epiphany was with KDE. When I saw my first commit into KDE's
trunk, even though it was a tiny one line bugfix, it felt so great. I started
wondering : why didn't I do this before?

So, if you've never contributed to OSS, go ahead. Pick a project of interest.
Get yourself on the mailing list and on the IRC channel. Ask questions. Find
stuff that needs to get fixed. Help others. And get those bugs fixed.

~~~
senko
_Then I actually sent a patch._

One thing to note when contributing code, is the project maintainers probably
won't commit it right in. Often they'll suggest small (or not so small)
improvements (be it stylistic, to make the patch follow the coding style, or
suggestions how to better organise the new code).

The important part is: they don't think your patch is bad; they would love it
to hit the trunk/master; they are happy at having new people taking time and
effort to contribute. Their initial "rejection" isn't, and don't get scared
away by it.

~~~
For_Iconoclasm
This happened to me, to a T, when I submitted a patch to cloudfiles-python.
The patch was beneficial to my employer (we really wanted to use server-side
copying on RackSpace Cloudfiles), but I couldn't imagine that it wouldn't be
useful to other people using the Python bindings in question.

I actually ended up not implementing one suggestion (it involved project-
contextual knowledge that I didn't have time to look into; I figured the
maintainer could make the change if he wanted it), but the patch was pulled in
anyway (after many months... apparently the service was not available to all
Cloudfiles customers at the time).

So this is more anecdotal evidence. Make contributions! I also made a fix to
another project which involved 2 line changes. The fix does not have to be big
to be significant in some way. New social coding websites make it easy. In
particular, GitHub has very easy-to-use forking and pull-request functionality
which I highly recommend using if a project you like is hosted there.

------
cdibona
As a side note, we have the summer of code coming up...organization/project
application deadline is the 11th.

------
sgt
I may just consider this. FreeBSD is my favorite server operating system.

------
astrodust
Sounds like FreeBSD has burned so many bridges that they're having to post
want ads like this.

~~~
Luyt
Nope, they haven't burned bridges, they're just not as advertising themselves
like for instance, some distro's of linux are doing that.

FreeBSD is mostly consisting of people who value technical merit over anything
else.

