When you mention in your resume that you are an active contributor to Linux source code.

Contributor badge 👍

Welcome to the new world. Microsoft is now the top open source contributor on Github.

Stars that matter probably most

We were four.

I setup a git repo, invited everyone and started coding. After a week I noticed I still was the only contributor.

Turned out they had their own code base in Dropbox. :/

Dear children let's talk about how to ask a f***ing question.

You don't just go "I need help. I can't figure it out." We had trainings on this, I sat through 3 hours holding your hand to help you try and understand things.

And yet now we have scheduled another 3 hours to help you figure this out because you said you were having difficulty with it because you couldn't figure it out. How about instead of just saying you "Need help", you start by
1. Explaining what you are trying to accomplish
2. What specific issue are you facing? Is there an error message or something?
3. What have you already tried thus far that didn't work?

Instead of "I NEED HELP I CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT!" that is the sign of a lazy f****ing engineer, someone who doesn't want to think, who doesn't want to learn something new who wants to just coast by. Especially when this is going to become an increasingly important part of your job.

And of course you currently are still a whole job level above me because sitting around and keeping a chair warm for 10 years means you are a valuable contributor, instead of what you can actually DO!

This bugs me so much. So remember kids, when you need help, or need to ask a question, ASK IT THE RIGHT F****ING WAY!

OMFG!! I just discover a fucking bug in a library used by thousand of people in scientific community!! 🤩🎉

Started when my program outputting strange result. I was in a huge fight with my supervisor about one of the function from the library. My hunch was telling me that this function is the source of the problem, but he insisted that no such bugs could exist in the library that has been used by thousands of people.

I couldn't reproduce the bug so I just stayed silent at that time,
But now, I finally got the bug showing. Yeah I am gonna shove it to his face next week.✊
I will also let the people who maintain the library know.
Feels so good being able to be a contributor PR to this famous library 😎

The downside is now I can't use this function, I have to implement by own function.

Source Code Activism is a thing that should not exist.

Keep your filthy CoC away from the Linux kernel you freaking bastards.

Hey. This code look broken. What should I do?

It isn't broken. It's doing what it's supposed to.

Well, it's hard to follow, but it certainly doesn't look right. And it isn't doing what I expect. Also, why is it calling method(a_class1_or_class2) with a class3?

It isn't hard to follow, and it works just fine. Let me show you. ... huh. looks like it isn't right. and there's a comment here saying the calls aren't clear. but it works just fine. Just copy it over and do it the same way.

I already did that. and it isn't working.

What are you talking about? Of course it works fine. Did you check your code?

------

Really, dude? It doesn't work fine. but, guess what? It works fine* when I change it to call that method with a class2 like it asks for. (Surprise!) But I can't tell him that. Nope. Bossmang get offended. Still won't admit I was right about anything, either.

Ahh... the continual joy of working with (and for) trash.

* well, more fine; the rest of the feature is still wrong. but nope, i'm not allowed to fix it. because why would they want anything to work properly? Already-accepted wrong behavior is good enough. Can't clean up the code, either, because that "muddies the waters." Bitch, I couldn't see the bottom of this sewer if it was half an inch deep! Which is more important: the last contributor entry beside the code, or that code being readable and maintainable? or it, you know, working?

doot doot.
need to scoot.

When you're the only contributor of your own open source project..

Bonus points if the person asking me to write tests is a direct contributor to the feature and he's low-key asking me to cover his code.

When even Tim Berners-Lee is not counted as a contributor on GitHub.

As much as I love opensource I hate really hate some of its actvie community members (read this as "freetards" <-- see urbandictonary). As a .Net + web devloper with minimal C experience (I just started learning it) and literally no Python experience its not really easy to contribute for me to many (most) opensource software for linux. I am using some <unnamed software> and I found a <critical bug>, it was easy to reproduce and I wrote for list of possible solutions, found it in a code and linked and basically wrote a docummentation longer than any other I ever wrote for every single project I did ever, combined. This <software> was critical for my server and since owner of github repo and few other people there were really active, I hoped that this bug with pretty good documentation will be solved fast, I went to my bed with a heroic feeling of an open source community contributor that helped saving world. I was horribly wrong. Tomorrow, I got 3 passively agressive responses from owner and other 2 freetards that summed up said <other1>:"oh thats nice, fix i yourself and commit it", <other2>:"have a sex with yourself" in a nice way, and <owner>: "fix my softwate and create mrege request". After replying that I have no experience my Python skills are not on a level requied for such an action, he messaged me on twitter I have linked to my GitHub profile saying even less nicely that I am a "retarded c*nt" and that I should learn Python and fix it myself. This makes me stay with my Windows based Server for some time now, fuck this. I googled his github nickname and guess what. Our main freetard is admin on an <unnamed linux forum> and mebmber of many other "computer help" with literally half of his posts just slightly toxic posts about how everyone should use linux and how supreme it is ober anything other, the other hals was crying why linux has only 1% of market share. Oh boi I am not sure why but ITS MAYBE BECAUSE OF FREETARDS LIKE YOU.
And the funnies thing is, hes not only freetard, he is just fullstack retard. One of his posts is "helping" to some <noob windows user> installing Linux. tl:dr for this las part: Freetard basically wiped all data of that <noob>.

PS: Bless everyone who do not respond "oh nice, now you can do it yourself"

I found an old project on which I hadn't version controlled, so I decided to manually commit progress on a past date. Only problem GitHub calendar wouldn't show it.

I emailed them and because it was private repo I added them as contributor. Then I got this reply.

This gem of a game. Partly cause i'm a contributor, partly cause i'm a space junkie.

Is this advertising? maybe.
Am i in love? definitely.

Got a CTO at my Unity job that's younger than me, which by itself is fine, but the only reason this guy was put into that position was because the previous CTO left the company at the time where I was relatively new and he is the person most familiar with the codebase of our primary project than I was at the time.

I understood the decision at the time, but still, having a position of power being handed to them just as a matter of inheritance doesn't command my respect. Nevertheless, I withheld my judgement at the time to see how his leadership goes.

Not even 1 year in and this young CTO started making jabs at me, calling my code hard to read and incomprehensible, to my face, in front of everybody else.

Motherfucker, I don't find his code easy to read either but I went out of my way to frequently ask him, the previous CTO and other teammates to clarify what they wrote here and there. He on the other, made no attempt to ask me for clarification and instead waited until company meetings to air these grievances.

Our boss started to ask me to follow SOLID principles (even though he can't recite what that acronym means) due to complaint from the CTO guy, even though the CTO guy doesn't even follow SOLID himself! But I took the higher road and didn't flip it right back on him.

What I did propose in return though, is that the dev team start using pull requests and have a code review process if the CTO wants to sign off on everything that gets in the codebase. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not for this guy! He immediately starts complaining that reviewing pull requests would be more work for him. Motherfucker, you refused to go to my table to ask for clarifications about my code yet still want to understand what goes on, then do code review.

It was at this point that I realized that this guy doesn't actually want me to write good, clear code. He wants me to write code HIS way so that he can understand. Yeah okay, I can accept that idea in isolation. Some open-source projects require contributors to follow certain coding convention to make the maintainers' job easier too. One project that immediately came to mind is "In-game Debug Console for Unity 3D" (disclosure: I am a contributor to this project)

But guess what?

THIS COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE A FREAKING CODING CONVENTION. NOT WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE. NOT EVEN A VOCAL ONE.

What this CTO guy wants from me is a complete blackbox.

To all fellow devs out there, I hope you don't work with a CTO like this, or become one.

Currently an official contributor on Immutable.js! 😜

It feels like you are talking to yourself while commits when you create a github repo and you are the only contributor. :p

I've been a Python user and contributor for 10+ years. Somehow, after seeing so many fights on the Python mailing lists in the past few months, I have mixed feelings about the language itself.

The binary on my laptop is still the same, but using it feels different.

The tale of the asinine Typescript framework guy continues:

>guy makes a framework
>promotes it
>people don't wanna use it because it's mediocre
>doesn't care, he still promotes it
>people started criticizing his framework
>won't listen
>calls his critics haters
>thinks PH tech guys are way behind the world
>says a lot of bad takes in tech himself
>such as NodeJS used as a front-end
>people tryna correct his bad takes
>calls them haters too
>people start complaining
>gets banned in many PH tech communities
>except one
>total windbag in there
>somebody calls him out, explains why they hate him
>he says his framework will be famous and we will all be eating dust
>heckler tells him he is not only the person in the open source community and tells him a famous Filipino open source contributor
>says he doesn't know this famous contributor and he doesn't care
>challenges heckler to confront him face to face
>heckler calls his bluff and gives a place and time to meet
>big guy agrees to meet
>people are clamoring for him to shut up
>admin tells him and the heckler to shut up
>big guy pushes it
>calls the admin (female) a puta (whore)
>gets banned
>goes on Facebook saying that his heckler will not show up in that place despite it being the favorite hangout place of the heckler since 2017
>that he is being banned because of haters
>people call him out on his Facebook posts and he takes them down
>people in the tech community started thrashing his Github with prank forks and PRs
>guy tries to shame them on Facebook
>gets rekt by tech people
>goes on Twitter saying that backward PH devs are oppressing him
>even tagging the famous devs

@marcusignacius I have lost total sympathy for this guy and his framework. Arrogant, petulant, childish, and uncharitable. honestly he brought this on himself.

Somebody honestly slap him this rant on Twitter pretty please.

Man, contributing to open source projects seems very intimidating to me.

I have never contributed to one of those repos on Github with a shit-ton of stars and a load of watchers. Made up my mind to start sometime around the start of September. Looked up a repo that I was very excited to contribute to. Went through their really large codebase, tried to understand as much as I could (They have a fair amount of documentation, but I just can't understand a lot of design decisions that were taken). Looked up one of the open issues marked for newbies, went through the relevant code to understand where and how I would have to make my changes in the code, and was about to start... when a seasoned contributor submitted a pull request.

This same occurrence has repeated itself 3 times now. If you mark an issue for beginners, maybe let the beginners handle them? Also, if you plan to contribute to an issue, why not announce your intention to do so? Get the issue assigned to you, so no one else ends up wasting their time coming up with a solution.

I would love to recommend this to the contributing team, but I am just way too scared to initiate a conversation with these guys. I mean, they are way more experienced and knowledgeable than me (some of them are even famous!).

I am definitely out of my depth with this project, and maybe should look for an easier one, but I really want to rise up to the challenge. Guess I'll stick around then, just waiting for my chance. :|

Facebook is a giant piece of shit. Not only is their platform a massive contributor to mental illness, even their API's are fucking garbage. I'm trying to use their ads API and what it does is it hijacks the entire fucking request so you can't even extract data from the request after calling it. Fuck Facebook and everything they've ever "contributed" to society.

I want to get every contributor of arch wiki and kiss you on the cheek. EVERY SINGLE ONE.

After I finished my probation of 3 months, which was also almost 3 months ago I noticed that Im doing better than half of the team so I asked my manager for a raise of 43 percent. Was given the green light but havent actually received the raise and was being fed excuses and promises . Started applying, got a better offer and gave my notice today. Suddenly hes shitting bricks and wants to talk with me tomorrow and asks me not to accept that offer yet. I smell a counter offer. Fucking lazy cunt couldnt move his ass for 3 months now all of a sudden hes my best friend. Seriously this sounds like a cliche but its surreal to see a respected person do this stuff, I guess all of the managers are the same even if they seem different in the start?

Best part is that Im not even a big contributor or even own some big features in that company. Ive been here 6 months only. He says he sees potential but tbh Im just a regular guy who crunches tasks and asks questions. I come in to the office only twice or three times a month. Seriously idk what he sees in me. Anyways.

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

Be nice, they said.
StackOverflow should be more welcoming, they said.
C00lHoker99 is a new contributor. Be nice, and check out our Code of Conduct, they said.
Oh, for fucks sake...
Nobody is going to be nice to drunk hobo that shits in the middle of the library.
Duplicate, no MCVE, bluntly offtopic and "do my job plz asap" questions doesn't deserve any niceness from community.
If you feel like SO isn't welcoming, that's certainly your fault.
And what now? Instead of answering good questions and being **nice to nice fellows** we are swimming in Pacific Crapocean. Nnnnnniiiiiicccceeee

Any company that ENFORCES you to have a college degree so you can get hired - is a failed company in my eyes and not worth any of my time.

I would not accept to contribute a thing to that company regardless of the salary i would be paid.

Same goes for all and everyone else: if an open source project were to require a contributor to have a college degree so he can contirbute, is a failed project.

ANYONE and ANYTHING who requires a college degree - has already failed.

TLDR, i am not performing as I used to in my job before i made my side hussle and idk if i should do anything about it.

every since covid started and companies started laying off people, I started realizing im in danger when no company was able to match my current salary, and the ones that do would, make me do a hunger games hackerrank competition with thousands of other people which I don't really wanna take part of..

My company even laid off a lot of people due to budget cuts a while back and i didn't feel secure at all, and knowing that i might end up with less salary should i get fired and settle for the next company that accepts me, kinda made me lose any trust i had for the whole being an employee thing... I have financial goals i want to meet and depending on this one company to not fire me is scary...

I registered a tech company and hoped I could take on some high budget projects, got nothing the first year but slowly i started getting some projects and now im hiring contractors to help with projects and its going great and im really happy and excited about it.

But i often need to manage said contractors, have calls with clients and even do some coding myself. Some of that i end up having to do in secret in my company time... we work in a big co-working space so i get to sneak into a meeting booth and do all that.

my manager lives in another country and basically im in a situation where i can get away with it without anyone noticing.

However, I used to be one of the top contributors in the company. I used to finish a butt load of tasks every day and i ended up being promoted to manager, but i still get some coding tasks. But generally, if it weren't for my side hussle i would still be a top contributor and shine like i used to, but now i mostly do what is expected on me, and im afraid someone would ask me at some point why im not as productive as I used to be.

nobody asked me anything but i just feel kinda guilty and miss having the one job to focus on and taking credit for a lot of things and helping everyone, but at the same time i dont trust that the company cares about me enough to give me any guarantees or stocks or bonuses so i feel i need to keep growing my side hussle to have a safety net..

thank you for reading my rant

Anyone who is a contributor @ an open source project?

Why are OSS maintainers so fucking incompetent and cocky? A documentation clearly says to use "use_parent_assets: true" when creating a child theme. Yet not a single fucking line of code actually checks that value. The fix is literary a single if(value) assets = deepMerge(parentAssets, assets). But because some contributor somewhere didn't write that line to the maintainer's liking, it's been hanging in the air for months.

Take your head of of your ass, there's thousands of people paying for support & addons for your product, and you can't add one fucking line to fix a rather critical bug.

Being the sole contributor to a project is such an experience. After endless nights of bug fixes and brainstorming, I have breleased my app to play store.
Currently it is Alpha phase . I'm getting some positive feedback as well as some great comments from my friends . Really looking forward to release the project in production soon

How often have you seen a manager working as an individual contributor when things are urgent and the assigned engineer is sick!!!
Such type of managers are the rarest species that can be found on Earth.
I hope everyone gets such managers and then, all Devs gonna have a great time working in tons of interesting and feasible projects.

bitter reflections from a bitter dev on hacktoberfest this year (in the past 2 hours of trying to find issues my IQ has at least halved):

- DefinitelyTyped - used to be my bread and butter to complete hacktoberfest; now, not sure if actual issue, or person just doesn't know how to use typescript (found a multiple such issues that were actually non-issues, the type they were asking for was right there, no pull request needed)

- avoid "issues" on no code / low code tools, these are toxic issues with titles like "I EXPLAIN BUG HERE", then probably not even a bug / more a feature request or clueless clown

- if your entire contributor team has the same character styled profile pic + background, i can't take you seriously; if your identity is so closely tied with what github team you are on... uh, i mean cmon what is this kindergarten? (also love the fact that an anon managed to get themselves mixed in hahahaha they ruined it perfectly!)

- most 'hacktoberfest' issue finders themselves are broken or don't load anything

- people claim issues and then never return YAWN

- the hacktoberfest discord: the projects channel is mostly people promoting their garbage repo WHICH HAS 0 OPEN ISSUES IN THE FIRST PLACE AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA and then OTHER people promoting their own portfolio on hacktoberfest???!! 😂😂😂😂 yeah bro i'm gonna help you with your own portfolio site GTFO

from what i've seen, i think i can start working approximately 5 minutes a day and be more successful than these absolute 🎪🤡🤹‍♂️ devs

sure, there is being a beginner, and there is being a clown salesmen trying to get people to do work for you... i mean wtf is going on

i WANT to help and contribute, but this year its really a struggle to find anything worthwhile to contribute to!

somehow the spark is gone... this might be my last Hacktoberfest... let me just return to my wisky and be in peace

Someone raised a PR for the opensource project "fast XML parser". Since this was a major change, it was difficult to review. I asked for the purpose and requested to break it into multiple PRs, where 1 PR should have related changes only. And any good change but unnecessary change can be avoided to scheduled for later.

We had long arguments for a month or two.

I don't know why but instead of breaking the PR, the contributor keep updating his PR for every commit someone made on the original repo.

He also stopped contributing for other changes, and commenting on other issues. (Change in the behavior)

Finally after 5-6 months, I had to close the PR as it was not active, having conflicts and not as per guidelines.

I know this is utopic, but I've been thinking for a while now about starting an open source platform for figuring out the problems of our society and finding real world, applicable, open source solutions for them.

To give you some more details, the platform should have two interfaces:
- one for people involved in researching, compiling issues into smaller, concrete chunks that can be tackled in the real world, discuss and try to find workable solutions for the issues and so on
- one for the general public to search through the database of issues, become aware of the problems and follow progress on the issues that people started working on

Of course, anyone can join the platform, both as an observer (and have the ability to follow issues they find interesting) and/or contributor (and actually work with the community to make the world a better place in any way they can).

Each area of expertise would have some people that will manage the smaller communities that would build around issues, much like people already do in the open source community, managing teams to focus on the important thins for each issue. (I haven't found a solution for big egos getting in the way yet, but it would be nice if the people involved would focus on fixing stuff in stead of debating about tabs vs spaces, if you know what I mean).

The goal of this project would be to bring together as many people from all kind of fields to actually try to fix this broken society.

It would be even better if it attracted people with money and access to resources (one example off the top of my head being people like Elon Musk) that could help implement the solutions proposed by the community without expecting to gain profit off of it (profit is also acceptable if it is made in a considerate, fair and helpful way, but would not be promoted on the platform).

The whole thing would be voluntary work; no salary, no other commitment than the personal pledge that once someone chooses to tackle something, he/she will also see it trough (or at least do his/her best).

The platform would be something like a mix of real time communication, issue tracker, project management tool and publishing platform.

I don't yet have all the details for how it should all fit together, but if there is something that I would like to start, this is definitely it!

PS: I don't think I can ever do something like this by myself, and I don't really have the time to manage a community of developers to start work on it right now. But if you guys think something like this is something worth your time, I will make time and at least start on defining the architecture and try to turn this into a real project.

If enough people are interested, I will drop any other side projects and do my best to get this into the world!

Thank you for reading :)

I get bouts of motivation and when I do I pick up 100s(clearly exaggerating) of things to learn which includes taking up new courses everywhere(literally), trying to be an open-source contributor, the most recent one is I've purchased a Ukulele (it's going good so far, well thanks for my $1 Masterclass subscription that I took last year!).
The sad part is that I have many unfinished courses everywhere. I'm learning to handle one thig at a time.

I'm just fed up with the industry. There are so much stupidity and so much arrogance.
My professional experience comes mainly from the frontend and I feel like it's not as bad on the backend but I'm still convinced it's not really different:

I'm now about to start my 3rd job. It's always the same. The frontend codebase is complete shit. It's not because some juniors messed up not at all. It's always some highly paid self-proclaimed full-stack developer that didn't really care somehow hacked together most of the codebase.
That person got a rediculous salary considering the actual skill and effort that went into the code, at some point things became difficult, issues started to occur and that person left. If I search for that person I find next to the worst code via gitlens on Linkedin it's somebody that has changed companies at least two times after leaving and works now for a lot of money as tech-lead at some company.

There's never any tests. At the same time the company takes pride in having decent test coverage on the backend. In the end this only results in pushing a lot of business logic to the frontend because it would just take way to long to implement it on the backend.

Most of the time I'm getting told on my first day that the code quality is really high or some bullshit.

It's always a redux app written by people, that just connect everything to the store and never tried to reflect about their use of redux.
Usually it's people, that never even considered or tried not using redux, even if it's just to learn and experiment.

At the same time you could have the most awesome projects on github but people look at your CV, sum up the years and if you invested a lot of time, worked way harder to be better than other developers with the same amount of experience, it's totally irrelevant.
At the same time all companies are just the worst crybabies about not being able to find enough developers.

HR and recruiters are generally happy to invite somebody for an interview, even if that person does not have any code available to the public, as long as that person somehow was in some way employed in the industry for a couple of years. At the same time they wouldn't even notice if you're core contributor for some major open-source product if you do not have the necessary number of years in the industry.

I'm just fed up.
By the way, I got my first real job about two years ago. Now I'm about to start my third position because my last job died because of the corona crisis. I didn't complain for some time because I didn't want to look like I'm just complaining about my own situation. With every new job I made more money, now I'm starting for the first time at a position that is labeled "lead" in the contract.
So I did okay. But I know that lots of talented people that worked hard gave up at some point and even those that made it had to deal with way too much rejection.
At the same time there are so many "senior" people in the industry, that don't care, don't even try to get better, that get a lot of money for nothing.

It's ridiculously hard to get a food in the door if you don't have any experience.
But that's not because juniors are actually useless. It's because the code written by many seniors is so low quality, that you need multiple years of experience just to deal with all the traps.
Furthermore those seniors are so busy trying to put out the fires they are responsible for to actually put time into mentoring juniors.

It's just so fucked up.

We offer you to join our A-team and be an important contributor in an exciting agile web development team using the latest web technologies to develop our new front end using AngularJS.

1. No sugary snacks (ugh, gonna be brutal).

2. Find a Node project I can become a regular contributor to (because I haven't had an excuse to really learn Node yet).

3. Learn to sit back and stop worrying about whatever the big new thing is in the industry. Be content to read up on it and see how it plays out.

That third one can fit my laid back personality anyway, but it's so hard not to get caught up in worry when things like Node, Blockchain, and AI become such big crazes -- and then the hype dies down.

Of course, I do still want to learn and use Node, but anxiety about being left behind isn't a factor anymore. So that's a plus.

I use the ICU format often for translation because it's simple enough and supported on many platforms. It's something of a standard so I can use the same translation string format and similar library functions everywhere.

ICU is like a really simple templating language, somewhere between printf and something like smarty or twig simplified and specifically intended for internationalisation.

I updated a library providing ICU compatible parsing and formatting for one of the platforms I'm using and find tests break. I assume that only thing to change is the API. ICU very rarely changes and if it did it would be unexpected for it to break the syntax in a major way without big news of a new syntax.

The main contributor of the library has changed since some time last year. Someone else picked up the project from previous contributors.

Though the library is heavily advertised as using ICU it has now switched to using a custom extended format that's not fully compatible and that is being driven by use case demand rather than standardisation.

Seems like a nice chap but has also decided for a major paradigm shift for the library.

The ICU format only parses ICU templates for string substitution and formatting. The new format tries to parse anything that looks XML like as well but with much more strict rules only supporting a tiny subset of XML and failing to preserve what would otherwise be string literals.

Has anyone else seen this happen after the handover of an opensource library where the paradigm shifts?

Layoff wave in Germany.
There is a new open-source project on Github, willbeallright-COVID19 for engineers being recently layoff because of the COVID19 situation. The main aim is to help programmers to stay connected to job opportunities. Quite interesting as the main contributor mentioned immediate questions that should be asked after the notification, and it seems to be on point as even here I've seen people searching for that information like What about all the personal items you have on the company computer? How can you get this information back? She is looking for community support so if you have any experience with layoff might be an interesting project.

Just moved teams and went from a lead to a individual contributor. Feels much quieter... almost too quiet.

"This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers." (not my question, but by a newbie who, for some reason I will never find out, tried to use an outdated Ubuntu version)

Seen that bullshit so many times.
If you don't have a minute to ask a question to a new contributor, but you do have the time to downvote or close questions, do you really think you are doing the community a favour?

I see that AskUbuntu is not a little bit better than StackOverflow. I will just shut up and leave the assholes alone then they can tell the newbies that they're not welcome on any StackExchange and that's it.

4.5 months of being tech lead and I think I’ve had enough already and will just go back to being an individual contributor.

Once technical direction is set what remains is coordinating, organising, communicating, documenting. Zero tech’ing.

Turns out it’s dull as fuck most days.
😕

I need an advice!
I'm a back-end dev with 5yrs of experience.

Our team initially started with 7 back-end engineers, and 1 developer was acting as the "tech lead". I was happy as an individual contributor and I enjoyed it a lot. I learned a lot of things.

After 1 year, our team got downsized. All other BE devs got replaced by 2 new engineers - one with 7 yrs of experience who fckin doesn't even know how to google and drop a constraint in DB, and another with "13 years" of experience who's a credit-grabber and all talk.

Now here's my problem. I feel that I've been "unofficially" given the role of a lead developer - the one who needs to lead code reviews, mentor others, decide on the higher level design, chase people for deployment approvals, managing 3rd-party dependencies, and forced to become the "coordinator".

This stresses me and burns me out. I just want the peace of becoming an individual contributor.

What can I do at this point?

okay so i want some suggestions from you people, basically i am undergraduate, highly interested in web development as well as software development, i have created some web apps(i use MEAN stack). i want to become an open source contributor and i am not sure how to do that. I have tried going to different github repos but it was of no help. So any suggestions on what to do and how to do is welcome

The owner of a github repo has added me as a contributor but haven't given me write access, so i can't push commits.
When i asked him, he said i have to make PR. The fork button is also disabled. So i guess i can't make a PR also.
Now WTF i am suppossed to do now?
No write access, fork disabled . Still i have to push my commits ....ughhhh

Hello guys,
TLDR;
leave a company where I have big influence with less technical challenges for a big company where I am challenged but jus as an individual contributor

I am working for a good company as a DevOps engineer, made a lot of achievements and literally moved the company to a whole new level, however I am working all alone, no mentorship but I get to lead everything and take initiatives

You can imagine the stress working a lone with a big scale in terms of production and other teams that I should support

Have been promised that we will get a team but it has been 15 months and nothing happens

I feel that technical I am not growing enough since I don't have time to improve or any mentorship

Now I am offered a senior position in one of biggest fashion/retail companies in Europe

And I am not sure if I should leave or not, btw it involves relocating

Which has an "easier" codebase for someone beginning as an open source contributor, Chromium or Firefox?

Engineering Managers: What's in it for you? What drives you to manage a team and not just be an Individual Contributor?

Appraisals are pretty insightful times. I wanted to check how much work I do as compared to others in the team. So, I tried to pull up number of pull requests created by me and others in the team. And to my surprise, I create 4x(I created about 850 pull requests) more pull requests than the next contributor(200 pull requests). I knew in general I was doing more work and much faster, but this is just too much.

I know number of pull requests is not an indicator for the amount of work done by anybody, but I had this feeling as well that I was doing more than others. I often see other members of the team not putting that much effort, and rather have a relaxed approach to getting work done. They pick one ticket and take the whole week to complete it slowly. While I hustle to get as much done as possible.

As far as the appraisals go, I am kind of laid back in terms of contributing towards overall organization which is now getting more weighted for my appraisal. So, despite me doing quite a lot of work, I am getting the appraisal at par with others in the team.

So, its kind of feels a little bit uncomfortable.

I am new here so apologies if I make any mistakes.

I have been a opensource contributor since last 2 years and it has been a great experience. As I am looking for a new opensource organization, I got around an organisation X(name changed). It is my first time when I don't like an opensource organization. The organization is controlled bh a single person and he does just tells me to copy the whole website of another popular opensource organization and make the organization website. Also, he does not listen about anything. He just pings me about the work done everyday even after telling him that a review is a blocker for me to do new task. I don't say it is a bay thing but don't looking at the issue is the main thing. On another case, the build pipeline was failing. It can be solved only by changing certain settings on the build pipeline and I does not have its access. I told him about how to tackle it in the review comment. Even after this, he just pings me for around a week just telling me that it has something to do with my code and the pipeline is all right.

I can understand that in the early phase, an organization may have some problems and the setup may have some flaws but this type of dictator behaviour is not good in my opinion. I had worked in 3-4 opensource organization and all have very welcoming community. I had always learned from them but this is my first time bad experience with it

I've beaten the system.

I have managed to remove all traces of a contributor and the associated fork from a repository on GitHub.

Is it possible for someone to stay as an individual contributor forever? Particularly for a back-end engineer or a data engineer?

umonut /dev/logic
mount /dev/imagination
~ unknown contributor

Just forgot to tell my friend/co-contributor that I did a commit and pushed it. Now there are like a gazillion conflicts!