You are only a Kontributor when Its a KDE repository.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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When they reject your PR because you still managed to slip in a bug
If it involves pointers, not unlikely.
I knew a guy who boasted about the number of repositories he created on Github. Said he created over four thousand.
I took a look. He did in fact sit down and create over 4,000 different, unique repositories. Each with a README and some slight variation on a few lines of code. That's some kind of dedication, I guess?
Was he a Go developer before generics? Published 4000 versions of the library, one for each type.
No, it was mostly short bash/python/php scripts.
Maybe he automated it?
And maybe he published it on GitHub?
That’d be funny. Seeing mass-repo-creator and then 4000 random repositories below it.
And your typo fix kickstarts 10 workflows, downloading gigabytes of data and running endless tests.
Depending on the size of the project, this may be an environmental concern.
When your PR to replace one line of code actively contributes to climate change.
Using legacy SI units for size of information is deprecated, they only bring confusion, instead use IEC/binary units like GiB (gibibyte). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
Legendary o7
Most of my PRs are fixing typos in the Readmes 8) It ain't much, but it's honest work
I saw the other day a profile full of PRs, all diffs were changes from passing code through an autoformater.
I once fixed a CVE by removing a line. And, IIRC, my only contribution to openssl is a single-character one.
Typing characters is maybe 1% of the job. The other 99% is understanding how the change affects everything else. Changing a single line of code in a function called by 1000 other functions each themselves called in 10 other functions can still potentially be more work and a bigger change than changing 9000 lines of code in a function called once.
I once fixed a bug in credit card payment form because someone had gotten some formatting character screwed up and used a capital M in some place where a lower case m should have been. Since it was a payment system they couldn’t take payment for a while whilst that was screwed up. I was contracting there and happened to notice it. Sometimes all it takes is one character.
In my developer career, the littlest commit I did was the removal of a single ';' which was causing a wonderful to debug bug ;)
Even better when your email gets scraped years later that reads:
My name is Kai and I came across your contributor profile on the Node.js github. I’ve using the Node to build scalable web applications and I genuinely appreciate all the work that has gone into making Node.js fast, flexible, and efficient—it wouldn’t be possible without amazing contributors like you.
I wanted to ask you for a quick favor[...]