#DEVDiscuss: Succeeding in OSS

Have you ever had a surprise, unexpected, or random OSS success?

I like the reward of being able to officially say I'm a contributor to a certain project here and there for completely trivial contributions.

For example, I'm a contributor to Reactjs for a completely trivial, non-code reason. But it is a contribution to the official repo 😄

Have you ever had a surprise, unexpected, or random OSS success?

Yes I did, for some people it could be considered a small thing, but for me it was a success and I was happy for the whole day. I still remember that day, when someone opened a pull request to one of my repositories.

If you stop to think about, this person has dedicated some of their time and effort to contribute to something that I created, I still get this nice feeling, even recently with my second contributor. It's awesome to receive it!

Any triumphs, fails, or other stories you'd like to share on this topic?

I'm pushing myself to create an awesome tool called pr-tracker for the hackathon event and for anyone who wishes to use it. Today I happily added the v0.0.1-alpha tag and I hope that this tool grows and matures to help as many people as possible.

When I found solid.js as the first framework that ever made 100% sense to me, I wanted to contribute. I helped translating the docs to German, put helpful JSDoc comments over all functions and took over the testing topic. I discussed types with the creator of the framework and was acknowledged as contributor in the last larger release, which was great. Also, as one of the contributors to the collection of solid-primitive packages, I'm always happy about feature requests and to see them being put to good use.

If opening issues counts as contribution, my experience with the Firefox team concerning an error in their understanding of text-indent was very frustrating. This issue is still open after 7 years.

Another frustration was my attempt to establish an Object.clone method with the TC39. They declined any support with the argument it would be too complex and incomplete by design and then did structuredClone, which did very much the same thing, minus the extensibility.

Other than that, all my contacts with OSS were usually successful and great learning experiences.

Have you ever had a surprise, unexpected, or random OSS success?

I would count this more as disbelief than unexpected, but seeing my contributions get merged into the Apache Cordova project in 2015. That was my most prolific OSS contribution to date and required signing a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) prior to my code being accepted.

Have you ever worked really, really hard on an OSS project and received minimal reward?

Broadly speaking, I avoid over-committing in my OSS contributions and focus instead on bug fixes or maintenance. However, I have had a negative experience where I prepared a fix for an OSS package owned by Oracle and the company abandoned the project without notice. That was frustrating as it then forced me to maintain a fork for my own needs.

What can we do, collectively, to better support OSS builders and maintainers whose work we rely on?

1. Check your ego at the door. You're not a paying customer, these people don't owe you their time. Participate civilly and collaboratively.
2. Donate back the OSS community. This could be monetary or by participating.
3. If you fork a project and extend it, contribute it back to the original package, it's likely that others have similar needs.

Any triumphs, fails, or other stories you'd like to share on this topic?

Have fun with OSS.