I’ve spent a reasonably long time with computers. I’ve been doing something with either software or hardware (mostly software) for pretty close to three quarters of my current lifespan. I started when I was about 10, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) nobody was paying me for my work yet then. Flash forwards a few decades, and I have a gig I rather enjoy with SUSE, working on storage stuff.

OK, “yay Tim”. Enough of the backstory, what’s the point?

The point (if I can ball up my years of experience, and the experience of the world at large), is that, in aggregate, we write better software if we do it in the open. There’s a whole Free Software vs. Open Source thing, and the nuances of that discussion are interesting and definitely important, but to my mind this is all rather less interesting than the mechanics of how F/OSS projects actually work in practice. In particular, given that projects are essentially communities, and communities are made up of individuals, how does an individual join an existing project, and become accepted and confident in that space?

If you’re an individual looking for something to work on, whether or not you think about it in these terms, you’re effectively looking for a community to join. You’re hopefully going to be there for a while.

But you’re one little person, and there’s a big established community that already knows how everything works. Whatever you’re proposing has probably already been thought of by someone else, and your approach is probably wrong. It’s utterly terrifying, especially when anything you push to a git repo or public mailing list will probably be online for the rest of your life.

Fuck that line of thinking. It’s logical reasoning, but it’s utterly unhelpful in terms of joining a project. It might be correct in broad strokes if you squint at it just right, but you’re bringing new eyes to something. You’ll probably see things established community members didn’t, or if not, you’ll be able to help smooth the way for the next newcomer. One of the kinks though is speaking up about $WEIRD_THING_IN_PROJECT. Is it actually broken, or do you just have no idea what’s going on yet because you’re new? Do you speak up? Do you raise a bug? Put in a pull request? Risk shame in public if you’re wrong?

I might be slightly biased. This is either because I’ve been doing this long enough that I no longer suffer too much if someone tells me I’ve made a mistake (I’ve made lots of them, and hopefully learned from all of them), or it’s because I’m a scary looking white dude, dripping with privilege. Probably it’s a mix of both, but the most important thing I think I ever learned is that it’s OK to be wrong in public. If in doubt, you should:

• Listen for long enought to get a feel for the mailing list (or forum, or whatever).
• Ask the question you think is stupid.
• Submit the pull request you hope is helpful, but are actually sure is incomplete or inadequate.
• Propose the new architecture you’re certain will be shot down.
• Don’t take it personally if you do get shot down. This can be a crawling horror of difficulty, and only goes away with either arrogance or time (hopefully time, which I’m assured will eventually compost into wisdom).

If you don’t get a helpful answer to the stupid question, if you don’t get constructive feedback for the pull request or new architecture, if some asshole does shoot you down, this is not the project or community for you.

If someone helps you, you might have found something worth pursuing. If that pans out, keep asking stupid questions, and keep submitting pull requests you’re worried about. You’ll learn something, and so will everyone else, and the world will eventually be a better place.