How to Contribute to Open Source: Extensibility from Simplicity by Ryan Davis
506 views · Published 14 September 2012 · 20:51 · Indexed 12 November 2026
Channel: Confreaks · 2012 · Science & Technology
The bar for contributing to open source is much lower today due to technologies like git & github... _or is it_? It is now downright simple for developers to be able to fork projects and send pull requests upstream. As such, the number of forked projects and pull requests have scaled up. But all that burden has been shifted back to the maintainers of the original project. They're left with the decision to accept the patches as-is, reject them, or rewrite them in a more generalized form. In other words, the maintainers are faced with the decision of increasing maintenance complexity, increased animosity / drama, or somehow distilling the underlying reasoning behind the change and abstracting them so they're usable by everyone. The latter is both the hardest to do and the most beneficial to all parties involved and much of that effort can be done before the pull request even goes upstream.
More from this channel
-
35:52
Code Design and the Science of Pleasure
-
5:40
Services Inception with Ruby by Dave McCrory
-
48:58
Ruby Software Continuously Delivered and Exhaustively Explained by Brian Guthrie, Srushti Ambekallu
-
40:58
Jruby Polyglot Heaven by Thomas E Enebo and Charles Oliver Nutter
-
42:17
Be a Minecraft modman with Purugin by Thomas E. Enebo
-
36:46
Your tests are lying to you by Chris Parsons
-
23:46
KidsRuby: Think Of The Children! by Ron Evans
-
52:05
Resources, For Real This Time (with Webmachine) by Sean Cribbs