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2021-04-04

The small joys of doing open source

"It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life." - J.R.R.T.

This post is about the joys of making small contributions to open source.

I thought open source would make me feel like stack overflow makes beginners feel: unwelcome and dumb! And I know stack overflow, I've been there since the beta.

The sweet sweet rewards

I'll go through some of my contributions and tell you what I liked about them:

MDN's equality table

This is the contribution I'm most proud of. MDN is the reference for the most used programming language in the world, JavaScript.

I thought if I tried to change MDN, the gods above would strike me with lightning for I know not the limits of my ignorance. Nonsense! People there are very nice people!

And I changed the scary equality table.

All because I asked "why 9 falsy values and not 7?"

This was one of the comments after the merge:

"I love this ;-)

But yeah, anyone who has the enthusiasm is welcome to help make MDN better." - chrisdavidmills

Imagine a thank you on a stack overflow question, they would slap you silly!

I've learned a lot and felt I got authorization to change a unesco monument.

The PR

The answer from the billionaire

I was researching redwoodjs and found a typo. Sent a PR to change like 3 characters.

15 minutes later, Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder of github, and billionaire with a bat-mobile merged my PR! On a Thursday afternoon.

It made me feel like he was a regular person and that regular people like me could also do incredible things.

The repo was deleted but I have the proof on my e-mail 😍:

Tom Preston Werner thanks

Working with the 9.5 billion downloads per year guy

I was building this site you are looking at and noticed a big bundle when highlighting code.

So I asked how to fix it on the repo and I was told if I could send a PR to fix it myself. During the next days after work I worked on it. Even if I had no clue.

The change was small, but I learned a lot. I worked with wooorm. He works full time on open source and he's one of the driving forces of unifiedjs. Never heard of him.

I used github actions for the first time, quite cool. The code is very readable and the CI checks are incredible! They check if a markdown file has duplicate words, indefinite articles, etc...