Also, everyone’s time is limited and they can’t contribute to every open source project they’re using (or trying out). Especially if they find a lot of issues with it; they will want to know what’s up with these issues before investing their time in this project. If they take some of their time to give feedback on your project, you should listen.

Two people within the last week have sent me questions about my API for interacting with GiantBomb. I made it specifically for myself but I posted it to GH in case other people might benefit. I specifically said that I didn’t plan to add any more features since I only used what I needed but I’d gladly accept pull requests.

Anyway, these two users asked me if my API did this and that and what not; I responded and helped them both out. One of them wanted to add a field and I told them how they could do that and about some caveats I knew about when I made the API. It was a cool experience, I guess, since I didn’t really set out to be “an OSS manager” just more like, hey, here’s some code, have fun! To hear someone one say “Thanks you really made my life easier” makes it all worth it.

For me, the issue is that I like to share (most of) my code because I think it might help someone who had a similar problem or might make someone’s life a little bit easier. I don’t really work too much on them after I use them in my own project. If I did, I wouldn’t have time for my own personal projects that these are born out of.

I do think for big projects like Nuget the biggest barrier to me trying to fork and contribute is simply the time it takes to understand the codebase. I had mentioned to the devs that it would be really nice to add diff/merge capability when upgrading/installing packages. They said it would be but it wasn’t in the plan in the near future. That makes sense; if I really want it (and we kind of do) we should try and come up with a proof of concept. If I didn’t have anything else to work on, I definitely would… but like I said, it takes a lot of effort for someone unfamiliar with a codebase, even a small one, to get comfortable enough (or confident enough) to contribute. I’m not saying that Nuget owes me this feature because I don’t have time to contribute it, I’m saying I want to contribute it but I wish I had the time/capability to do it.

I think many projects, even Nuget, go to great lengths to help people understand how to contribute. Even then, it’s just simply a hard thing to do. People code differently, people’s level of understanding varies greatly, etc. etc.

Anyway… good post