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Time for #DEVDiscuss — right here on DEV 😎
Inspired by @tigt's Top 7 post, tonight’s topic is...Succeeding in OSS!
≥8 years ago, I wrote about an extremely niche improvement to a very specific use of SVGs. It got enough positive feedback that I turned that knowledge into an NPM package: mini-svg-data-uri.
Today, it’s both one of the most and least important web dev things I’ve ever done.
Questions:
- Have you ever had a surprise, unexpected, or random OSS success?
- Have you ever worked really, really hard on an OSS project and received minimal reward?
- What can we do, collectively, to better support OSS builders and maintainers whose work we rely on?
- Any triumphs, fails, or other stories you'd like to share on this topic?
Top comments (9)
That definitely counts as a success! Well done for sticking with it. 👏
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!
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-alphatag and I hope that this tool grows and matures to help as many people as possible.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 😄
Added Reactive 2015 and React Europe 2016 so that there are some upcoming conferences on the page.
What's "trivial" to you might still be important to some. Great job!
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.
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.
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.
Have fun with OSS.
Wrote about my views on Open Source
dev.to/balagmadhu/the-price-of-ope...
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