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Make an open source maintainer's day with this one weird trick

Jerod Santo on October 22, 2018

Little bits of appreciation can make big differences in maintainers' lives. Here's one way you can show appreciation that will take less than five ...
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Nicolas Cuervo

I was thinking the same here: the "issues" section is for, well, reporting issues. Sure, not all maintainers might be so picky to make of this a big deal, but also others like to keep of the sections clean, as it makes their life easier (it serves as statistic for bug-squashing, to represent how stable is the current state of the project, etc). Some just read the number of issues open and make themselves an idea of the project stability, without regarding if any of those is a "thanks for your hard work!".

This trick might be great for small projects, maintained by a small team, but for more mature projects you have other communication channels that are more appropriate (slack channels or mailing lists, or twitter as Aleksei mentions - or any other social network the project makes presence on).

I'm sure the intentions of these "thanks" are the best, don't get me (us) wrong. But, have you seen those "please don't talk to the driver" signs on buses? This is a similar thing.

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Basti Ortiz

YES! I want to see more of this out of the community. Why don't we do this more often? Why haven't I done this before? The life of a developer is a stressful one. The little things can turn one's day upside down. I am definitely doing this when I have the time to do so. Unfortunately, I am too occupied right now to personally thank the great developers who make the world go round.

Thank you so much for sharing this. This should really be done more often. The world would be a much better place if we all did this.

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Jérôme Gamez • Edited

I can confirm this - when I received this kind of “issue” in one of my Open Source Repos, it made my day - I introduced the „won‘t fix“ label just for that and open it up each time when I’m down :)

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Phil Ashby

Yup - I really should do more of this too. It's nice, even when someone simply ticks a Github star (well, it makes my day, easily pleased!)

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Jerod Santo

If you think a thank you note is "junk email", then you should check your personal spam settings for a misconfig.

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RupankarGhosh

Hey Jerod,I have been using GitHub for an year and I found really nice open source projects there which makes my life easier. But I never really thanked them for making this sweet tools. Your post give me a chance to think about this small thing of thanksgiving to developed. And thanks for such a nice post 💌.

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Jerod Santo

That's awesome, Rupankar! Happy to nudge you in a positive direction. 💚

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Jason Steinhauser

HTTPoison really is a good library. I'm going to have to find a few OSS guys to thank now. Great idea Jerod, thanks!

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Yoandy Rodriguez Martinez

There's a little nice project for that here

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Bernhard Webstudio

Great idea. At least star the repositories you use!

For PHP dependency management using Composer, I recommend symfony/thanks;

 
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Jerod Santo

You said:

has a lot of free time to read junk emails.

This is not what you think?