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Discussion on: Overcoming blocks about contributing to Open Source

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James McPherson

Your list of blockers is correct (only missing the community aspect that @rhymes mentions). I've observed this in quite a few different projects over the years, too, both as somebody already working on the project (OpenSolaris amongst others) and as somebody wanting to get involved.

My most recent not-my-project submission was a new feature in Nikola ( github.com/getnikola/nikola/issues...) which enabled both captions and ordering of pictures in a gallery. A feature which I wanted, so I scratched that itch. It took me a few iterations to get it all ready for integration. By the time I made that PR I had many years of software engineering experience in both C and Python, and a lot of confidence in my skills (both writing code and interacting with people).

The first change request I submitted was for Solaris 8 (I worked for Sun at the time), to fix a small bug in the mpt driver (SAS hba). I was so nervous. Perhaps since this was a commercial software operation and all the contributors had been deemed by mgmt to be good enough (hey, they hired us, right?) I didn't feel quite as nervous as when I offered a changeset to the darktable.org project to make that build on Solaris.