My first open source PR was 3 lines

We ran the Security Profiles Operator to ship AppArmor profiles to our Kubernetes nodes. It worked. It also logged the same error over and over:

getting owner profile: the node status owner is of an unknown kind

Millions of lines of it. The profiles still loaded, so nothing was broken. Just loud.

The operator keeps a status object per node for every profile, and a reconciler looks up which profile owns it. That lookup was a switch on the owner's kind. Seccomp was in it. SELinux was in it, twice. AppArmor wasn't.

So on 30 November 2023 I opened issue #1993 and asked three honest questions: is this important, does it mean something is wrong, and can someone guide me to a fix. An hour later I sent the fix myself as PR #1994:

    case "AppArmorProfile":
        prof = &apparmorapi.AppArmorProfile{}

Plus the import. Three lines.

Writing it took minutes. Getting it merged took 4 days, and none of the delay was the fix itself:

• The linter failed on import order. Then on a whitespace change I couldn't see. My actual comment on the PR was "I have no idea what fails, can any1 explain?"
• The CLA bot blocked it. Corporate or individual? Nobody on our internal Slack knew which one I should sign, so the PR sat until someone decided.
• The e2e tests needed a maintainer to type /ok-to-test and /retest for me, more than once.

Sascha Grunert did all of that: pasted the exact linter diff, retriggered the tests, approved it. It merged on 4 December.

The lesson I took from it: a first PR is mostly about learning the project's machinery, the linter, the CLA, the bots, the slash commands. The code is the small part.