If you have been in the open-source community lately, you know what I am talking about. The story goes something like this: There were loads of videos/blogs/events hyping up open-source contributions, mainly as a good gateway to land your dream software engineering job. And to some extent, it is true.
However, this trend has also brought a flood of pull requests (PRs) that contribute little to nothing or, worse, add clutter to the codebase.
And this is why, lately, you can find a wave of blogs and videos on the theme of “Why you should NOT contribute to Open-Source.”
This article will show how bad it can get with the latest surge of unsavory PRs.
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ExpressJS
The latest drama has happened in the epxressjs GitHub repo. As you can see, there were loads of “Update Readme.md” pull requests.
This doesn’t immediately sound bad; perhaps the Readme was riddled with typos? It's a long shot, but let's investigate. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Looking closely at some of these PRs, we will see the drama's root cause.
So let us take a look…
Maybe it’s just one bad apple? Well, let’s look at some others…
As you can see, these PRs are not trying to better the project they contribute to. Although somewhat comedic, having lots and lots of such PRs is a nightmare for the project's maintainers.
And the last one, I think, tells the bigger picture in this story. It seems that lots of these PRs were a learning experience (assuming “Collage” was a mistype of “College”). Although, that is an assumption made in good faith.
Some of them could have been done as a sort of shortcut for bolstering resumes, which is a far more alarming intent.
The missing puzzle piece
Newcomers don’t understand that contributing is not all about the code. It is about investing your time in understanding the project and the issues it is trying to solve, being a part of the community and the discussion, and wanting to better the project because you want it to thrive.
And that is what is praised about open source contributions, the will to learn and the will to help. In the process, you demonstrate that you can be proactive and solve complex issues. That is what employers are really looking for.
One look at contributions like these, and you can be sure that you will be ignored by potential employers.
Final thoughts
Now, there were some external actors in the latest PR nightmare that I won’t be naming here because I doubt that they acted with ill intent. It’s the latest buzz, and I am sure that you can find them with a single Google search if you wanted to.
It’s important to mention that when considering contributing to open-source, start by looking at the projects you already use and are familiar with.
Alternatively, focus on projects where you have domain expertise, as sharing that knowledge can be a valuable resource for the maintainers.
Have you had any bad experiences contributing to open-source?
Top comments (23)
This is interesting: github.com/expressjs/express/pull/...
It seems that this is organised. So could it be not a general issue, but an exception?
Update:
Yes, it is
It's a direct suggestion from here:
httpx://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ez8F0nW6S-wQuite the detective 😉
As I mentioned in the Final Toughs, there were external actors in this incident and yes this is was an extreme example, but it was useful for making a point!
some newbies misunderstood the guide and this is the result
Interesting points! I think, in a way, it is inevitable, but there are ways to deal with this. E.g., Hacktoberfest is introducing stricter rules every year to differentiate between meaningful PRs and simple typo fixes, etc.
The tech community is ever-growing, and I agree that this was inevitable to happen at some point (although this is an extreme example).
Hacktoberfest is definitely making steps in the right direction!
I would find it very sad, if people were generally discouraged from contributing. Our automated linters and PR templates will improve and maintainers will find ways to automatically tag PRs to suit their process. So they can still choose to look at low quality PRs if they want and don't need to increase contribution barriers per-se. Also GitHub introduced "discussions" exactly to defuse "issues".
We generally encourage our interns for example to contribute to open source because there's a lot to learn about how stuff is done properly. All assuming that they read
CONTRIBUTING.mdfirst.Oh, I forgot to say: I really like how Stackoverflow does it!
I definitely don't want to discourage people from contributing!
My main goal with the post is to highlight the importance of open-source contributions and to ensure that we're all approaching it with the right mindset and intentions.
By the way, how does Stackoverflow do it?
The stackexchange network knows levels of priviledges: stackoverflow.com/help/privileges
For example you can only write comments or review posts after a certain amount of upvotes.
I don't think contributions to other open source projects will help you find a job, unless they are very substantial. In my own experience, even making a popular project didn't help me with this.
Contributing isn't about creating a pull request but about learning and collaboration, and for this it could be useful but will require significantly more time.
While it is losing everyone times, it's easy and quick to reject those. I'm more worried about chatgpt/copilot pr that seems legit but are not quite done with full understanding of what is done and is either going to be introduce in the project of lazy code review or are really going to lose everyone time as it could start a lengthy discussion that is never going to be merge as the author won't be able to clean it up.
Having done cv screening when i look at someone contribution I actually look at the pr content, code and the interaction that happen in that pr
That is a great point! A bunch of PRs like that could be far more damaging to the project than updates to the Readme such as these.
If you put open source contributions into your resume, be prepared to showcase your contributions during the tech interview, just sayin 🫣
Showcase your amazing markdown skills 😄
Copilot detect and close when!?
When I was reading this article I realized one thing, this is probably a way for some people how their make GH profile filled with green squares.
You are probably not wrong 😄
I appreciate this perspective. Sometimes I think about OSS contributions like a charity. Give your free time as you see fit--but don't treat it like a second job if you value your health.
Well written! I agree with your conclusions. This is indeed an important topic that needs to be discussed.
Thank you! I'm glad you found it interesting
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