Case in point: During the whole Julie Horvath controversy, a few anti-Github developers started a campaign to create awareness of the harmful effects of Github's culture (or something)...but they created their standalone site using Github Pages:
https://github.com/CultureOffset/cultureoffset.github.com
I pointed out, independent of how I felt about Horvath or Github, that not only does it send a terrible message to run a boycotting campaign on the service you want to boycott...it is completely unnecessary, thanks to how git actually works and the many other great build tools/stacks to do static web development in under 24 hours. However, I got reamed for being an asshole and "man-splaining" things.
But really, as useful as Github is, every dev should spend some time on thinking through what underlies Github, and how to get by without it...especially if you intend on protesting Github.
This can be useful when people are commenting on your pull request and you are not sure whether they have a final decision on the merge.
In this PR for example, wearhere is labelled as a collaborator in the corner of his comment. https://github.com/inkling/Subliminal/pull/170
After that, you should email the lead dev(s) and ask how you can contribute. Many projects have a mailing list and that's usually the best place to start.
I find this hard to imagine.
There are people who are just learning to code, who got the advice, find a simple open source project and help.
There are people who have only done early stage classes for CS degrees that want to practice in real coding but haven't been exposed to real world development.
There are people who have been coding forever but never paid attention to that stuff because they were always part of a team and didn't worry about it.
One extreme example: we had a person wander into the local hacker space on python user's group night. She had an English degree and had never done anything nearly as technical as coding. She knew that her library science degree would entail some coding and database knowledge and wanted to get up to speed prior to needing it for coursework. She understood the concept of community work and abstract stuff about open source, but not really anything on a practical level. Within the day she was helping one of the member's pet project by copy editing the readme and some of the tech docs. I'm certain she had no idea what a readme was when she got up that morning. (not exactly a code contribution, but definitely a project contribution). Within a couple of months she was able to get her first code submission to a project.
Ignorance and ability are not as correlated as people like to think they are.
thank god there are people who understand that. It's amazing to me the number of people who equate the two. Equally ridiculous is the tendency of programmers to spew advice such as "Read the fucking wiki (or documentation)". That really doesnt help newbs who are just barely figuring out the right way to Google things. The thing about being able to find some instructions on how to do X is that it's predicated on actually knowing that instructions are out there somewhere.
"But I do, they are on this website here and there is a link to them at the very top of the README!"
Didn't matter, I got told off for what was really "you don't have docs in the usual place on GitHub."
Very frustrating.
@patio11 I think it was made a comment in a blog about don't put Open Source on GitHub because you really build up GitHub's name not your own, which is an interesting point to discuss. EDIT: found it https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/do-not-en...
"This is one reason why, while I love OSS, I would suggest people not immediately throw their OSS on Github. That makes it very easy for developers to consume your code, but it does not make it easy for you to show the impact of that code to other people, particularly to non-technical stakeholders. To the extent that people's lives are meaningfully improved by your code, the credit (and observable citations) often goes to Github rather than going to you. If you're going to spend weeks or months of time writing meaningful OSS libraries, make a stand-alone web presence for them."
(For my project I'm using GitHub Git, Github issues, but everything else is on a website on a domain I control.)
Does git have built-in citation management?
That would be awesome, btw. That would arguably elevate git to the level of email: made by hackers for hackers, now universal to the fabric of modern life.
next up: a well-written & concise guide on writing proper commit messages. could be based on http://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messa... and http://robots.thoughtbot.com/5-useful-tips-for-a-better-comm...
A sample script can be found here:
http://addamhardy.com/blog/2013/06/05/good-commit-messages-a...
