Re:Ask HN: Why is contributing to existing open source proje...
by jka on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @10:45AM
(#30778968)
> There is a random person in Nebraska that would appreciate your help, you just didn't find them yet.
To add to that: it's also possible that they'll appreciate the help when they see it -- but they're out doing shopping for their family / at work / taking some time for themselves at the moment.
Estimating time to complete FOSS contributions can be really tricky because the social considerations are less predictable (generally) than in a workplace environment.
(I say this all as someone who has offered patches, badgered people for attention, and then later felt bad about doing so)
I have a few open PRs to a small-ish project for about a year now. The maintainers haven't even looked at it. The PRs in question replace broken CI, fix bugs etc.
On the other hand, I have merged PRs to a large project that took the maintainers a few hours to review and merge. The PRs here are minor improvements.
My take is: do not give up. There is a random person in Nebraska that would appreciate your help, you just didn't find them yet.