Also, it's fun to read over the different projects, so we all win.
As someone who made small contributions to several projects and left comments under many GitHub issues, things that I see:
* Heavy users are more likely to report bugs and end up contributing to the project * If many people run into the same issue, more likely someone will create among them will write a fix, or at least suggest a workaround * A "healthy" project -- one that addresses GitHub issues and pull requests quickly, that responds to people's questions instead of ignoring them, that encourages technical discussions, is more likely to attract even more contributions. * Some projects have issues and pull requests that are open for a long time without any response from maintainers (despite active development). I myself wouldn't even bother reporting a bug because it's not worth it
Meanwhile, even under this thread, you can find people that expect certain amount of experience with a particular language. That just says to me they don't want contribution. Why? I am no expert in that certain language, but I am experienced enough in software engineering that I can jump into many codebases and create a high quality patch with some ChatGPT. I've done this many times before. If they are so obnoxious I'd rather put my energy elsewhere.
what then should they be doing different? to contribute code to a software project you need to know or learn the language the project is written in. there is no way around that.
does it bother you that they don't want patches created with chatGPT? did you miss the controversy around that? can you assert that the code you submit is really free of copyright claims?
I'm sure you get some commitments of people who say they will help. Just like people say they'll pay for your product once you build it and people who say they'll go to an event 6 months from now.
It's hard enough to find contributors among engineers who are using a tool.