tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915405415003666702.post1383104358195456556..comments2024-01-10T03:25:01.209+05:30Comments on N Recursions: Contributing to the open source communityNavhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01320006785676088076noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915405415003666702.post-47927195494124612272014-03-10T21:16:00.608+05:302014-03-10T21:16:00.608+05:30:) Thank you Noah. Your comment brought a smile to...:) Thank you Noah. Your comment brought a smile to my face. The thoughts on your blog appear to be born of a lot of experience in the field. Reminds me of a time when a finance person in my company joined me for breakfast and asked me why softwares need to be upgraded. Said he understood why a car would need an upgrade, but softwares don't have any moving parts :) I explained to him the process of architectures, OS'es etc. changing and it seemed like he finally got my point. About the mindset you mention, I believe it's the same as the principle of diffused responsibility: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility. The "Somebody else will do it if I don't" feeling. But most of all, I believe it's because most people lose track of what they really want to do in life. I've seen many forget why they fell in love with programming in the first place, after getting stuck in a routine job. Pretty much like how Pi says that after the incident of the tiger eating the goat, life lost most of its enchantment (from the movie "the life of Pi").Navhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01320006785676088076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6915405415003666702.post-18278852964045017182014-02-17T01:48:25.164+05:302014-02-17T01:48:25.164+05:30Another thing that you can do is something that yo...Another thing that you can do is something that you've done in this very post! In other words, ask people to contribute.<br /><br />It sounds crazy, but you wouldn't believe how many people don't think that there are any ways to contribute. I've been a community manager for a long time, so I've worked on these issues for years. I recently wrote about how healthy projects need people, and it made its way to Hacker News, a popular news site. There, many people took issue with saying that software doesn't necessarily break, that it doesn't need to be maintained.<br /><br />https://blog.engineyard.com/2014/open-source-software-contribution<br /><br />There's a mindset that seems to come from the isolationism of the great hackers of yore, who would sleep under their desks or build hardware in their garages. They did it alone, so can't we always go it alone, like pioneers? But it's just a myth. Even the golden age hackers worked together. In fact, you could argue that they were more social, more engaged in communities, than these renegades are now.Noah Slaterhttp://twitter.com/nslaternoreply@blogger.com