Since when do Unix tools output 3,000 word long usage info? Even GNU tools don’t even come close…

[zlatko@dilj ~/Projects/galactic-bloodshed]$ man grep | wc -w
4297
[zlatko@dilj ~/Projects/galactic-bloodshed]$ man man | wc -w
4697
[zlatko@dilj ~/Projects/galactic-bloodshed]$ 

The article sure mentions 💩a lot.

These technologies, although archaic, clumsy and insecure

Like cars? Or phones? Those are also archaic, clumsy and insecure technologies.

One thing to add that I haven’t seen is that for big projects, there’s often nobody that could understand it all. People either get their individual components it they understand how stuff interacts, it’s very rarely expected that new people in the project, even if very experienced, can just understand everything at once.

What you said that maintainers know every single fob is very frequently not the case at all! But since they get the big picture, they know in which part to look, and with their experience, they’ll know what to look for in that part, it may seem to you like magic. It’s not, it’s just experience.

Don’t get discouraged though!

Getting into big open source projects as a junior -level can be difficult, but often isn’t that hard - a lot of projects often need help and will take anything they can get. And if your experience already partially aligns with what you’re getting into, even better. If you reach out and be upfront about it, you’ll usually get pointed in some way.

Now, you seem to only have worked on your own, with smaller code bases. That means, you don’t have a problem of code organisation. So you can’t understand a solution if you don’t know what the problem is.

So how would you go about it?

My suggestion is to maybe get the. 10,000ft overview. Also, understand the project workflow. Projects usually have specific ways of doing things - how to build, test, run things. Try to figure out how to build and run the software on your own. If you make it, that’s a great step!

Then dig into one specific component/module/part. After a bit of study, you may be able to understand that component and find a simple thing that you can change about it. If you get this far you’re golden, you’re doing more then a majority of users that software.

Now if you’re interested, you can dig more, or reach out to devs, saying what your experience is and how far you got, and ask them if you can help. And take it from there.

even if it is an earlier, yet undeteced bug, whoever found it (in this case, the cowboy), should at least log it, if not open a separate PR to fix it.

I think it is a bit more than that.

You point out two things:

• the “fuck it” algorithm
• the hidden DNS request.

So, now, obviously if you wrote the “fuck it”, then well, you fix it. If you found the DNS library problem - find a better lib or something.

But if you take the stance “fuck it, there’s always something”, you don’t even have a chance of finding out. If you had a test suite running 10 seconds, and suddenly it’s up by 10 more, you would notice. If you had tests running for 10 minutes, you would not.

If you had a webapp or something that always opened “fast”, then suddenly it gets doubly slower, you’ll notice it. But if you already started slow, you won’t notice (or care, or both), when it gets even worse.

I think that’s the point of the article. If we all dug in and fixed a little bit, eventually we’d have fast apps or tests or whatever. If you accept that things suck, you’ll make it tripply worse. It is a conscious effort to be fast.

Yeah, there was a bit of discussion about that on Lobsters :)

It’s not a monopoly, but it’s still an oversized influence on the market. I think the poster is arguing that: when have you heard a recruiter ask you for your bitbucket account? But they will look at github.

I largely agree with this statement. I think the original question is very widely scoped. It’s like asking, “what’s the best tool for hammering nails, chopping wood, cutting wood, cutting glass, polishing floors, and building skyscrapers, and the tool is used by all builders anywhere and any time in the human history?” Different people, different skills, different problems.