I feel called out
I don’t even know how to get into that
KDE seemed like quite easy to get started with, I installed their tooling, found a good first issue in Dolphin I could reproduces but couldn’t build dolphin locally following their guide, joined their matrix chat and asked for help, got ignored for a day, then somebody pointed me to another room where I should ask if the build guide was up to date, got nothing their and I gave up
Went through some other interesting open source projects I have been using and I was trying to pick something but to no avail, all issues there is somebody from India that took it and didn’t reply after 4 years (probably they have something in university asking them to do that)
I would rather spend my precious time in building something I have 100% control over than join the rat race. I have cloned a few projects in the past, fixed some annoying issue or upgraded deps to match my environment, installed the forked version and never opened a PR
So yeah, if you have a project and need some extra hand, let me know, I am an expert in Python but interested in languages I am less than an expert in like go, rust, zig, elixir (I am ready to match your style, good quality, skip using LLMs, …) . If interested I could also invite you to help out with a few things I have in progress or I am aiming for a re-write.
Me: “What an excellent project you’ve got going on here. I’d love to help.”
Admin 1: “This is an automated message. Please fill out this form and give us 10,000 details about yourself. Please provide evidence you’re a Type S, Mark 12, Fibonacci Certified, Code Arch-magus. We will get back to you in 6-8 weeks if we notice you, but let’s get real, probably never.”
Admin 2: “Hey, is that a reference to Tuscany in your bio? We don’t serve Italians around here. Fuck off, dipshit.”
Admin 3: “This project hasn’t been worked on in 18 months. I’m actually about to delete the whole codestack. But I hear there’s a guy who only speaks Armenian doing something similar. Try reaching out to him.”
About… Fuck… Over a decade ago, I was working on a Windows CE handheld and as we were coming all from Linux, we decided for the newly released QML Qt port
It was an absolute nightmare…
I found 3-4 people worldwide having the same problem with the port.
2 russian, 1 Chinese and I sadly don’t remember the last one
We were all in the same forum trying to exchange with translations tools available.
Until we found out, that the original contributor made its folder structure part of the Qt build system and you needed to build a path of nearly 20 fucking folders to cross compile this shitI’m still emotionally connected to my fellow coders, who were just as confused as I was, and I never found this situation again
But it brought me back to the early days of the internet and I really enjoyed it
Edit: as I’m getting old, it could have been more than a decade…
I mean, trying to implement stuff yourself is great for learning. Only once you are confident enough it is worth contributing.
