{"id":576,"date":"2012-04-24T07:20:46","date_gmt":"2012-04-24T12:20:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/?p=576"},"modified":"2012-04-24T07:20:46","modified_gmt":"2012-04-24T12:20:46","slug":"simple-mistakes-in-getting-started-in-open-source-dev","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/archives\/576\/simple-mistakes-in-getting-started-in-open-source-dev\/","title":{"rendered":"Simple Mistakes in Getting Started in Open Source Dev"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 2002, I got an account on LiveJournal. In order to help my friends get accounts, I started doing LiveJournal support. (I got 5 support points in my first week<\/a>, which was a reasonably big deal back then. (Warning: Reading other posts from that era of my life is not recommended :))<\/p>\n

Over time, as a somewhat more technical member of the support team, I started attempting to explore links to this ‘zilla’ thing that people kept mentioning, LiveJournal’s bug tracker. However, I always found that I never really understood what was going on: looking at the content above the fold in a typical Bugzilla bug<\/a> is a bunch of confusing looking metadata to a new developer. I remember at some point when someone told me to look at the comment — and I remember saying something along the lines of “Wait, there’s more content in this page if I scroll down?” Yes, I had been reading bugs for weeks, and never realized that … there was information other than the metadata.<\/p>\n

I remember somewhat later, as I got more into development, that I would actually read patch files and attempt to understand what they were doing. In one case, I found a patch file written by a friend in the support community that had a pretty clear typo in it. So, I downloaded the patch file, opened it in an editor, added the new line that was missing, and added the “+” at the beginning of the line — like he had for all of his lines, of course — and re-uploaded the patch. <\/p>\n

Of course, anyone with a passing knowledge of tools will know that adding a single line to a patch file … isn’t going to go well. \ud83d\ude42 But to someone who didn’t know that patchfiles were produced and applied with ‘patch’, ‘diff’, etc., this concept was a strange one.<\/p>\n

So, in my start in open source, I didn’t know how to read bug reports; I didn’t know how patchfiles worked. Yet I still was able to learn, improve, and eventually, do a little bit of good in the open source world, thanks to the help of a lot of people along the way.<\/p>\n

We all start somewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2002, I got an account on LiveJournal. In order to help my friends get accounts, I started doing LiveJournal support. (I got 5 support points in my first week, which was a reasonably big deal back then. (Warning: Reading other posts from that era of my life is not recommended :)) Over time, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}