The Two a.m. Patch Half the Web Shipped
Rafael talks with Ingrid Haugen, who fixed a security bug in a tiny utility library used by hundreds of thousands of projects, about the night it happened and what came after.
Your First Pull Request, Walked Through Slowly
0:00 / 1:06
Sample the first 60 seconds free. Sign up free or log in to hear the whole episode.
Show notes
Contributing for the first time
Most developers want to contribute to open source and freeze at the first step. Rafael invites Camila Duarte, a developer from Recife whose first pull request was merged last month, to retrace it with him, from finding a small issue to the moment the maintainer hit merge.
- Choosing a project where you are already a user
- Reading the contributing guide and the unwritten rules
- Writing a pull request description someone busy will actually read
- Handling review comments without taking them personally
- What Camila did next, and the second one being easier
Links to beginner-friendly issue lists are on the Witspeak episode page.
Transcript
Welcome back to Fork and Maintain, I am Rafael Nogueira. This episode is for everyone who has wanted to contribute to an open source project and closed the tab. My guest is Camila Duarte, a developer from Recife whose first pull request was merged four weeks ago, and we are going to walk back through it slowly: how she picked a project, how she found an issue small enough to finish, how she wrote the description, what the review comments said and how she felt reading them. I will add the maintainer's side, because I have been on the other end of hundreds of first contributions and I know what makes me smile. By the end you will have no excuse left. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let's fork something.
Open as text