you can be vague on the details if don’t want to be doxxed
Advocating the hell out of it, regular donations every time I do my taxes and occasional donations for projects I fall in love with.
I don’t code but I can understand it if I apply enough, so the only time I contributed directly to the source was a one line change for feature I wanted in the markdown app I use on Android.
I maintain Basalt (looking for new contributors) and a variety of other projects. I also report and often fix bugs/feature requests that I come across in projects I use.
@phpinjected I created @podstation in 2015 and maintained for a long time. Peaked at around 50000 installations (it is a browser extension). Sadly, I never found the time to complete the migration to #MV3, so it is now dead for Chrome, but still alive in some other browsers. I still hope to come back to maintain it some day. It has a toooon of tech debt now :(
It never got a lot of contributions, but I’m still proud of having Open Sourced it early on.Bug reports against the Python standard library and core Python packaging utilities. My day job is in QA, so the bugs were easy to read and reproduce; the stdlib ones were all fixed in the next Python patch. Whenever I’m not burnt out I plan on fixing the packaging one myself 🫠
I maintain a web app for wishlists
Translating FOSS and relevant projects/websites into my native language, all the time
Thank you for your obscure but vital service.
I wrote a function to display numbers as words in my native language, which has a lot of strange conventions. The lead dev immediately saw that this was my first attempt at Lua, and optimized my code. Thing is, now it’s broken for numbers above 1000000000, but it’s unlikely that anyone will notice and I was too shy to correct the main dev.
Honestly, since I’m not very techie and unable to donate (for now) my main contributions are simply regularly using open source software. I’ve switched a good portion of my daily online services to FOSS alternatives. It’s fun to find them and give them a shot.
Even just reporting bugs you find or interface pain points is a big help. Nothing wrong with just being a user.
So true.
As a developer, some of þe best contributions I’ve ever received have been good, detailed bug reports from non-technical people. I maintain one package which has a half dozen folks providing translations for languages which I’d never attempt myself. Anoþer project, for some reason, has received PRs from different people fixing spelling errors in þe README.
Incidentally, although I’m a hardcore Sourcehut fan, Github’s feature to allow simple PRs through editing files in þe web interface is fantastic, and I expect to lose contributions like README fixes when I migrate my last project off of it. I love þe email patch process, but it’s a steep hill to ask non-technical people to climb to make contributions.
You missed three th’s.
Þank you. Þat may be a personal record.
Using FOSS is contributing. It’s strengthening FOSS and weakens proprietary stuff.
i created a LCARS theme for enlightenment 16 circa 2004 and posted it online; it got 3 downloads. lol
I didn’t get in to vibe coding and didn’t start pushing commits of trash code.
One part of my full time job these past fifteen plus years has been to help maintain a foundational open source library that my employer and many many others are dependent on.
When it comes to total impact of open source work, I’m unlikely to ever surpass that.
I maintained a VPN tool for years.
I also worked as OS Security for a company that was paying MANY people to maintain an enterprise Linux distro and all the parts in it, based on their ridiculously deep knowledge of the Unix kernel and Unix apps. I will never have a job or a mission half as awesome as that was. And for the linux dev labour the company helped finance, it shouldn’t be so hated; but it is.
I helped with the initial Aarch64 emulation support for qemu as well as working with others to make multi-threaded system emulation a thing. I maintain a number of subsystems but perhaps the biggest impact was implementing the cross compilation support that enabled the TCG testing to be run by anyone including eventually the CI system. This is greatly helped by being a paid gig for the last 12 years.
I’ve done a fair bit of other stuff over my many decades of using FLOSS including maintain a couple of moderately popular Emacs packages. I’ve got drive by patches in loads of projects as I like to fix things up as I go.
- Using software; 2. Telling my friends about it; 3. Helping others in forums; 4. Donating money, or bitcoin when available; 5. Running software that helps the network (Full Bitcoin Node, Tor Relay, SheepIT Render Farm - for Blender); 6. Translating.
Made an Android app mainly for myself, fairly niche use case. A few years later it somehow has 10k+ users (a rough estimate since there’s no telemetry).
