I found a “< 0” comparison instead of a “<= 0” in a conditional check once for someone else’s audio library I was using which caused random lockups in the decoding loop only ever so often when decoding MP3s. It was for a function that removed ID3 data on the fly while decoding and then checked for more to strip out. Took a day to finally pinpoint what was happening, test my change, and then notified the author, who immediately fixed it. It felt great.
You don’t gotta be a rockstar 10x developer working on 50 projects at once to help out.
One time I figured out why a strange dependency was needed in a LaTeX book. It’s part of the official documentation of a project and the author had opened an issue about it. I dug deep into the package code and figured out why, came up with a fix, and contacted the author about the solution. That was two years ago and they have not replied or fixed it, but just worked on different things. I don’t demand anything, but I haven’t felt motivated to help out since then in that documentation project.
Fixes typo
Github: you have earned yourself a spot on the contributor list
Adding to my CV: valuable contributions to numerous projects on github
I also fix typos.
Most of them I made, be it still counts!
Anybody else waste a minute scrutinizing this image macro for a spelling error?
Amateur, I wasted 5 minutes checking for errors.
Look at the millionaire that uses documented projects.
Edit: Oops, didn’t see the community. I was thinking of programming libraries.
I recently fixed a typo Spunk -> Splunk, that was a hoot
My first contribution to a complex system was fixing a comment calling an email BCC field CC.
one character/word pull requests are awesome, i did that with Lemmy once
This is how I contributed code to the NSA
i translated a cli file compressing tool to my language. No coding, just editing the strings in the source and recompiling
