Is there a place where you can request code reviews on opensource software?
Is there a place where you can request code reviews on opensource software?
Many of us write opensource code in a void: nobody ever looks at it, uses it nor reviews it. We are the only users and authors.
In order to improve, where can we get our code reviewed? I don't mean professionally, just from like-minded individuals.
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This is not an answer to your question but it's tangentially related.
Someone I greatly respected ran an open-source project with the policy of merge everything. Completely flip this idea of carefully review, debate and revise every PR. His theory was that it helps to build an open community, and if something breaks someone else will revert that commit. He says that the main branch was almost always stable, a massive improvement to how it was run previously. He passed several years ago and for some reason this reminded me of him.
I guess what I'm trying to say is if you get something out there that people find useful, the code will be looked at. It doesn't help you if you're looking for someone to collaborate sorry.
This is how you get supply chain attacks.
Yes it is. The code is in Bitcoin Core so there's a non-zero chance you win at life if you want to try.
There is a very effective approach (34:00), that big companies like cloudflare use, to ship a product in a fast and quality way. It bears parallels to what you are describing. In essence engineers should not get hung up in the details to trying to solve everything.
- Just build a proof of concept
- Discard the prototype no matter what and start from scratch keeping the initial feedback in mind
- Build something internally that you yourself will use
- Only once something is good enough and is used internally, then release it to beta.
So that tedious process in trying to flush out all the details before seeing a product (or open source effort) working end to end, might be premature before having the full picture.
That's Wikipedia's approach, arguably one of the most successful "open source" projects in history - certainly not without its problems, but overall it's pretty great
I've actually found his blog where he talks about this "optimistic merge"
There's a number of them as the idea grows. See also the C4 process RFC
mbin (fork of kbin) is currently trying to implement the process.
It's great to see the attempt and also an example of what the C4 guidelines are made to avoid.
Notice how many comments are little nitpicks about this and that. Completely stalling the commit and getting further away from the original point of C4 which is to reduce contributor friction and avoid these kind of endless discussions on PRs.
I don't want to be too critical because some of that is a clear lack of understanding of the motivations of C4 which is explained more thoroughly in Pieter's blog posts. You don't want to adopt a contributor guidelines that you don't understand of course.
IMO it's better just to implement it as-is and start using it in practice rather than bikeshedding.
Feel free to make that comment there.
I would have but I don't want to tie my Lemmy account to my actual identity :/
This is for 0mq right? I remember reading Pieter Hintjens about this realization he had over a long time of developing 0mq.
Yes that's right. I was only just transitioning into adulthood and Pieter mentored me and profoundly changed how I view many things. It wasn't just zeromq but that was the main thing. I still keep his books at hand on my bookshelf. His death impacted me greatly.
