pull request: An external-repository modification to someone else’s code which you’d like them to adopt into the master copy of the original repository, specifically the notification request to ask for this.
It’s funny, I put in a pull request in March of this year for a timezone calculation bug which I’d discovered somewhere out there in someone else’s code. I guess I was trying to be a good net citizen and giving back to the community. I’d forgotten completely about it until now. The original author merged my commit into his code yesterday and blessed it, basically. This would actually be my very first pull request in the world of open source so I suppose that’s special in some way.
In this particular case, it took the author almost three months to see the request and get around to responding to it. Granted, few of us would be paid to maintain our open-source repositories so they’re usually just considered hobbies for most of us, something we do in our spare time.
As a coder with many decades of experience, this pacing is a bit odd to me. (As in, “wow, three months to bless a quick-and-dirty code fix”.)
I’m not complaining… Okay, maybe I’m complaining. Maybe I was just a bit naive to the average amount of effort people are putting into this.
The entire collective force of open-source is something to behold. Almost every day some huge effort is being launched and thousands—even millions—of downloads occur from these repositories. But what happens to the original codebase when the author gets side-tracked with their next great idea?
But what happens to the original codebase when the author gets side-tracked with their next great idea?
The New, New Thing
All this reminds me of the biographical book “The New, New Thing” about a serial-entrepreneur, Jim Clark (of Netscape fame). The biography doesn’t really paint a pretty picture of the billionaire, instead suggesting that he was perhaps suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADD) or possibly Hypomania. He couldn’t focus on a project after the second year, opting to push the work onto others and move to the next project.
I guess I have to ask what part this plays in the world of open-source software. As an inventive person, I stare at my To-Do list of project ideas and realize that it could be argued that this is some mark of my own internal restlessness. Could I be content working on one project for year after year?
I’m a former CEO and at one time I did run a software development firm for nine years. Fortunately, though, I had project after project then to develop so that kept things lively. I’m impressed by those who literally spent most of their lifetime devoted to a single project.
A Lifetime of Service
Dr. Royal Rife comes to mind as one of these people. He was curing cancer and a variety of diseases back in the 1930 decade but he spent much of his life before this inventing the microscopes and medical device equipment which he would use in the culmination of his life’s achievement. His original home site is now the location of one of the Scripps hospitals here in San Diego but seemingly nobody knows his story. He spent a lifetime curing cancer and he isn’t famous for it.
I guess we as a society aren’t really conditioned to reward and remember someone who did one thing very well. To be famous or respected now, presumably you have to produce project after project, never satisfied with the maintenance of same, always chasing the next big thing.
If You Build It, Own It
I guess my word of caution in the world of open-source then is to own what you’ve built. Try to revisit it from time to time, like you might keep a plant alive by watering it once in a while. Do new things, of course. But don’t forget that your last thing could actually be ticket to your success.
outsourced guru 