Dispelling the 'Genius Programmer' Myth

We often hear people lament how hard it is to get a patch accepted to large Python open source libraries. Through a series of (often amusing) real-life anecdotes from Twisted, RPython, Cryptography, and examples from many other Python libraries, come learn about code reviews, getting your patches accepted, and tools/processes to encourage quality contributions.

Transcript

1. Dispelling The ‘Genius Programmer’ Myth 
 (Through Code Review) Ashwini Oruganti twitter.com/@_ashfall_ DjangoCon US 2016
2. ✦ Software Engineer, Eventbrite ✦ (ex) Director, Python Software Foundation ✦ PyCA/TLS ✦ Twisted, HippyVM
3. …
5. Genius!
7. Open Source Contributions!
8. ☺
9. Fears of a new programmer
10. Clever people don’t make mistakes, right?
11. Leaders exist. Heroes don’t.
12. Why won’t you “just merge it”?
13. “I hope that’s not my project” -Every maintainer in the room
14. Contributing Basics
15. contributing.txt
16. Respect the process
17. Split reviews into smaller diffs.
18. Work with your reviewer.
19. Criticism is not evil.
21. Iterate failures quickly.
22. Document every effort.
23. Hi Maintainers!
24. Social problems cannot be solved with technical solutions.
25. If you care deeply about a style, document it *visibly*.
26. It’s OK to not like things, be nice about it.
27. “Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Never.”
28. 1. Mention the change. 2. Provide a self-contained example. 3. Describe the effects of the change.
29. Respect the volunteer’s time. “Thanks! This looks really good. IPv6 has a number of subtleties, so I have quite a few review comments, but I want to emphasize that the code does look good and you’re definitely going in the right direction. :)”
30. Contributor Maintainer
31. There’s no such thing as “not qualified enough”.
32. It’s alright to miss things.
33. twitter.com/@_ashfall_ Thank You!