Contributing is such a wonderful way to give back to the community. And isn’t it heartwarming to know that a contribution you have made, regardless how small, is then being integrated into something that is used by dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people?
That’s a little way to leave a mark on this planet, and possibly improve the life of people.
It is really good when I’m already using something, so I contribute to it because there’s something I wanna fix or add.
But when I’m feeling an itch to make something, then contributing can’t help because I don’t wanna go search for similar projects. I just wanna build.
Contributing is what you do to other people’s projects once you are done making your own stupid things, and feel confident you will improve rather than ruin other people’s stuff.
The problem is, things never feel like they are complete. There’s always more you can do.
I might do some contribs to lichess once I am done with my current stuff.
Shameless plug : I recently finished a longterm project :
https://newdawnowl.itch.io/microtonal-grid
https://programming.dev/post/46248494I think I’m currently doing both, for two similar projects. The first is pretty clearly slop, but solves my problem in the short term, while the one I’m working on is a much more general solution.
You could combine the two, by saying that developing a new feauture for an open source project, is you new project.
