Looking for both advice and anecdotes on joining well known, large public projects. Some friction points I have discovered and would like to address:
- Maintainers already have mature code and are far up the mountain of domain expertise. Playing catchup is hard.
- Open work is either too trivial, picked up too quickly by maintainers, or not documented. The, "I wish I had an idea for a feature I could contribute in the first place" problem.
- Medium plus sized projects require lots of domain knowledge, which means a new contributor will be slow. Often not able to ask many dumb questions to busy maintainers to unblock oneself.
- Putting work out into the public and getting scrutinized by old time maintainers can be daunting.
I'm asking, because I've realized that the only time I've successfully onboarded onto a large project has been with physical proximity to a developer and hand holding as I joined a new team driven by corporate interests. I'm interested in learning how to tackle the hard mode of making this jump into maintainership in open source.
- Maintainers already have mature code and are far up the mountain of domain expertise. Playing catchup is hard.
- Open work is either too trivial, picked up too quickly by maintainers, or not documented. The, "I wish I had an idea for a feature I could contribute in the first place" problem.
- Medium plus sized projects require lots of domain knowledge, which means a new contributor will be slow. Often not able to ask many dumb questions to busy maintainers to unblock oneself.
- Putting work out into the public and getting scrutinized by old time maintainers can be daunting.
I'm asking, because I've realized that the only time I've successfully onboarded onto a large project has been with physical proximity to a developer and hand holding as I joined a new team driven by corporate interests. I'm interested in learning how to tackle the hard mode of making this jump into maintainership in open source.