Time is a thief when you’re undecided
This week was bittersweet.
I will start by saying that in the project where I am currently collaborating we were asked to contribute to an open-source project, clearly, the first thing that must be done to fulfill this task is to look for a project that has problems that it can fix or even if you use a lot some project you can propose something that is missing with the intention of making the work in which you are collaborating more robust.
Let’s make it clear, I’m not an expert and that although I have used several open-source projects, these are gigantic and for the same reason they usually have only two kinds of problems that one can solve, correction of minimal details such as “ typos “, documenting some part of the code or translate something and the other kind of problems are quite complex problems which would take a person like me several weeks to just try to understand them and think of a possible solution.
While it is true that I have also encountered problems challenging enough to be worth it, but not so complex as to be able to solve them in a few days, being exposed to such popular projects there are usually many people who are aware of these and what has happened is that they end up “winning over them” which gives a feeling of frustration with which I have been learning to live this week.
The best thing I could do in this block was to ask for help, after trying to handle myself in this sea of projects I identified what I had been doing well since it was giving me positive results and also what was turning out badly since it gave me the feeling of that became blockers and I communicated them to my mentors, they came to my help very quickly and we decided that the best thing I could do was to collaborate on projects with less popularity but no less challenging.
I decided to address a problem reported by a user which was more than a problem a request, I decided to work and when I was halfway through the resolution of the problem I remembered that it was a good idea to validate my intentions, this had a positive result although with a bittersweet flavor. What happened was that the owner of the project answered me very quickly and after reading my possible solutions he told me that he didn’t love the idea that his project would be complicated so he preferred that I do nothing about it.
The above was bitter because I already had some advanced work and on the other hand it was good news because it prevented me from wasting more time working on this, coupled with the fact that I could continue collaborating with him only, not on that project.
In the same way, I think that another positive thing that resulted from this experience was to see that there are people who are very aware of their repositories and others who aren’t.
Finding the first ones is quite appreciated and from them, you can not only learn to validate your intentions but also to see how they work since they tend to comment a lot on their projects, which helps to see others’ mistakes that you can avoid in the future.
In general, it has been a week full of ups and downs, but I think that as always I have to learn what not to do, as well as the intention to reinforce what did work. Undoubtedly, what should not be lost is the desire to move on and the will to improve, decide on a project and throw yourself in order to solve it, as Rod Stewart says in his song “Young Turks”
Time is a thief when you’re undecided
so my friend, let’s not let this rascal steal more than we are willing to lose and focus on just one thing.
