90 sats \ 1 reply \ @jonatack 8 Jan 2023 \ on: tell me what the best collaboration between plebs and devs looks like bitcoin
I'm often asked this question by non-developers and writers/creatives: How can I contribute to bitcoin open source projects and help the developers?
What is arguably most lacking in the bitcoin open source space is attention to the developers' work: review and testing.
The lack of these things is the main constraint to progress, and developers can feel frustration from this. There are many heroes, but not so many helpers.
Therefore, if you're willing to roll up your sleeves a bit, you can potentially add a lot of value in that space without necessarily being a developer and doing code review.
For example, a non-developer could develop just enough understanding to:
  • build and test proposed changes, especially user-facing ones, and report their result in the pull request on GitHub
  • reproduce user-facing issues and bugs that were filed, and give feedback on the issue on GitHub
  • give feedback on anything they found confusing while doing so
Your perspective and that kind of work can be very valuable, particularly if provided with humility, self-awareness, kindness, respect for other contributors' time, and understanding of what kind of feedback is most useful (i.e. not grammar and style fixups and not arguing about unrelated things).
I've written some detailed articles about this, if you'd like to go deeper. They are focused on bitcoin core, but the same principles apply to most open source work.
Cheers.
write
preview
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @plebpoet OP 9 Jan 2023
thank you!
reply