My First Bug Report to Open Source

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow

— Linus's Law (Eric S. Raymond)

Throughout my career, I’ve always admired open source developers.
Even my very first blog post started with a quote from Evan You. Believe it or not, my friends used to make fun of me because his portrait was the wallpaper on my old iPhone SE. That person literally started my career. Because of him, I had a job.

Today, I made my first conscious open source decision.

It’s nothing big. Nothing particularly valuable.
Most likely, I’m the only person in the world who ever ran into this issue.

And honestly - I created it with my own hands.

I was trying to solve a problem, double-checking the documentation, fixing my own mistake. And after I found a working solution, I realized there was a mismatch between the docs and reality.

So I did something new for me.

I filed a bug report.

Here it is.

And here is my personal postmortem. At the bottom you can find a commit with exact fix

I’m proud of that.
And I want to do it again.
Hopefully one day I’ll be able to fix something directly, not just point at it.

I’m writing this mostly as a reminder - for myself, and maybe for you - that contributing to open source is something to be proud of. If you don’t have this moment yet, maybe it’s time to start.

Open source changed our lives.
Paying it back, even in small ways, matters.

- Moris Gloriss