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by flavioheleno 1550 days ago
I've been contributing to OSS projects for a few years now and all I can say is that it depends on the project.

I have a few open PRs to a small-ish project for about a year now. The maintainers haven't even looked at it. The PRs in question replace broken CI, fix bugs etc.

On the other hand, I have merged PRs to a large project that took the maintainers a few hours to review and merge. The PRs here are minor improvements.

My take is: do not give up. There is a random person in Nebraska that would appreciate your help, you just didn't find them yet.

1 comments

> There is a random person in Nebraska that would appreciate your help, you just didn't find them yet.

To add to that: it's also possible that they'll appreciate the help when they see it -- but they're out doing shopping for their family / at work / taking some time for themselves at the moment.

Estimating time to complete FOSS contributions can be really tricky because the social considerations are less predictable (generally) than in a workplace environment.

(I say this all as someone who has offered patches, badgered people for attention, and then later felt bad about doing so)