[jcims]

> But i feel like it was always true that patches from the internet at large were largely more trouble then they were worth most of the time.

Oh god, I needed to add a feature to an open source project (kind of a freemium project) about fifteen years ago. I had no experience with professional software development nor did I have any understanding of pull requests. I sent one over after explaining what I was trying to do and that I thought it would be a good feature for the project.

Now they probably shouldn’t have just blindly merged it, but they did, and it really made a mess.

Learned a valuable lesson that day haha.

[em-bee]

curious, what happened, and what did you learn?

if they merge something blindly, then it's really on them if it makes a mess.

[jcims]

If I recall correctly I sent the PR as just a way to ship a blob of code, intending to use it to demo a specific UI feature that I wanted them to look at.

Meanwhile I was tinkering with the schema in the database and messing about deep in the guts of the software. I didn't really know how to separate the two so I just shipped the whole PR thinking they would just run it on the side to demo the thing I was talking to them about.

Well they just deployed it to their production instance and fucked everything up on their end.

I recall being horrified when I was tinkering with their customer-facing instance and seeing evidence of the other work I was doing. I immediately emailed them and said whoa whoa whoa. xD

Found the email that I sent to the founder, from 2014:

>It looked like <redacted> may have got a few surprises in the code she merged from the 2.1M1br branch yesterday. I've just been committing basically all the tinkering i do to that branch, so it may have a few landmines in it.

>Hope i didn't create any headaches for anyone. Sorry!

[bawolff]

I mean, that sounds more like you were setup to fail.