Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sarciszewski 4255 days ago
In a word: Humility.

The maintainers of LogStash, for example, have a philosophy that "If our users are confused, it is a bug. It is not that they are stupid."

Another good example is PHPUnit, whose maintainer unarguably has a much higher prestige in the PHP developer community than I do, yet responded to trolling by implementing the change I suggested and taking the time to hash and PGP sign all of the past releases.

https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/issues/1334

The CodeIgniter maintainers responded to my gripes about their CI_Encrypt library by researching and writing a brand new library to fulfill that role.

And of course, we have some good bad examples.

OpenCart:

https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1534

https://github.com/opencart/opencart/pull/1594

Mojolicious:

https://github.com/kraih/mojo/issues/656

Etcetera. Humble lead developers are less caustic and create less barriers for entry. This encourages people to contribute and allows a community to flourish.