I'm trying to model my participation in TC39 based on what I've been reading about maintainers of open-source projects, but having a hard time. When people file a bug, asking the reporter to make a PR can be sort of painful! But I am really happy with many recent contributions.
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Believe it or not, grunt work like "update the spec to use ? instead of ReturnIfAbrupt" is the kind of work that is highly interesting to new contributors:
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1. The new contributor gets satisfaction from adding value to the project, which they measure by how much the maintainers seem enthusiastic about getting the work done.
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2. This kind of work is a good fit for detailed but rote instructions. The group of people working on it can help each other to get it right, and even improve the detailed instructions.
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Counterintuitively, they are more likely to get it right given good instructions than one or two overloaded maintainers trying to burn through a huge slog like this, and they ask good questions when the instructions aren't detailed enough.
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3. Maintainers underestimate the work of just getting the "contributing environment" set up: tooling, GitHub workflow, CI, learning syntactic conventions, etc "Trivial" tasks still have all of those requirements, but have a quicker payoff to get something accepted.
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For a new contributor, getting *anything* accepted is the best feeling in the world, and increasing the rate of success to "first accepted patch" is a huge input into the longer pipeline of more thorny contributions.
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4. New contributors notice problems in tooling that people were "getting by" with, and want to fix them. Often, external contributors are in a better position to fix tooling or workflow issues than the maintainers, because of knowledge that comes from their coding experience.
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5. There is often more work needed on "un-specialized" aspects of a project than the time needed for the specialized part. Even in a spec, GitHub workflow, maintaining tooling, ops (hosting the latest version of the spec), etc take a lot of time.
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Increasing the pool of contributors who have skills and time to work on that kind of stuff unburdens the existing maintainers.
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And people love roles like "keeping the spec up and up to date". They feel like they're contributing to something important, even though they aren't (yet) equipped to write spec text.
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The same holds true with things like helping with explainers, writing Babel plugins, writing spec tests, etc. These are all things that a much wider group of people can do, and things that people are enthusiastic about doing.
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Done for now

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