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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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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Your contributions are good as usual.
End of conversation
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