I Fix Open Source Bugs By Day and Create New Ones By Night

My journey as an open source contributor is filled with irony. During business hours, I'm methodically fixing bugs in Wagtail and Plone, writing detailed documentation, and ensuring my code passes all tests. After hours, my personal projects look like they were coded by a caffeinated squirrel who just discovered programming.

Contributing to established open source projects has been both humbling and enlightening. There's nothing quite like the experience of spending hours crafting what you believe is the perfect pull request, only to have a maintainer kindly explain that you've fundamentally misunderstood how computers work.

Here are some revelations from my open source adventures:

1. Documentation is simultaneously the most important and most neglected aspect of software - I've spent entire days trying to understand undocumented functions that probably took 15 minutes to write. Then I write detailed documentation that future developers will also ignore.

2. Code review comments are an emotional rollercoaster - "This looks great!" (euphoria) → "Just a few small changes needed" (mild anxiety) → "Please completely rethink your approach" (existential crisis).

3. Open source maintainers are the unsung heroes of tech - These brave souls somehow maintain their sanity while fielding questions from people who clearly haven't read the documentation, dealing with drive-by PRs that break everything, and politely explaining why they won't implement a feature that would completely change the project's purpose.

The most fascinating aspect of contributing to projects like Wagtail and Plone is witnessing how large-scale collaboration actually works. Modern software is too complex for any one person to fully understand, yet somehow, diverse groups of strangers across time zones manage to build cohesive products together.

My contributions to these projects have taught me that good code isn't about clever tricks—it's about readability, maintainability, and thinking about the next developer who will inherit your work. Unfortunately, this wisdom evaporates the moment I work on personal projects, where my commit messages devolve from "Refactor authentication middleware for improved security" to "IT WORKS DON'T TOUCH."

In conclusion, open source contribution is like having a split personality: a professional, disciplined coder in public repositories, and a chaotic code wizard in private ones. If you ever look at my GitHub activity and wonder how the same person who fixed that elegant bug in Wagtail also created a personal project with a function named "magic_fix_dont_delete()," now you know. We contain multitudes.