top | item 45331490

(no title)

henrebotha | 5 months ago

Hey don't hate on us humans who genuinely do open random PRs to random projects to fix typos. https://github.com/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Ahenrebotha+archi...

discuss

order

Dilettante_|5 months ago

Thank you for your service o7

treesknees|5 months ago

I’d love to know what your genuine motivation is. Is it a desire to genuinely improve projects? Because I’ve always had the impression that people who do this just want to boost their PR counts and GitHub activity numbers.

basscomm|5 months ago

Not everyone is a developer. Finding and fixing typos benefits everyone and allows nontechnical people to participate in the projects to improve the software they use, even if they can't contribute code.

henrebotha|5 months ago

Genuinely, I am trying to improve things. Making documentation more readable has a real cascading positive effect. Of course, most of these PRs are tiny — just a word or two — but that means it takes me almost no time to submit them, so the ROI is still positive.

One of the most enraging things to me is when a text search of documentation fails because the word I'm searching for has been misspelled in a key place. That's one of the things I'm trying to solve for.

I'm also just a stickler for good style. It bums me out when people misuse heading levels. Heading level is not a font size markup!

Of course doing this does generate activity on my GH, but I think all of us have probably moved on from caring much about the optics of little green squares.

Also like someone else said, it's just fun. I like typing and making Git do a thing and using my nice keyboard.

LandR|5 months ago

There's been a couple of projects with typos, that I wanted to fix but didn't for exactly the reason above!

Didn't want to be seen as just padding my github.

krageon|5 months ago

I used to do this when I had more free time and I did it because I just enjoy doing it. When I write it down like this I realise it sounds kind of obvious, but here we are

cgh|5 months ago

I once submitted a typo fix, among other things, to XFree86 way back when. Talk about love of the game, good grief.

jbd0|5 months ago

> PR counts and GitHub activity numbers.

This used to mean something, but I don't think it does anymore.