Engineering

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                                                 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Most of My Pull Requests Started as an Annoyance

There’s a popular way to do open source: pick high-visibility projects, choose issues strategically, build a narrative. I don’t do it that way. I use a piece of software, something about it bugs me, I go and read why, and sometimes the why is fixable. That approach has a good merge rate for small things and a bad one for anything ambitious. Here’s an honest tally from three projects. qBittorrent: six merged, several closed I use qBittorrent on a Mac, and the macOS build had small, visible rough edges. Those fixes merged: text cut off in the About dialog, dark corner artifacts on line edits, delete shortcuts that didn’t match platform conventions, invisible toolbar spacers replaced with visible separators, overlapping text in the priority editor, a background mismatch in the Add New Torrent dialog. ...

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
                                                                                                                                    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The Best Way to Learn a Codebase Is to Break Someone Else's

I started sending pull requests to open-source projects in March 2026, mostly to tools I use every day. At the time of writing that’s 170 merged, across Python, C++, Rust, Go and shell. (The full list is generated from GitHub, so it can’t flatter me.) I learned more from the review threads than from the code I wrote. Most of what I learned came from maintainers telling me, politely, that I’d missed something about their project that nobody could have told me in advance. ...