Adventures in Engineering

Give contributing a go

For the first time in 12+ months I made a code contribution to open source and it feels awesome! I’m delighted to say homebrew now includes PHP 7.1 (less than 48 hours after release).

A lot of hard work goes into FOSS and the communities around it; and most of my time has been community centric and not code. In part its because I’m busy on the community side and partly a sense of cautious sense of ‘someone else would be better at making that contribution’.

Friday however, brought around the stable release of PHP 7.1 (hi 5 to the PHP7.1 RM’s!). I decided to admit my lack of knowledge, and figure out how to help get PHP 7.1 stable into homebrew for everyone.

Most of the leg work had already been done (so I can’t claim any of that credit). Luckily, it turns out that bumping the minor version is simply a case of:

  • bumping the src hash
  • bumping the version reference/names
  • and (I learned later) bumping the revision so bottle-bot does a re-build!

See here’s the thing.

Asking for help, and admitting I didn’t know something was the hardest part of the contribution!

This is a short post.

Take the opportunity to ask for guidance, make a small contribution, and help keep FOSS projects awesome.

And a very big thank you to Jan and Andreas for showing a new contributor the ropes. You made contributing a delightful experience!

developerjack