Depends how familiar I am with what I'm doing. For something like a simple React component, I don't need to look up syntax. I've done it a million times so that's committed to memory. But, let's say, Rust... I'm just really starting out with it and have to go to the docs to see how to do even simple things. I'd also add, sometimes my brain just refuses to work with me. Example: I was super tired and trying to filter an array. I tried doing .filter ({ name : - 1 }); instead of: .filter(node => node.name - payload.name); It really just depends. But it's super normal. (Though, I don't know how you define "experienced programmer" so my opinions may not be applicable)

I just started my OSS journey but here are some top reasons for me personally: It's fun! I mean, working on projects in private is fun too, but publicly having that code available (especially for someone who works from home) makes me feel more involved with people. Job opportunities. I just started and haven't received any job opportunities but I think I'm raising my chances! (Especially because I have no job, haha) Learning from the community. This is probably my favorite aspect of OSS. I don't have to do things alone. I can seek help and guidance from other people. (To help this even more, I decided to build OSS Buddy, which will be released soon.) Giving back to the community. I don't have the finances to donate to open source but I do have time. I feel like I'm not just a "consumer" of open source but rather a consumer and provider! Other small things, like getting quick fixes in for something I rely on in one of my projects or helping to add new features that I would like to see shipped! To not have to rely on only myself. This means more bug fixes and feature requests shipping!

Context: I left a job a couple of months ago. This company was super disorganized and every day, I heard everyone complaining about how something broke in production. I stayed quiet for a couple of weeks but this continued on. Finally, I asked several people if I could write some tests, even if they were just for crucial parts of the applications we were building. Weird Advice: One of the developers responded that he didn't recommend writing tests because there was a good possibility they would fail. I was a junior in this position and he was kind of arrogant so I tried to push the issue in a lighter manner by explaining all of the benefits. He still kept telling me no say I finally explained to him what writing tests really meant and how failing tests show us where/how/why/etc things broke so we can fix them much faster. He just ignored me from that point on, and then I left a few weeks later.

Material Palenight (sometimes high contrast if I'm having a harder time seeing)

Nice to meet you :-)

Please ignore the UI for Graphkit Console... I did this in a very ad-hoc way, where I wrote most of the source code in about a day or two. It's extremely buggy and initializes with some data. Anyways, it'll be stable by February 1st!

Hey everyone! I'm Clayton. I've been programming for ~3 years and lately been working a lot in open source. I am spending a lot of time learning Rust, was writing Go for a bit, and of course, JavaScript/TypeScript across the stack. Always love meeting up with other devs so if anyone's in the Tampa Bay (Florida) area, let me know and I'll buy you a coffee! In case you'd like to check out my recent projects, the main ones are: Graphkit This is an open source project that helps create really robust GraphQL APIs. There's a web GUI (similar to the old Graphcool Console, but full GraphQL support), a CLI (not written yet), a code generation library (somewhat written), and other tools. I forked GraphiQL to add some support for broader use cases and would like to write "official" implementation libraries for each language. (*Warning: Console is not working properly. I had to push to git because my computer's being wonky but that triggered a deploy to Netlify. Oh well.) https://github.com/graphkit https://console.graphkit.co OSS Buddy It's just a landing page at the moment. Finishing up a few things & then working on chat features. Basically, this is a super simple web app to connect with open source devs willing to help you either get started in open source or even if you're a veteran, mentor you with an existing project(s) to help get you up to speed. (You can do this yourself but it's slower and, besides, who doesn't want a buddy?) https://ossbuddy.com

Out of curiosity, I saw a project that basically enables users to file issues and receive support if they pay for it. I don't remember all the ins-and-outs (don't even remember the name of the project) but do you think if we, as an industry, promoted this type of behavior across the board, would see OSS become more stabilized? For example, having to pay for support for 50 libs (even at $5 per month) will get out of hand but if we collectively donated like $5 per month and then a committee/org oversaw funds going to actively maintained projects, that would be more feasible for everyone. I don't know if you'd be willing to comment since this AMA is finished but would be interested in this type of discussion. Collectively, we could get a lot more done (I assert, at least) instead of donating to individual projects (but, not replacing those financial contributions/donations either).

Haven't heard of Blazor! Glad I asked this question. Looks like a cool project. (Though, I don't write C# but maybe one day I'll have a use-case for it) Thanks for taking the time to answer both of my questions!

VS Code but learning vim - Eventually, I'd like to work on a fork of Left to support programming with it. It's just so beautiful and without all the bloat. Basically, it's just a text editor. No plugins/extensions/linters/etc. I'd love to get in the habit of running scripts to handle those fixes and really get in the habit of not relying on tooling so much.