Fun Fridays

At work we have this concept of “Fun Fridays” - every other Friday we get to work on whatever we want. It’s a plus if it’s work related, but that’s not required. This is nothing new, Google has had it for years.

So, what do you do on a Fun Friday? Very often it seems like stuff that’s in category of “stuff I want to do with our product/project that never gets prioritized” or maybe “I really wonder if this works?”.

But I’ve been wanting to do something else for quite a while. I’m a mender, so greenfield work is not so attractive to me. I need some scaffolding to be present for me to work, and I really like hunting bugs and rewriting old code. So how can I relate this to our Fun Fridays?

Well, I can contribute to OSS.

And that’s just what happened yesterday.

Earlier this week @bbatsov, the master brewer of CIDER tweeted:

If you want to get involved in CIDER's development a good place to start would be a "low hanging fruit" issue https://t.co/sa1ONLGZyh

— Bozhidar Batsov (@bbatsov) April 8, 2015

which resulted in this PR

So here’s the deal:

If you’re maintaining an OSS related to Clojure, and want a part of my 10% time, I’d be more than happy working on the most mundane tasks. I don’t expect much, but for me to finish something within the day, I do need issues that are “ready for work”. Like the issue above, fixing doc-errors for CIDER is pretty straight forward and was very easy to start working on.

I’m aware that making issues “ready for work” for someone unfamiliar with the project is a lot of work, in fact almost as much as fixing the issue yourself, but consider it an investment for the future.