I’ve been in open source long enough to have been on both sides of the question thing.
When is the good time to ask? And where? Publicly? I can’t do it publicly. It’s such a basic question; everyone will know I’m stupid. This person seems nice enough, I’ll ask them in their DM.
Hi, {NAME}.
…12 hours later…
How are you?
…7 hours later…
I’ve been reading the team’s chat for a few weeks now and was thinking of joining. I have experience in {A COMPLETE WORK EXPERIENCE} but I’m new to this and need a little help. I know you are busy but I was wondering if I could ask you a question when you have a time?
Please, stop. You already asked two questions without asking anything. This is not a business call; we don’t do small talk in DMs. Concerned about my availability? Then don’t waste it by asking me how I am. No one cares. If you do, you shouldn’t.
“When I have time…” When that happens, I’ll read your messages. There better be something worth that time. But don’t manage my time for me. That’s my job, not yours. Your job is to ask the question.
So, you finally spill it. And I give you the link in the handbook where all of that is explained. Now you feel even worse. Because it was in the handbook all this time, and you didn’t read it. You just asked the stupid question that had the answer, and your inability to find it was a burden.
Wrong!
That answer ended up in the handbook because it’s the most common frequently asked question by new people, and I’m too lazy to repeat myself. You did the most logical thing in your position. And even if I wrote it yesterday, it’s probably obsolete by now. That’s why I need you: to read it, apply it, get stuck and frustrated, ask more questions, and get that answer up to date. Then we move on to the next most common frequently asked question.
That’s how you move an open source project forward.
But now that you’ve got the link as your answer, you’re even more afraid to ask another question. So you read what you can find, make your own conclusions, start contributing to the low-priority tasks and make a couple of mistakes. You get lost and don’t know how to proceed, but there’s no one to show you the way, because you showed no one what you did.
I get it. You want to be polite and considerate, you don’t want to be on the way. You don’t want to be a burden. And you try so hard that your effort not to become a burden IS becoming a burden. I don’t see you being interested in learning how to contribute properly. All I see is you keep doing things wrong, like you don’t give a damn about anything this team built in the past decade or so.
Just ask the question.
I can’t read minds and know what you don’t know, especially in a written asynchronous communication, which we, as humanity, still have no clue how to handle. I’m not here to walk on eggshells around your insecurities. I’m here to teach you everything I’ve learned so far.
If there is one single responsibility for a contributor in an open source project, it is to enable others to replace them.
Let me enable you to replace me and ask that question.