this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Programming
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What can members of the community who can't code help with?
Project management. See for instance this talk: https://youtu.be/u3PJaiSpbmc?si=FbQGTfx4nERCb0R-
Can't or don't want to?
I got into a project starting out with translations. Then community support. Then wrote a web interface to the desktop/server application. Then got into the project itself.
Many projects have a contributing document or page with pointers. In general, being part of the community, providing information or support, improving documentation, or the bug tracker (reproduction, labeling, discussing/guiding), translating.
What can be done and what makes sense varies a lot depending on project size and popularity too.
Documentation, bug triage and many other non technical tasks
If you're an artist, there's no shortage of potential open source work. Most FOSS apps have an ugly af GUI.
Either making better assets or better overall design would work.
And so many FOSS apps want nothing to do with good UIs and will be really mean to designers trying to help.
Depends on your skills. Documentation is always useful. If you have language skills, translation of documentation or helping create language packs/translations.
That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure if I thought about it, I could come up with more.
Good advice. I want to add the option to offer money or hardware support. Writing helpful Bug Reports is also a good, especially if you really care with testing. Maybe even do Testing of software and functionality, Beta Tester with reports. Less technical would be designing logos or buttons or any graphical activity for documentation and websites, or for the application itself.
Documentation and Bug Reports are probably the top way to help if you can't code.
If not code or documentation contributions, then well-written bug reports. Seriously, the quality of bug reports sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. And I don't necessarily mean a full back-trace attached -- and please, if you ever send a back-trace, copy-and-paste the text, never a screenshot -- but just details like: system details, OS, version, step-by-step instructions to reproduce that a non-coder could also understand, plus what you expected to happen versus what actually happened.
This stuff (usually) comes naturally to programmers and engineers, but users don't necessarily see things this way. I sometimes think bug reports need to adopt a "so tell me what happened?" approach, where reporters are encouraged to describe free-form what they think of the software, then providing the specific details that developers need. That at least would collect all the relevant details, plus extra details that no developers thought to ask.
Even just having folks that help gather and distill details from user reporters on a forum is easing a burden off of developers, and that effort should be welcomed by any competently-organized project. Many projects already have a template for reports, although it often gets mistaken for boilerplate. Helping reports recognize that they need to fill in all the details is a useful activity that isn't code or docs.
The problem I have with bug reports for things like docker containers (I will just use that example for now) is again documentation... I get that most people make really bad "it broke, fix it now" kind of reports with no detail, but unless you actually dig into and know the code, there is often almost no debugging documentation (github issue templates help with that when the devs make one)
Where are the logs? If you refuse to use the docker standard of pushing logs through the log api, don't respect the LOG_LEVEL environment variable, errors are non-descriptive, and don't provide documentation to where your logs are stored, how the hell can you expect users to provide relevant logs??
I have run into dozens of pretty big projects that fail with 0 log output and there is 0 log documentation and then the dev auto closes the issue because "not enough logs to help." The only way to find the logs is to find an old issue where the dev has laid out where the relevant logs are, like WTF? No I am not going to spend an hour looking in every single part of the undocumented directory structure to see if there happen to be logs in there. Use the standard, document your log locations and what they log (no 3ch9qjV7.log is not descriptive enough), or don't complain about not being able to help without logs.
I think, this may be one of the rare cases where use of LLMs may be reasonable. Help user structure their report, then call for a human
Thanks! I will look into joining.