Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 22: Health insurance and contributing to open source projects

Episode Date: August 15, 2016

In episode 21, Jamison and Dave answer these questions: What’s up with all this health insurance jargon? How do I get started contributing to open source?

You can write amazing code. You can learn patterns and frameworks, but that won't help you know how to deal with a boss who's a huge jerk. For that, you need soft skills. soft skills engineering it takes more than great code to be a great engineer this is the soft skills engineering podcast i'm your host dave smith and on the guitar and vocals jameson dance your musical guest welcome how are you doing jameson i'm doing great uh i'm i'm pumped now because i just performed and that always gets the blood flowing you know i'm ready to go take on the world oh i have one announcement before we start too uh so i have um struck out on my own as an independent

consultant i am looking to help teams and and clients build good software build good teams uh i'm kind of a back-end front-end generalist with an emphasis in javascript on the technical side and then i i can do a bunch of other stuff besides that too so if you are interested in working with me i would love to hear from you um you can probably the best way is just tweet at me or dm me i'm at jurgison on twitter and uh that's the end of my shameless self-promotion there you go so javascript on the technical side and soft on the soft skills soft on the soft side yep or hard on the soft skills i don't know good on the soft side and the word side he words good and codes good yes well uh james and i think we have a story from a listener about getting fired we do

keep rolling in i love that they keep rolling in i hope that this keeps happening because these are these are great for lots of reasons so i will uh i will interpret this one i will sometimes read it and sometimes summarize stuff so my second job out of college had me doing quality assurance work for a company that promised upward mobility into a full developer position as an aside this is a thing i hear a lot that you move from qa to development and i hear very uh mixed results about it actually happening sometimes it does sometimes it does not about 11 months in we did our weekly monday stand-up meeting and i spoke about some plans we had three months out tuesday afternoon i got the we need to talk talk from my manager who dropped the company no longer needs

your services before immediately piecing out and letting hr finish the process oh yeah that's when the hr person steps in the room yeah nothing good happens after that i was a huge shock because i'd been working hard and never heard anything negative from my manager it was also a big hit to my ego and self-confidence because i kept asking myself if there was anything i could have done differently that is very understandable and also very common among all the stories i think yep so far a few weeks later i spoke with a senior programmer still there who said several other employees had been fired in the weeks and repeated several times it wasn't my fault which i really needed to hear at the time our only guess was that there was some real shady financing situations uh going on

at upper management um there you go yeah so so shady financing i don't know if it had to be like shady or malicious but it could have just been they were running out of money and they needed to cut costs yeah um it definitely sounds like i mean no one said you did a bad job and you got fired and the fact that other people were laid off that definitely feels like a cost-cutting thing which sucks to go through but but it's a little bit better for your ego yeah your ego can heal faster if it was budget yeah i've i've been in a place where uh we went through a cost cutting like that and i was not let go but several of my friends were and uh it was super sad i mean the people that were still there were sad the people

that were gone were sad and they asked themselves those same questions like why me what did i do and there's uh there's usually a long chain of events leading up to that that have little to do with your individual performance on the job i think when it comes to self-confidence it's actually better if the whole company goes out that's so true yeah yeah not that it's better for the people, but at least self-confidence wise. Well, the best thing for your self-confidence is if you quit and then the whole company goes out. Later suckers. Yeah. And then you can say, see, I knew you couldn't do it without me. Yeah. Anonymous. Thank you for your story. I appreciate that. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. All right. Do we have some questions today?

We sure do. Do you want to do the first one? Sure. This first question is titled, how to health insurance my employer offers health insurance as a benefit but the information is so full of jargon that i can't figure out what's a good option for me what does all this stuff mean oh prepare yourself that's what it means so first off i think you and i both wanted to say this we only know stuff about the u.s health care system um and then we just hear like these glorious legends of the european and canadian systems i hear i hear both glorious legends and uh whatever the opposite of glorious legend is yeah depending on people's political depends on whether you are asking on facebook or twitter uh so this is all very specific to the u.s and it's likely to be

very different outside of your country um and also the fact that you're getting it through your employer is different from lots of people who are um insuring themselves i'm actually going through this right now as as part of starting up my company uh getting insurance for myself and i can confirm that it's the worst it is the worst it's it's very nightmarish i was talking to dave earlier about this novel called the trial by kafka um and this this is the like definition of kafka-esque just you're a part of this huge machine like an unfeeling bureaucracy that's trying to grind you up and at the same time doesn't care about you it's like this weird combination of of being utterly uh utterly insignificant and also they they will charge

you huge sums of money if you get it wrong yeah so everything's fine that's what that's what i mean to say everything is fine everything is fine nothing will go wrong also on disclaimer land we should probably say it is probably a felony for us to give health insurance advice i'm just i'm just guessing yeah this is not legal advice or illegal advice it's probably illegal advice it's entertainment this is just entertainment for entertainment purposes only yeah if you just want to kick back and relax and listen to some people chat about health care you've come to the right podcast and just don't do anything they say yeah uh do you want us to talk about the marketplace or do you want to stick purely to kind of stuff that will apply if your employer

is providing all the benefits let's go with employer benefits employer health insurance benefits okay i mean the first thing is um your employer can provide you a plan but that doesn't necessarily mean they pay the premiums so they they can have some wait a minute wait a minute what is a premium come on a premium yeah uh that's what you pay to get insurance you pay a monthly chunk of money to the insurance company and then they guarantee you some kind of services basically so that's like your fee that's the fee you give the insurance company it doesn't do anything besides buy the insurance yep and and your company might pay that they might not they might pay some chunk of it and then offer a range of plans some of which are more expensive than

then the amount that they pay and you pay the difference so kind of figuring out that is the first step um there seems to be a relationship between the size of the company and the amount of the premium that the company will pay for example uh well actually you know what i'm gonna have to backpedal on that i've seen tiny companies pay the whole premium i've seen giant companies do like a 50 50 thing where the employee pays half and the employer pays half uh and then i've seen giant companies pay more i don't think i've ever seen a giant company pay the whole premium yeah i've uh this is total hearsay but someone told me that that giant companies they generally have their own insurance plan where they just yeah when you pay the premium you're actually just

paying it to the company yeah they i think that's your own employer and self-insured right yeah and then and then if you have health expenses the company pays them but they they have all this money saved up supposedly from the premiums you pay. Yeah. I've seen that too. So it's like they actually hire a company to administer this pool of money. It's a giant fund that all the employees are putting money into. I guess that doesn't affect you that much though. Not really. You can't tell the difference. Yeah. Um, uh, maybe the second most important thing is figure out your health situation. If you have very low healthcare needs, if you don't really see a doctor and it's not cause you're stubborn and lazy, it's actually cause you don't need to see

a doctor uh you have very different health care needs than someone who maybe has some kind of chronic condition or takes regular medication or has regular appointments with specialists so usually there's a range of plans some of which have low premiums but if you need to use them it will cost you more money out of pocket uh or other plans who have higher premiums but more is covered um and and if you're very healthy a low premium that's always a gamble right because if you get in a horrible accident and you have these giant expenses then that'll usually cost you more but but if that doesn't happen then you'll save money if you pick a low premium plan insurance is basically gambling with the future it totally is yep yeah but it's like it's like

reverse gambling you're like saying i'm gonna put a bunch of money in just in case you know It's not like you win if you get in an accident. No, I mean, you can say that. And then if your insurance plan is high deductible, there's some number. Sorry, we should probably talk about a deductible. Do you want to define that? Sure, I'm going to give it a shot. So the deductible.

Remember, illegal advice. Yes, this is illegal. the deductible is an amount of money that you must spend usually in a calendar year before insurance benefits will start to kick in and pay for stuff so for example if you have a two thousand dollar deductible plan you will have to spend two thousand bucks before insurance will start to cover anything on your health needs and that's in addition to your premiums your premiums don't count that's like going and getting medication or paying a hospital bill or something exactly so if i have a ten thousand dollar hospital bill and my insurance says i cover ninety percent of

all your health care needs well that's only true on the eight thousand dollars that you spend above the two thousand dollars so you'll end up spending two thousand dollars plus i'm gonna do math in public seven hundred and twenty dollars seems like remaining eight thousand um for that ten thousand dollar bill so that ten thousand dollar bill if you had no other expenses that year would end up costing you two thousand seven hundred twenty dollars math it checks out okay because i trust you math is based on trust really math is a feeling more than anything else uh yeah so if your plan is high deductible you can google the the the cutoff but if it's a high enough deductible you have access to something called a health savings account and this is uh

it's a way for you to put away money tax-free that can later be used to pay for health care expenses i don't think it pays for premiums i think you can only use it to pay for like doctor's visits and stuff like that i think you can use it for premiums on for future health plans but that's kind of in the esoteric realm that's super illegal what he just said am i going to jail the other cool thing about hsas is you can invest them uh in in like index funds or stock markets really i haven't done that yeah and and then uh so eventually there's a there's a point sometime it's some age i don't know 60 65 where if you have money left in there you can take it out tax-free so then it's basically just like a tax-free investment account

So if you are healthy and you have access to savings, an HSA is a great way to avoid paying taxes on the money that you spend on health care if you end up needing it. And if you don't end up needing it, it's a really great way to save for retirement because you can get returns on your investment and then you take it out without having to pay taxes on it ever, both when you put it in and take it out. The other benefit to an HSA is that many times your employer will actually contribute money into the HSA for you. Not all employers do this, but, and sometimes it's not well documented on the insurance information that you get from HR when you start a new job. So always ask that question. I have found that at every company I've looked at that has an HSA, I have to ask. They don't usually volunteer that. And I don't think it's malicious. I just think it's just, it's a weird uh responsibility because the insurance company doesn't know or care whether

the employer puts money in your hsa and so it has to come from like a different source of documentation from like your actual benefits people at your company yeah and and it's it's untaxed right it's tax-free so yeah it's great um it can make your taxes slightly more difficult to do as i have found where i've actually had to file an amended return twice because a certain unnamed tax preparation application screwed it up but anyway we can't say the name because that would be more illegal it rhymes with furbo tax so i'm not gonna say the name oh furby tax yeah that that's like a toy tax preparation program combo right that's right uh so yeah again hsas are um if your employer contributes it can help make the difference

between uh if a plan is worth it or not for you um it can but if you're super healthy they're kind of a no-brainer to me if you're not then you especially if your employer contributes gotta look at it i guess um one more thing i would say is uh benefits are i think a hugely undervalued part of total compensation for a job and i i didn't really i had heard it but i didn't feel it in my gut until i quit my job i was paying for all my own benefits it's it's easy for your employer to spend 30 grand a year on benefits for you health and and 401k and hsa contributions and stuff uh yep so that's a i think an important thing to look at when you're applying for jobs is the benefit could like you could say this person will pay me 10 grand more

in salary but if the benefits are way worse then that could end up costing you more money i've had that happen actually that very scenario um where i went to interview this is like 10 years ago and um it was like a ten thousand dollar raise and i was like sweet and then i looked at the insurance i'm like this is gonna cost me ten thousand bucks a year a year yeah it was terrible uh i mean i could talk about this forever our listeners probably don't want to hear me talk about health insurance forever are there any other high points you think we should hit dave what the crap is a copay is that the same thing as a premium the copay is not the premium so usually when you go to a doctor just your normal family doctor um they charge a certain amount of

money for your visit but the insurance will pick up everything but the copay and that's usually like 25 or 50 dollars it's usually some like nice round number yes it's a fixed dollar amount it's not a percentage yeah so so it basically means if you go to the doctor you pay the copay and everything else just goes to your insurance and this is like go ahead this is like if you're sick you have a cold you want to go to the doctor maybe get some antibiotics or something you pay a copay and usually there's a copay for the doctor and there's also a separate copay for things like the emergency room that's like 10 times the cost yeah that depends on plans yeah some plans don't have that but that's what a co-pay is so i don't i really don't understand why it's called a co-pay

um because you both pay yeah together then why like you both pay for everything i do yeah that's true i never got it but yeah and and some plans uh they won't offer the co-pay until you meet your deductible and some really yeah oh yeah some plans um they the co-pay is the same no matter where you are in your deductible thing all right let's talk in network and out of network like is that like internet and out for net uh sure i have no witty remark to accompany that besides so in network out of network so apparently health insurance providers have negotiated deals it's basically price gouging is near as like like that's the summary of everything with insurance It's basically someone is getting a lot of money somehow, and it's not you.

They have said, if you go to this doctor, we will cover X percent of your bill. But if you go to this other doctor, we will cover a lower percent or zero percent of your bill. And one time, I'm just going to tell you a story that makes me so frustrated. We went and looked up a doctor on our health insurance website, because that's how you find out if they're in network. and then i went to the facility where this doctor where their office is where they were practicing and i got my service and then later i got a bill and from the insurance company saying this doctor is out of network and i said no she's not she's right here on your list and they said oh yeah she's on the list but that building she was in that day is not i was like are you freaking

kidding me yeah usually usually doctors work at multiple different places and often you're right the deals are with the the facilities not not the individual doctors the search stuff for that is just garbage it's yeah it's so bad so that's in network versus out of network and on an hsa it usually doesn't matter that much but i think they have separate deductibles for in network and out of network so like you might have a five thousand dollar deductible for in network and a separate ten thousand dollar deductible for out of network and so depending on what kind of facility you go to for the different service you might actually be tallying up two deductibles in the calendar year yeah um i'm about out of stuff i know we wanted to talk about employer specific things but one

thing i would say about the non-employer stuff the open marketplace stuff is in in my experience generally the plans are not as good as what i've received through employers they cost me more money and they cover less for that amount of money really i think that varies widely on your location but at least where i am the plans aren't very good uh so be be grateful for your employer providing you insurance so this might be a little too philosophical but isn't it weird that our employers provide insurance it's so weird yeah it's bizarre it really locks you into a job yeah you know changing jobs one of the hardest parts is figuring out the new health insurance especially if you use your insurance if you have relationships with doctors and then you you get a

different job and they're not covered then you have to decide do i want to pay the extra fee or do i just shake up everything and get new doctors and yeah it really uh it makes the labor market less liquid is this the the smart words i'm going to use to describe it yeah yeah yeah and that's kind of i mean that's kind of an argument for consulting and that's part of my attraction to it is i decide everything yeah like it everything is transparent to me all the costs are up front yeah and i i work for a company and do a service for them and they pay me for the service and there's not this weird paternal relationship where like we will provide care for your family like no i i do that you just pay me the money you would have spent on that

and i will spend it myself actually most you know when i think about that i've often thought i wish my company would just give me the money that they would spend on health insurance for me but now that you mentioned that all the plans are crappier and more expensive maybe not at least in utah they are uh there we're getting more philosophical but there's something about like being given a gift versus money that makes you feel good so maybe that's part of it it engenders more goodwill towards the company because they're providing something for you that even though it correlates with money it isn't really money and yeah i don't know there's all kind it's it's weird also you don't get taxed on the money the company spends on your behalf

to buy you health insurance yeah so this is true that's all i that's all i can stomach talking about health insurance you should see your doctor about that copays deductibles networks oh there's an infinite amount of stuff we didn't even talk about but um one thing i would say is uh it's overwhelming at first it's definitely possible to understand it it just takes a lot of work so if if you need health care or you suspect you might need it in the future it's definitely worth time to to check if you're superhuman uh then you might be able to getaway just saying give me the cheap thing and i won't ever spend any money on it here's the good news i have had so many engineering friends who just really geeked out on comparing and window

shopping the different insurance plans and they'll discover all these little nooks and crannies in the in the plan and then bring them to light and it's just the best so good news is you're an engineer who if you're listening to this you probably are and uh you probably have peers who have done a lot of exploration at least that's been my experience more so than any other kind of person in any company the engineers seem to really dissect the stuff sure well should we uh get away from this as fast as possible run away question answered no deductible met yep back to legal territory all right uh i will read the next question this is from a listener named grant seltzer seltzer right yeah like the water yep yep that's the that's the person thanks how can i get

started contributing to open source projects all right good question open source popular topic much like health insurance yep we will probably not break any laws let's be honest we probably already have uh so first i would ask why do you want to contribute to open source there is this feeling i think in programming that it's kind of a moral thing like you are you are good if you contribute to open source and you are bad if you don't i think that's kind of garbage i think open source can have value and and not contributing can also have value so do you think there's like a feeling that you oh it's like this is how you give back as a programmer oh yeah there's some of that and some of it is like you're not cool unless you contribute to open source and all of

the cool people do contribute to open source and it's kind of like this weird click and uh open source is awesome and i'm so glad it exists i i have a problem when people feel pressured into doing it or they think they have to because that's what everyone cool does i think if you want to do it then then that's awesome but but i've talked to people that feel like i have to do this to get a job or like to be to be loved i just want to be loved yeah um yeah so so like your company uses it or you are excited about it or you know the people that run the project or um you you'd like it as a hobby like there are tons of valid reasons i would just say make sure you you have a reason beyond i want twitter followers or whatever i want to be considered

cool by the least cool group of people on the planet let's let's be honest if you really want to be considered cool you need to go take up smoking because everyone knows that cool kids smoke with a vape pen now is that oh yeah that's true you got it vape uh now we're illegal again dave give me give me some advice so uh i i actually only have contributed to open source projects out of necessity so like i'll be using a project as part of my work and i'll find a bug or a feature that i really want and i will submit a pull request to the project and i've done that maybe a dozen a dozen times or so in the last about five years um does that make me cool you're already cool oh i thought oh okay sorry i thought you were

saying you had to do open source to be cool but i guess i misunderstood oh well i was saying that but there's an exception for dave no okay you can't try to apply logic to my jokes sorry i actually haven't i haven't done too much open source um and in fact it seems like the people i know who do the most open source are actually employed full-time working on it has that been your experience that's definitely true for like linux kernel stuff and for i would say the more popular javascript frameworks especially uh i guess for rails too i mean the the big contributors are generally base camp employees uh but i think there are projects which are really are just works of love yeah oh there

definitely are we know about i know about several of them from people i know yeah but i would say it's evenly split but there are people that get paid to do it for for money so that's a great way to contribute go get hired at facebook and work on react or whatever google and work on angular um there you go i have similar experiences to you where i'm not an open source wizard uh it's not what i go home at night and do i have contributed it's generally been to scratch and itch or the other uh thing is if i'm just learning a project and i see there's like a weird bug or there's something confusing in the documentation uh that's kind of the extent of my contributions so you've done documentation contributions yeah cool i have do you think that's a pretty

good way to get started it's very low cost and it's also you avoid byte shedding right if there is a typo in the docs it's a pretty clear and easy merge and and lots of times um to do like a big complex feature that's kind of what people imagine is contributing to open source and i would say that's like the one percenter open source contributor style because it needs so much effort from the core team and and there's a lot of context you need to understand which takes a long time to build up but just to get started documentation bug fixes those are those are easy ways to get started that are generally accepted much more easily i think i agree in fact there's there's probably a ladder of ease of acceptance and ease of getting in and it probably

starts with documentation and then the next step up is probably ancillary stuff around a project like for example uh i could i submitted a pull request to the angular project a year or two ago to add a very small feature to their unit test framework so that i could test a certain kind of http request or something and it was like super easy no-brainer it got accepted um that's like one step up from documentation is like unit testing tools around the periphery of the project sure what do you think would be like the next easiest thing to do oh i don't know if i have a defined ladder in my head i mean uh like build stuff is always breaking every time new new software comes out or a new os comes out or something so and that's a lot of stuff you can

encounter on your own right like i tried to use it and it didn't work and then i fixed it now it does and here's what i changed yeah a lot of times that'll involve getting help from the project maintainers but then you can submit the request to actually get it incorporated in oh yeah point and that's a that's a larger point in that the maintainers love it when people do stuff for them uh it's it's such a relief when someone does a thing that is uncontroversial and just like a pure good like it was broken and now it is not broken even if you have to hold your hand through doing it yeah exactly like on the latest version of mac os here's a fix that makes it work and then boom it's like beautiful yeah i um go ahead i was gonna say that the next go you go ahead on the

build thing because i have the next tier i think no that's all that's it it's the build thing that's it so i think that another easy way to contribute is to find a project that is very like plug-in architecture centric because sometimes it's really hard to jump into the core of a project and there's so much you have to understand so much context but but a lot of these projects will have little plug-in architecture and you'll be able to say like i'm going to work on this plug-in like just maybe it's an integration with slack or something or you know something very narrow in scope and you don't have to worry about like 17 use cases with like esoteric requirements right you can just focus on this one little thing and so i've actually i contributed a plug-in to

an open source project about 10 years ago actually and it was great because i had this well-defined area that my code could work in and i knew i didn't have to worry about concerns from all over the globe instead i could just focus on my one thing yeah that was a nice that was nice and the the the people that run the project love that too because it it's kind of validation for them anything that's creating an ecosystem around their project just they they love to see that because it shows them people are using it and it makes it more viable and it's it's good marketing for them yeah that's awesome um can we skip a bunch of steps and say the last rung is creating your own open source project yeah yeah uh-huh uh no the last rung is creating an open source project

and then it becomes wildly popular and you can't possibly keep up with it anymore. Yeah, open source burnout is a real thing. One of my good friends is a maintainer of a, well, the creator and maintainer of a fairly large project and he lives a life I do not envy. Constant harassment from strangers

for free work from him is how I would summarize his nights and weekends. Oh, so sad. So be careful what you wish for. Open source fame is the monkey's paw of software. Oh, sweet metaphor. thank you what does that mean uh have you heard the monkey's paw story where it's it's like this i don't even know where it comes from but someone finds a monkey's paw it's got a certain number of

fingers each finger grants a wish but the wish is fulfilled in a way that you hate like if you wish to be rich like your whole family dies in a horrific accident and then the company that killed your family has to pay like death benefits or something oh okay yeah so it's all it's all like you get the thing you asked for and it is horrible okay and that's the monkey what a positive episode for me today i am full of just joy and light so does the monkey's pop pay your insurance deductible like yeah it it gets you this great plan that you really end up needing when all of your limbs just fall off all of a sudden oh boy yeah um so i think let's go back a little bit just let's go really tactical like how do i get started i think the number one step that you

almost definitely have to do in 99 of cases is create a github account like that's how you get started right i mean i i am hard pressed to think of an open source project these days that is not on github yeah probably some hipster project it's probably it's probably there but i don't know what it is either so github account and then number two i would say is focus on projects that you use i've heard several people say that they have a really hard time working on projects that they don't actually use including projects that they started which became popular and which they then stopped using for whatever reason oh yeah like they're like i don't have any way to do this so you really got to focus on things that you use yourself i've even had pull requests i submitted

to a project in the past and then i stopped using that project before the pull request got accepted and then a bunch of discussions happened on it and i'm like i don't really care you know it's just hard to really push it over the finish line yep so focus on what you use yeah i mean do you want to talk at all about starting your own open source project or do you do you want to save that for another day let's save that for another day okay that's a way uh that's a secret bonus episode you can unlock for giant piles of money cool so do we cover it you think yeah one more thing a lot of projects this is an area that has gotten a lot of attention recently and a lot of projects are putting special care into curating

lists of issues that are marked first timers only kind of so if you're if it's a first time you're contributing to open source they're they'll they'll put a lot of effort into documenting here's exactly what you need to do and and way more effort than it would have taken them just to fix it but they want people to get involved in the project and to enjoy it and hopefully that pays off with more contributors over the long run so it definitely helps them but it's a cool idea that uh there's there's more of a support system now for getting started than there used to be So often you can just look at a project you use, look for first timer issues or new contributor issues, and then you just do what it says in the issue. And it's pretty, pretty mechanical almost.

So, yeah, it kind of is. Actually, I have a funny story about that. So a mutual friend of ours has an open source project and he created a first timers only branch on the project. And then he made a failing unit test. And the task was make this test fail. and it was a pretty straightforward change or so it seemed and so he got someone who contributed to it and then i went and looked at the pull request and i'm ashamed to admit i bike shedded it i totally did i was like what about this game welcome to open source bam i felt bad but it

was like i don't even know why i bothered honestly i wasn't even a user of the project i just it's like this you know that there's like that part of your brain where you're like uh-oh there's a potential mistake here i can't let this go yeah you know that that part of the brain took over errors have snuck into the world and i will stick them out it was like four or five comments back and forth and i think it resulted finally in in the maintainer actually like reverting the first timers commit and replacing it i just i'm like i completely missed the point dave smith patron saint of open source contributions anyway i felt bad but at the same time the project was better off classic bike shed uh so maybe what i would take from that story

is uh it takes effort right and there might be obstacles technical or social or whatever and even or there might be obstacles like someone named dave even the great dave smith famed nice person and good human being uh might block you has inadvertently made someone's contribution more difficult and and that's just sorry i uh yeah you got it i people burn out from that kind of stuff they absolutely do and if i had read the c4 the code community construction contract or whatever beforehand i would have realized no no no if i care about this i would make another pull request that would come in after this one and that would actually address the issue rather than stymieing this thing and stopping it i should have just said yep merge that sucker and i'll

come in and make a new one yeah oh man that would have been better behavior we have a soapbox here and i'm going to use it so um be nice to people in open source issues uh especially people that are trying to fix them and especially maintainers this doesn't apply directly if you're trying to contribute but if you have an issue if you find something broken and then you google and you find an issue that says this is broken and people are saying like we're working on it uh please don't yell at those people or call them names or tell them that they're bad people it happens sometimes where people just seem really entitled and angry because they're feeling pain right like it's breaking their work or they're behind on a deadline but the right way to express that pain is not to

say what morons you you maintainers are if you knew what you were doing yeah blah blah blah like have empathy for for people that are working for free i try to imagine myself talking to someone as if they were in the same room or working on my team with me and someone i was gonna have to talk to a lot um i try to get in that mindset before i comment like that i try and imagine that they're just the cutest little puppy dog and and then i i want to like be nice and give them pets instead how could i yell at you yeah who would kick a puppy dog no one all right on that very pleasant note thank you james you're welcome question answered yep one more thing if you have experiences contributing to open source for the first

time or the thousandth time we would love to hear about those too but only the one thousandth time exactly yeah two choices we were very clear i thought yeah we are programmers uh yeah so send uh send those stories and we'd love to share them with people and and and show kind of what happened i guess i didn't say my very first contribution ever maybe i should say that oh yeah uh my first contribution i was a college student working on this project called psi ruby which is an attempt to create a scientific um kind of package for the ruby programming language and there was an exception somewhere that it was catching but it was catching the wrong class of exception. So it was too general basically. And all I did was change

it from catch this most general kind of exception to catch the specific exception that the error is actually related to. And it was like 10 character change and it got merged in and it made me feel good. Awesome. And it launched your career. It launched my career. I've made literally some other open source contributions after that. Congratulations. Thank you. All right, jameson where can people go to find out more about the show they can go to soft skills.audio our fancy website it has words it has sound it has no pictures quadrichromatic design and brutalist design yep all in one uh there's also a page on there there will be a page for a sponsor info if you're interested in sponsoring the podcast in reaching developers who care about being good

human beings and and uh figuring out how to be better at their jobs then um we'd love to talk to you about sponsoring yeah maybe you work for a company whose name you would like to hear at the beginning of this podcast talk to your manager are you recruiting people and do you want people that care about soft skills and that care about being good to work with yeah do you just want our eternal goodwill or just that you can buy that yeah you can buy that it's all for sale um and And what if someone wants to ask a question on the show that they would like us to answer? They can send a tweet or direct message to at softskillseng on Twitter. We check it pretty regularly and we throw those questions in the queue.

So we would love to talk to you. Thank you so much to everyone who has asked a question. We have so many to go through and it's just great. It's a great problem to have. Goodbye, everyone. See ya.