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Comment by ninepoints | Hacker News Reader

This is akin to filing a bug report, and then taking responsibility for the fix committed by someone else.

I help maintain some open source projects, and I totally disagree. Filing bugs (or thoughtful feature requests) is absolutely a contribution, and I wish more users would do so.

Edit: In fairness, I think some of the ways the author describes it are grandiose ("my extremely important contribution"), but I interpreted them as hyperbole.

I think this is the part that itches me:

> . You can paste source code directly into your Markdown document without any changes, and it will appear as expected in the rendered HTML. That’s my doing.

It makes it sound like the author of this blogpost actually did the change, while in reality they suggested the change. Of course it's good to suggest something, and even nicer when whoever you suggest it to implements it. But I'd never claim "that's my doing" after suggesting any features/fixes.

A bit like writing an email to Apple suggesting something, then they do that thing and I wrote a blogpost saying "That's my doing, I was there first. And you’re welcome.". It just doesn't taste well.

If a candidate were to say “that’s my doing” when describing the outcome of a prior team project, and language barriers weren’t a mitigating factor, I would consider that a significant red flag for ego. Not a crime, and a reasonable exaggeration in many circumstances. But I wouldn’t want someone communicating that way in a professional capacity on an engineering team.

Well it’s a good thing drdrang was just posting a missive on his blog and not in a job interview with you. But I guess if he does ever interview with you, you’ll remember his tongue-in-cheek missive and be dismissive, even if if never comes up in conversation.

That’ll show ‘em! Never write tongue-in-cheek blogs or else random weirdos who will never meet you will write you off as a candidate for an engineering team that doesn’t exist and that you don’t want to join in the first place.

> If a candidate were to say “that’s my doing” when describing the outcome of a prior team project,

"I made that" is the ultimate statement of pride in work. Taking that away is a really awful anti-pattern in management. Let your people be proud of their contribution, and equally proud of the product of the team. The work of a team is the sum of the contribution of all members.

> a reasonable exaggeration in many circumstances

I find people who take credit for the work of the team to be a lot worse than people who take pride in their contribution to the team.

By no means am I saying that "I made that" is a bad thing when it's true! It's vital to lionize people for the work they individually do, and encourage them to take pride in that work themselves.

But if they use the same language to describe the entirety of a team project, not just their contribution, as "my doing" alone, that often crosses a line into toxicity in the ways you mention in your second paragraph.

I interpreted that as not being serious, but I can see why that part rubbed people the wrong way.

A well described and thought out bug report can make fixes trivial and are worth their weight in gold.

Obviously the "it doesn't work" bug reports are worthless.

I found a bug on a tutorial found in raywenderlich.com and sent a fix proposal. But I wasn’t even acknowledged. I wonder how I should proceed about it. Or this is just normal to open source projects.

Not so normal methinks.

Had this one project where I converted it over to python 3 in a fork and they merged the whole thing without a mention of where they got it from. Kind of sucks but ultimately didn’t matter because I was doing it for my own usage. Plus it made my life a little easier because I didn’t have to maintain it separately, just fire and forget a bug fix whenever it came up.

If I was doing Resume Driven Development I would probably care a little more though.

I see, it’s just sucks because it took time to debug that fix. Anyway I don’t mind anymore.

Some credit as the motivator of the fix is deserved. The author very clearly states:

   Undoubtedly, as Markdown became more popular, someone else would have pointed out this problem. Gruber himself would have been annoyed by it if he ever needed to write a code block with backslashes in it. But I was there first. And you’re welcome.

I don't think they are trying to take more credit than is due.

But also > You can paste source code directly into your Markdown document without any changes, and it will appear as expected in the rendered HTML. That’s my doing.

In that sentence, it kinda does sound like they're trying to take credit for it.

Its upon the reader to ascribe malintent. Ill choose not to.

Generally I don't like to point out typos, but in the context of malintent: Ill vs I'll is pretty amusing :D

It is their doing - they started the series of events. It's other people's doings ALSO. This sentence doesn't imply exclusivity, it just doesn't say others did stuff. Fortunately the entire rest of the document, particularly the part I highlighted above, makes it very clear:

1. what their doing is in more specific detail

2. what others' doings are in more specific detail

I'm going to assume that the author included all that additional detail in the document on purpose, and with the intent of clarifying what "That's my doing" entails. It seems pretty unlikely that your hypothesis of "the person is claiming the whole thing is their doing and accidentally wrote a whole bunch of words undermining that simple sentence" is the right one.

There is an entire article. There doesn't need to be just one sentence plucked out of context.

"I pointed this out in the Markdown mailing list, and Gruber agreed that it should be changed. In the next Markdown release—which was, I believe, his last—he made the change, and all the text in code blocks has been treated literally ever since."

What's wrong with that? He said what he did, said who fixed the issue, and stated the result.

Or maybe the reader can do better than isolate a sentence out of context and assume bad intent. It’s obvious this is not to be taken seriously. It’s a few paragraphs on a blog, FFS.

I personally read it as a tongue-in-cheek boast where the author's intent was to clearly indicate that their contribution was minimal and they just happened to be the first person to point something out to the developers of the library.

Agree completely. This is just a fun little anecdote.

It is still a contribution, which is what the title is. It did not say "my feature implementation in Markdown". A good feature suggestion which is thoughtful and genuinely improves a product not just for that one user but for everyone is a great contribution.

The exact phrasing:

> That’s my doing.

Come on now.

I interpreted it as a joke, but I'm familiar with the author and hyperbole doesn't always translate, so I can see why it rubbed people the wrong way.

There is even worse than that. He also wrote:

> I

Which clearly means that he takes full credit for the whole Markdown implementation. What a scandal!

Right. That's why I can claim that my biggest contribution to Firefox is suggesting indicating the estimated reading time at the top of an article in reader mode. I'm the one who made the feature request [0].

It took some time, but they finally implemented it and I felt (and still feel) very good about it :)

[0] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265304

I think the claim "that's my biggest contribution to X" is fine, if you feel like that was what you think is the biggest contribution you made to X.

Where it starts to feel wrong, would be if you somehow started claiming "I suggested it first. It's because of me it's there. You're welcome", when you merely suggested the feature, not implemented or drove it to be implemented.

> Undoubtedly, as Markdown became more popular, someone else would have pointed out this problem. Gruber himself would have been annoyed by it if he ever needed to write a code block with backslashes in it. But I was there first. And you’re welcome.

I don't see how he's taking responsibility for fixing the bug. To me it just sounds like he's sharing an anecdote and this is not entirely serious.

I've made a few languages in my time, both programming languages and markup languages. One of the most valuable kinds of contributions is spotting design mistakes, suggesting good changes, and being a discussion partner about design-related stuff. I'd bet that in this case, the change to the parser code would be trivial; the hard part is getting the design right.

It's not that. It's tongue in cheek, as anyone who has followed Gruber and Dr. Drang for a while will understand.

Don't know about responsibility, but there are cases where I'd certainly take the credit. For example:

1. Finding the bug was difficult, while fixing the bug was trivial

2. My own proposed patches seem to sit for years, while emailing bug reports directly to the committer results in them committing fixes within days.

The whole post is pretty obnoxious. Its literally "you made this? I made this":

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/079/173/ed2...

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