As many of you know, I’ve been working on the Sample Programs repo ever since I quit my job at GE. For the most part, it’s been a lot of fun. Obviously, I’ve learned a lot, and the project has connected me with a lot of awesome people. One of the challenges we’ve run into is that the repo has sort of outgrown its original scope. As a result, the code has gotten messy. To combat that, we’ve added testing to ensure there is some consistency between languages. In addition, we’ve added documentation to ensure folks understand exactly what each program should do. Obviously, this has been a huge undertaking, so there are still a ton of quality issues. That said, I think the repo is in a much better place than it was 3 years ago.
Despite all the progress, I sometimes into issues with folks who only want their code submitted and don’t really care to help the maintainers. For example, during Hacktoberfest 2020, someone submitted some code to the repo that we hadn’t documented—let alone tested. I politely told them that if they wanted their code snippet included, they would have to document it. This was their response. To make matters worse, it received a little bit of a laugh from someone else. These types of things are really frustrating as a maintainer because they completely miss the point. Naturally, as we go through the documentation process, we revise how the program will work. If they’re copying solutions from Wikipedia, that probably isn’t going to work for us. Of course, I suppose when you’re just trying to win a t-shirt, quality doesn’t really matter.