It\u2019s Sunday. You\u2019ve had a lovely afternoon of coding and you\u2019ve just submitted a pull request. Unfortunately, your enjoyment quickly vanishes when someone you don\u2019t even know, leaves numerous review comments all over your work! (assuming you are lucky enough to have your unsolicited PR even noticed, that is). All those review comments cloud your thinking, and your peaceful Sunday goes up in smoke.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How should you respond to the (insert expletive here)<\/em> reviewer?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n You might be technically right in your decisions, but a combative response never fairs well, especially when you don\u2019t know the other person. However, implementing every requested change might be a time consuming \u2018ball ache\u2019, or worse, fury causing if you feel the requested changes are inferior to your original contribution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps the reviewer knows something you don\u2019t, or perhaps they haven\u2019t actually done a decent review; either way, a follow-up discussion could be appropriate. But how do you broach the topic without coming across as arrogant or combative? Sometimes other contributors just want it done \u2018their way\u2019, and you must comply for no other reason than being \u2018lower down the contributor hierarchy\u2019. Are you willing to take direction from someone you don\u2019t know, and possibly don\u2019t even agree with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ve all had spats at work, so I won\u2019t expand on that except to say that disagreements between open source developers are even harder to resolve than with work colleagues. Sometimes, you can \u2018argue your case\u2019, but that often depends on earned trust, which means you\u2019ll need to stick around for a while first. This may be tolerable when your livelihood is at stake, but will you \u2018suck it up\u2019 when you aren\u2019t getting paid?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many people simply walk away at this point. Others stay and fight on the internet for a while. Far fewer get their contribution accepted. This is why getting an open source contribution accepted can be way more challenging than you might think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s Sunday. You\u2019ve had a lovely afternoon of coding and you\u2019ve just submitted a pull request. Unfortunately, your enjoyment quickly vanishes when someone you don\u2019t even know, leaves numerous review comments all over your work! (assuming you are lucky enough to have your unsolicited PR even noticed, that is). All those review comments cloud your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-source","category-software-development","missing-thumbnail"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":796,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732\/revisions\/796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8082\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}