Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software Highlight

Sindre Sorhus, who maintains hundreds of JavaScript projects, once tweeted, “After having reviewed 10k+ pull requests on GitHub . . . ~80% of contributors doesn’t [sic] know how to resolve a merge conflict.”56 A few years later, he followed up with more observations: Almost no one writes a good pull request title More than half don’t know about the ‘Fixes #112’ syntax ~30% don’t run tests locally before submitting a PR ~40% don’t include docs/tests57 I’ve also noticed that the general PR quality has gone considerably down in the past few years. I guess it’s a result of GitHub’s increased popularity. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯