It is often hard to tell the difference between great code and bad code. I've written code that was fast and very flexible, at the expense of being complex - the flexibility turned out not used at all (after 8 years in production I'm confident it never will be), so on hindsight this wasn't great code - but if the flexibility envisioned had been used the complexity would be required and the solution would be great. I've seen code that cleverly handled multi-threaded issues such that can't be understood or modified by anyone without breaking - but it great code because it abstracts the threads so nobody else has to understand them.
Second, when you first start on a project you don't understand it all. We want to grow your understanding and bring you in as trusted contributor. Setting the right tone in those first days makes all the difference in the question of will you contribute more code or not.
Last, most open source projects are essentially unmaintained. Almost any contribution is better than that, even if the code is bad, if it works at all...
> It is often hard to tell the difference between great code and bad code. I've written code that was fast and very flexible, at the expense of being complex - the flexibility turned out not used at all (after 8 years in production I'm confident it never will be), so on hindsight this wasn't great code - but if the flexibility envisioned had been used the complexity would be required and the solution would be great. I've seen code that cleverly handled multi-threaded issues such that can't be understood or modified by anyone without breaking - but it great code because it abstracts the threads so nobody else has to understand them.
At my previous company, the lead dev did this (the complex code part with the lack of usage too), unfortunately his view was that it might be used sometime.
I think, after 10 years, we were handling about 100 events per second peak load and what I pointed this out he countered with: What if we had to handle 100000 or 1 Million?
I gave up after that.
For context we were a B2B company with a relatively long sales cycle, so ramp ups were generally very strongly correlated with on-boarding of new customers and we normally had notice of what was coming. In other words, the naive solution would've worked fine ( the 100 events (not web) were across ~ 5 servers (servers did other stuff too)) and we would've been able to scale up while we did improvements to the naive solution.
It is often hard to tell the difference between great code and bad code. I've written code that was fast and very flexible, at the expense of being complex - the flexibility turned out not used at all (after 8 years in production I'm confident it never will be), so on hindsight this wasn't great code - but if the flexibility envisioned had been used the complexity would be required and the solution would be great. I've seen code that cleverly handled multi-threaded issues such that can't be understood or modified by anyone without breaking - but it great code because it abstracts the threads so nobody else has to understand them.
Second, when you first start on a project you don't understand it all. We want to grow your understanding and bring you in as trusted contributor. Setting the right tone in those first days makes all the difference in the question of will you contribute more code or not.
Last, most open source projects are essentially unmaintained. Almost any contribution is better than that, even if the code is bad, if it works at all...