Should Indians Contribute To Open Source? 

Great video 🫡

This is a must watch for everyone, wrong contributions are now hurting the respect of whole indian engineers space. This might make huge impact for others who would like to really contribute

This is not limited to Indians. Every developer especially junior devs needs to watch this.

Honestly the accountability in this video was mindblowing. I've seen this general shift towards "open sourcing to land a job rather than for the goodwill of the project" happen for quite some time now, but I'd argue the real takeaway from your videos have been the fact that contributing to projects you genuinely wanna help improve also benefits yourself. I wouldn't blame you for others taking what you preach out of context (although I have to admit, your channel did pop into my head when I watched Theo's vid a couple days back)

Firstly Indians shouldn't get offended if we have a problem with us. Too much patriotism is the problem 🤦🤦

That 1 year montage made me tear up slightly. so inspired by you always kirat bhaiya. Lucky to find a mentor, an old brother in you. I dropped out of college in May last week and the cohort started in june , like it was meant to be! I didn't have any exceptional coding journey behind me , never had written a line in javascript before. Here i'm today with 3 websites made for clients, that are live and are in use everyday! and still a lot to learn. While slowly i started to become self reliant and mostly learnt from docs, and didn't have to solely depend on the cohort, but since i have dropped out from college, the cohort gives me structure and also various insights from your experience. The value this cohort provided me is priceless :)

Software Engineering is not exactly easy and all fun. Just because its easy to get started, doesn't mean it's easy to follow through. I'm a SDE and my two cents on this is to highlight the social angle of this line of work. Understand and appreciate the sophisticated nature of a mature team and their codebase. Cheers!

I have liked how Harkirat has been transparent about everything he has done till now. One of the most real content creators out there. Good developers will definitely relate to your content on RU-vid and try to make the most out of any video you post. Regarding the open source controversy, it was bound to happen as we Indians often have a habit of trying to find shortcuts in everything whether be it DSA for jobs or OS for jobs. The main idea is that all these are basically the skills necessary for every developer, and there is no one short path to success. Everything takes time and, therefore, sincere effort. Anyways, all the best to whoever is reading this comment, and I hope you get to learn something. Jai Shree Ram!

Well said Harkirat Sir, We Indians should collectively be trained to prioritize quality over quantity I know given the situation it's a hard ask. But still, efforts should be made. Hats off to you for your Video and bringing this out & explaining the approach to be taken while fixing open-source bugs.Thank You

Never clicked on a video faster 😂

People missed the main theme for Open Source, open source were made selflessly, they were made on top of community belief but nowadays people are trying to get something from themselves from the Opes Source, these type of acts do hurt the main motive of the Open Source.

We should tale it seriously 🙏 kyu kisi ko takleef dena.. Harkirat always said this "Pick 1 problem big and worthy problem." Quality over quantity

Continue being the humble and honest person you are :)

It's not just github contributions. Over the years I've seen common practices hurt the overall software engineering effort rather than help. Some examples are throwing bodies at a problem, titles like senior software engineer, architect, etc being more important than the actual skill and experience, and being resistant to newer ways of doing things simply because they are unfamiliar. I don't know if it's a cultural thing or what, but it's a huge problem in the software engineering industry that no one seems to want to talk about.

Exactly why I stopped aiming for this year's gsoc... Useless issues being spammed

Great video! I think this isn't limited to a region. This should be rules/guidelines to follow by all of us. Theo said it best, "contribute to software you use".

I wanted to contribute to Open Source last year, but yup, after I reached to projects I wasn't able to understand the codebase that well so I decided to wait for some more time and gain some more knowledge so that I can actually contribute. So yeah, I'll do it when I have some more knowledge so that my contributions are meaningful to the project.❤❤ Thanks for putting out the video bhaiya❤

Honestly, as someone who absolutely loves Software Engineering and working in this field and someone who recognizes the fact with humility that we stand on the shoulders of some great passionate geniuses who paved a way to make software engineering fun and simple for us, the "fake it till you make it" mindset is strong among Indians and the Indian youth. Everyone is trying to cut corners and trying to make quick money landing in tech companies. This is making a lot of passionate engineers look bad .

Hi Harkirat, I don't blame you. I would say that after watching a few videos about open source on your channel, I got inspired and started doing the localhost setup of the open source project. I have never raised a PR because I am struggling to set up the codebase on my local system. I am glad that I am not spamming the open source community. This is a much-needed video. Thanks for putting it out.

To be honest you've given so much information , spread awareness about this whole open source and remote work but it's the herd mentality of people if one starts doing anything new everybody will follow blindly without proper knowledge. Btw keep up the good work.

Hey I just wanted to thank you for all your hardwork and I am really sorry that this is happening to you. I can see all the hard work you have put into this channel and hopefully only worthy people who actually wanna improve will stay.

Forget it. No one is getting a job if they need a tutorial like this one.

I knew all this was happened a week back or so, since I'm active in the community. I watched Theo's video when he put it out, then I also knew the posts/reply that came to that posts on twitter and how they mentioned about indians polluting open source. But I never ever felt, there wasn't even any thot that you were one of the reason behind this. And of course you are not. You never told people to do such contributions. You always had put the disclaimers in your videos. You always warned us about not to do these ugly contribution which doesn't have any value. You always told the right way to contribute. It's the people who didn't take things seriously. It's not at all your fault bro. You have made impact on our life in such a positive way. I can see lot of difference in the old me and what the current me now. And you have played huge role in it. Thank you so much Kirat.

Hi harkirat, from my perspective I am very grateful and to be frank some of your videos opened plenty of peoples mind on what is possible and you are right sometimes doing good things can lead to some other bad outcomes but people should see the good Intention. @everyone Intentions really matter. I hope to learn and grow with everyone this year.

Thanks man very insightful video!

You didn't do anything wrong. Indians tend to find shortcuts to success but they don't understand you can't skip the process. It's fundamental. You have done great champ! 🎉

This really shows the reality of some "devs" or students you go and fix typo mistakes and fix something that's not even an issuee and then cry about 3 lpa salary being less.

Thank you. I wish the Indian coding community was held to higher standards like this more often. Because to date its amounted to pollution, in the wild and in the workplace.

Interesting video Mr Singh. I wonder if it's worth adding: don't contribute to random high-profile projects just to attempt to increase your GitHub profile, contribute (or try to contribute) to something that you use and like. I agree with one of the commenters below: try to create your own project. Companies will be much more interested in the fact that you can design and develop something from the ground up. I think we should look at contributing to open source because we want to and not because we believe it will land us a high-paying job.

that anuv song is just awesome .your last video clip is really great ,I heard it 4 times .

All of us do dumb shit when we start out. Hoping all of the people who did stupid shit now become 10x better in a year 👊!

You are doing good work via cohort and are adding great value at small cost.

Much needed clarity.

I think these are the basic ethics to contribute in open source. Everyone should follow. Recently I contributed in Twenty, after PR I mentioned it in Discord and the maintainers immidiately accepted it. The same thing you are addressing here also discussed there few dayz ago.

Hitesh sir already posted this topic, so great harkirat sir you are also spreading the good information to open-source contributors 😊

I am really sad 😢 for harkirat, I never contributed though i learnt how the contribution is done all thanks to harkirat. Please don't stop open source content, there are lots of learner than spammers. It's all because of you that I learnt to understand projects. Bro literally Saab log HR ko kaise patana hay ye baat kartey hay but you talked about connecting to CTO Please don't stop harkirat make your videos membership only but please don't stop I love your web3, mern stack and open source content , bootcamp. Pls pls pls Your aim was to teach, you are fulfilling it to a good percentage. Pls don't stop

Meri sister and gf dono apka course kar rhi hai. On sundays i take combine classes to solve their doubt & in process mere concepts bhi refresh ho jate hai. personally meri khud ki life bhi apne hi banyi hai aaj se 2 year back. sab cheez ke liye thanks bhaiya

hey harkirat you are doing great job, the path you showed us and you explain us how things work in real industries along with this you also give us life lessons thank you for all these things ✌

If you want to be a software engineer, make your own projects. In today’s market companies are looking for innovative people creating something from scratch rather than doing something that’s already done. If a lot of people are doing something it just makes you like everyone else be different. Believe me making something from scratch is way harder than contributing to any open source.

dude you are absolutely solid! im not even indian im american lol really appreciate what you're doing dude you are helping alot of people and youre real, humble, responsible and just seem like a good dude. you quickly have came to be one of my favorite channels (ngl to ya lol youre accent is strong so it can be abit harder to comprehend sometimes for me personally but even with that small issue still one of the places i learn the most!)

First we indians messed up competitive coding community and then open source , india no 1

I think focusing on just Indians makes it sound a bit biased, there's developers all around the world doing the exact same thing, the only reason why Indians are being singled out here is because there's many of them, which makes it more noticeable to the rest of the world. Great video though, I just wanted to clarify that most of developers definitely don't specifically blame Indians for doing this.

Now everyone will mail you for a free t-shirt 🤣

A much needed video and this is called the right use of influence. These things just lowers down the respect for indian developers in foss communities. Well done

I have a question what if someone gets stuck like he/she cannot understand a crucial part of open-source code. Is there a way to ask for help from someone in community or just leave it and move on.

Jab tak dimaag m paise ko leke kaam karoge, wo kaam jaldbaazi m hoga aur galat hoga....rat race se hatne ke lie open source introduce karwaya tha harkirat ne, isko hi rat race bana diya.....abhi bhi time h sudharne ka...plzzz🙏🏻

100% on point. I'm a long time OSS dev. Mid 90's. I had to comment when I saw the fork and shadow bullet point. One of the most annoying things is getting devs asking you to add them to your repo with write permission, because they are unfamiliar with Git's forking. OR another pain point is they made a PR from a fork but once they made the PR they never touch it and update it again. Now you can be left in a situation of do you lift their changes into a new PR and essentially steal and discredit their contribution or do you try to chase them down to update their branch. If you fork the repo and make a PR, try to keep it shadowed. If you make a PR but than later you know you won't be available for whatever reason, close the PR with a one line message. "Can't maintain PR branch because I will be away on business." Most developers will do a contribution note or wait for you to return. There is some cultural differences too. Like some cultures like to preserve code while many want to refactor-all-the-things. This can cause friction in the open source world. Try to be observant of what type of culture the repo owner is and match their style and design. I have made PR's and allowed the owner to close them because they wanted to implement my code suggestions in a refactor I would rather not do. If the owner is not a jerk they will note your contributions in a documentation usually. If they are jerks, don't worry about it. Just move on. Letting yourself get frustrated from other engineers is a quick way to end up on a list of people not to work with. Better you keep your cool and note not to work with them then to lash out and you get on that list. Chances are others saw what they did and they too have added the owner of that repo owner to their list of people to avoid. OSS is full of drama... try to avoid it at all cost.

Honestly I have seen the quality of code improve dramatically over the past 10 years. When outsourcing first became a thing it was very difficult since I spent many days rewriting code that was produced from the outsourced company. Today I have a team - outsourced - and I know they will give me quality code. It's just a matter of evolving into the industry. The industry was started in the west and in America we had desktop PCs as far back as the 1970s. We have had a lot of years to perfect our art. Indians will catch up, and knowing how creative they can be I'm sure they will surpass many along the way.

as expected of my brothers, bravo!

i respect your effort harkirat bahiya,as a part of cohort 2.0..

Heads up king 👑. I chose the right guy as my mentor. Also you are not to be blamed, people do make mistakes, they'll fix it as well. Don't be sad or something you have a lot to teach me and I have a lot to learn from you. Hoping for everything to be better.

me the only African following this channel from the start😅

Awesome video I am your cohort 2 student and currently top of the leaderboard in Rocket Chat for gsoc this year

honestly, if most of this isn't common sense for you, please sit down and deeply reflect on your career choices.

Bro low key asked to stop contributing altogether. Apart from personal projects on open sources, I find it difficult to make myself actually raise a pull request. I always felt that if it was really required, maintainers might already would have done it. If they aren't, there must be a reason. This actually happened when we were making changes in an opensource dashboarding tool for our internal tool and a new version already came up with it.

What did you expect form audience who follow Tanmay Bhat.

thanks for Hitesh for rising this isssue

I am a cohort 0-100 student and it has been first and best paid course purchase and I would also recommend it to everyone I was a django developer and now shifting to Mern with the help of Cohort and not only the teaching also the community and connections we make is great and things we can learn from other

The great content 👍🏻

Indians are doing software programming for ages. But over these years, saw very little shareware or free programs developed by Indians. Most of the Indian software engineers are salary workers. Don't go beyond that unless paid. However there are few exceptions.This has been like that for more than 25 years. Most of the Indians programmers work in database, banking etc, where they can copy old code and re-develop. Very less people work on real engineering, space, aeronautics, gaming, effects for films etc. (these are like surgeon specialists) So I do not expect much from Indian programmers even now. (some may not like what I say, nevertheless ... Regards.

Of course they should! Indian SWE have always been one of the best around.

Great advice for everyone contributing to open source too

Much needed to clarify things seeing the open source hype in India.

It's happening cause, tech influencers promoting that everyone should contribute to opensource promoting it as a way to network or getting jobs

Very good suggestions for every enthusiast. Thanks for putting this out.

No one has targeted Indians. The tweet in the video thumbnail doesn’t exist.

thanks for making me aware of these things ❤ 🇮🇳

You are doing so good.

Thanks! It's a rare video. Appreciation from Pak.

This is good advice for anyone!

Thank you for bringing this up. I as an interviewer will now check for actual contributions rather than looking at their github contributions blindly. Indian engineers are some of the most notorious I’ve seen from lying on resume to pretending to be a know it all when you can’t even answer a single question to the point. I’ve never seen it with any other engineers from other parts of the world no matter if they are grads or engineering managers.

Ahh the end was good. Hoping people understood, grind & work on their skills. Do you really think a 4Cr Offer would be so easy just by correcting typos? Think, Build, Grind & be humble boys ❤

Hello I am from Nepal I just wanted to join your cohort. But there is no any method of payment and sign up in your cohort.

the best course that I have taken till date is yours

Harkirat bhaiya, you took this blame responsibility with dignity. Personally i dont find you to get this blame, you always adviced all of us from the start that make quality contributions, opensource is hard, take your time to understand codebase, learn on the go, pick an issue and try to solve it on your own. Rather pushing us to create PRs on updating readme files or correcting spelling, or just for sake of getting goodies , tshirt and neglecting the whole point of open source contribution. I mean we are or upcoming software Engineers who are expected to contribute on the source code, fixing technical errors, adding functionalities, collaborating in discussions on issues and solve problems. This is so obvious. I don't think you should take this blame. But still much respect and power to you❤

i just loved this video!

the f-ing lyrics of husn sits so good with the video 😭

Shifted my perspective after watching this. Never made a contribution before and never going to make a light-hearted contribution.

I have learnt this and will always stand by it I will never make my first contribution unless my contribution is really creating a good impact...

This issue needs more awareness Instead of being proud of everything, people should be more honest and realistic They must understand why they are doing something instead of doing it just to show off

This kind of advice and guidance video should have been there at least 1-1.5 years ago, cause then only "Contribute to Open Source" was there but not "How to" and "How not to"...

Your cohort is great, understood everything that you taught, but im struggling with react and im in week 6 starting due to exams in dec 2023, shall i look and do more from react documentation

I am an Indian coder and i got nothing to do with this spamming, wether i contribute to opensource is my sole decision and I dont need someone else opinion. But great video though, instead if addressing all the Indian programmers, you probably have to focus on the new comers. Don't blame everyone for the mistakes of the few.

That's how the world works right? You tried to do good to the people by spreading knowledge and SOME people perceived it to be the ultimate way to grab job opportunities, if everyone was smart and sensible, being smart and sensible would be something no body would expect anyone to NOT have but that's not the case, if everyone tops a class, being a topper is the same as being average. You did great, people learnt, developed skills but there has to be a major section of the society who'll try to use this as a shortcut to success. It's not your fault, you'll be loved by the ones who believed in you, always.

Yo, just wondering around. Cool montage...

I've done some work helping maintain a repo, and we've had "typo" PRs that "corrected" actually correct English into incorrect English. It did shed light on that, while correct, the wording was a bit more "native level" than it needed to be, but I think it's probably not a great idea to do Typo PRs if you aren't very good at the language, or it isn't a very clear typo.

We Indians never leave a chance to embarrass the Indian diaspora at large.

Sir when will the next cohort for beginners enrollment begin? I am looking forward to it? Or should I buy the recorded ones instead?

It's not really just an indian thing, maybe indians have more visibility due to there being more of them in the space, but this is stuff a lot of beginners do, and the typos thing is usually because people want to get Open Source contributions under their belt by any means necessary. It's a mindset people have that unless you're pushing stuff to github you're half a developer... so people go out of their way to find reasons to push PRs to popular repos. Shouldn't be the case tbh and i have no idea how that mentality sprang up

Thank you for this video, i was also on the open source race

The problem is we don’t have our own platform

Shadow solving is awesome thanks for that suggestion!

If open source contribution is not required or a plus for a resume, no one will touch it, no ones gonna pollute it. They're in it for the 💵

Top ending 🔥

As an influencer there's a greater responsibility, earlier it was just limited to big names in B town but now you got more famous internet personalities that impacts so many individuals directly or in directly. So it's always worth thinking before doing anything how this action will be conceived by a million people that follow you. There needs to be accountability.

- Don'ts: 1. Avoid making typo documentation fixes; focus on meaningful contributions. 2. Don't contribute without setting up the project locally; ensure your fixes work. 3. Avoid creating unnecessary issues or pull requests. 4. Don't participate in October Fest just for a t-shirt. 5. Refrain from persistently tagging maintainers; it's counterproductive. - Dos: 1. Focus on learning and understanding codebase. 2. Fork and shadow an open-source project; learn by solving issues. 3. Ensure your contributions meet production-worthy standards. - Considerations: - Maintainers face challenges with excessive contributions. - Maintainers' initial enthusiasm may wane with overwhelming PRs. - Clickbait titles and thumbnails may misrepresent content. - Conclusion: - Shift away from quantity to quality in contributions. - Avoid spamming projects; prioritize meaningful contributions over personal gain.

I was looking further into the issue and some Hacktober fest pulls up again and again..still I am unable to comprehend why people particularly from here went on to put up so many pull requests??

Its the desperation of people. Everyone is rushing to get into tech. Just understand more the crowd, lower the value and pay. For what you're trying to get into tech is what is getting ruined.

hello , i am a second year it student from third , i know python ad some basics of web develpoment, i want to take your course , should it be a right time as i missed syllabus or should i wait for the new launch please help

Respect++