What Can You Do?

If you're interested in helping out, for whatever reason, there's a lot you can do. You don't have to be able to write a lick of code to contribute to FreeBSD. Every so often, someone posts on a mailing list, "I'd like to help, but I can't code." This lament has appeared repeatedly on the FreeBSD mailing lists since I started reading them in 1996, and probably far earlier. The standard response to these messages is silence. After all, if you've already decided you can't help there's really nothing for anyone to say.

No one's denying that the programmers are the spotlight heroes of FreeBSD. Many of these people have impressive skills, and most of us could never even dream of being the next Bruce Evans. Matt Dillon rightfully collected copious kudos for his stunning response to a bug report from Apple Computer. Each BSD team has its own tales of coding heroism. If you can't program your way out of a wet paper bag, however, you can still help. The basic question is, "What can you do?" Not "What does the project need?", not "Wouldn't it be cool if my favorite OS did such−and−such?", not "What feature do you want?"; what skills do you have right now? Chances are those skills can be valuable to any BSD project, or to any other free−software project.

For example, I've worked for years in computer support. I've spent a few years trying to master programming, mainly to get out of the support arena. While I've moved up, and am perilously close to management these days, I'm still deeply interested in computer internals. Mastery of operating system internals comes from reading the code. For years, I believed that I couldn't contribute to FreeBSD until I learned to code as well as some of the Secret Kernel Masters.

I also do a truly unhealthy amount of writing. I'm good at it. One day I decided to try to write a FreeBSD technical article, and it was snapped up by a magazine. Since then I've published hundreds of pages about FreeBSD. People know my name. I'm a respected contributor, and I've never written a line of code.

What do you do well? Leverage that skill. It will be appreciated.

If Nothing Else …

If you truly have no useful skills, and you have no other ideas, just reread this book and the FreeBSD FAQ, subscribe to FreeBSD−[e-mail], and help other users. I started this way. If you elect to do this, I encourage you to politely guide people to existing information resources. When someone asks a question that is in the FAQ, give them a URL to the FAQ's main page. If the question has been asked before, suggest that they search the mailing list archives. If you can teach people to help themselves, we can reduce mailing list traffic. (As someone subscribed to 13 different FreeBSD lists, I have to say that reducing mailing list traffic is good.) As the old saying goes, teach them to fish and we'll sell them fishhooks. After answering mailing list questions for a while, you'll start to see things that the Project needs. One of those needs will match your skills.

When you see a problem that you think you can solve, stop for a moment and ponder it. If necessary, make a note of it and come back to it the next day. Is this really something you can do? It doesn't matter how dumb or small it is; can you actually sit down with your professional tools and do it?

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