Done! Submitted my very first commit for the official Ruby documentation.
Oh so nerve-wracking to submit a commit to the ruby/ruby repo, even a documentation fix. #missionaccomplished #whoohoo!
— Carina C. Zona (@cczona) November 3, 2012
Patting myself on the back for having spotted the error. It was over 2 months old — surprising for a standard library like URI::HTTP. So I second-guessed myself initially.
Surely that doc gets scrutinized by hundreds of people daily. Surely someone else would have spotted it ages ago, if it were done incorrectly. Surely I just haven't heard about some fancy new syntactical construct. Surely the fact that the example doesn't work for me is because I must've done something incorrectly. Surely.
That voice in the back of the head is noise from imposter syndrome. Shut up, you.
Doubt like this depends too on believing that those who have contributed to Ruby are infallible. A mythbuster, for me and for you:
$ cd ruby-official-repo
$ git log | grep -ic "typo"
842
Trust your instinct. Verify. Make better things happen. Commit.
Last month I also made a first commit for the official Rails documentation, and — hooray! — it was accepted. Though not without a brief facepalm moment when I accidentally submitted a big bunch of other people's commits with it. Luckily, the railsdocs repository is maintained separately from the Rails codebase. So it was a quick fix by doing git reset --HARD on master branch then the documentation maintainers and I each did a git push -f on our respective repos, and rebased my branch's commit back in. Voila, solved.
It's a good example of where Git is a big win for contributor, maintainers, and collaborators. It is also a good example of how wins like these are made easiest when developers are required to submit to an upstream via a branch rather than on top of master.
So, summary: I can now put "Rails documentation contributor" on the résumé, and hopefully soon will be able to put "Ruby documentation contributor" on it too. Don't worry; even though I'm a cool kid now, I still want to hang out with you.
UPDATE: Mission accomplished. What fun.
Documentation patch accepted. I'm officially a contributor to Ruby.Neato. bugs.ruby-lang.org/projects/ruby-…
— Carina C. Zona (@cczona) November 5, 2012