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While gaming/hacking a system can be fun, I find it somewhat sad that someone would prefer to do that over actually working on the Linux kernel. I recall a time after a undergrad course in OS when I actually understood what the kernel did on boot.
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Still more useful than Hacktoberfest contributions, so I can't blame her.

There is no point in publicly shaming junior developers.

Lot of them are paid doing low-value (or even no-value) work in companies too, but it's part of the learning process.

It's good that she got interested and she certainly learnt more along the way, plus this was 7 years ago...

There’s no point in lifting them up beyond reason either. What are other juniors going to think if they hear that one of their peers already got 340 patches accepted into the kernel?

News like this is why I just don’t trust anyone when they say they’ve done something impressive. It always turns out to be hot air.

Yeah this is the quality > quantity problem, and I tend to agree with you.

I think the issue starts from the university in some way like "get XXX commits accepted in open-source projects to pass/improve your CV".

“22 year old junior programming student wins scholarship by tackling good-first-issues makes other programmers butthurt.”

Have people forgotten how bad programmers in/right out of school are? These are exactly the kinds of things you give students to work on.

I don’t know if this indicates anything about how bad they are. Ultimately it needs to be done.

But I don’t think it says anything about how good they are either.

First of all, this was in 2017. Also, these changes are not noop changes, like comments or similar. They clearly make the product better and that was the intention, so what's the issue? Yes, she choose a niche and stuck to it.

I don't agree with that tweet and I want to see their merged commits if they think they can do better.

Why is he resurrecting something that happened over 5 years ago?

Not to condone the "Chusti" mentality but this tweet just seems unnecessarily vindictive.

Also, adding the const qualifier to a C/C++ heavy codebase where it wasn't before is some useful junior work.

Edit:

Also, based on further research this 100% is punching down. The recipient was from a lower middle class background and went to a crappy college and was able to leverage that experience to get a decent job. Meanwhile the guy that resurrected this story is someone who's parents appear to be Indian Diplomats and sent him to a top college in India.