Last week, I got my first commit in Git. After many years of being a Git user, I am now a contributor to Git itself.

My change documents the git fetch --jobs=0 option, which I’ve written about previously.

Here are some things I noticed while working on my contribution:

• Contributing to Git is intimidating, even as someone accustomed to working in public on open source software. Some of the discomfort came from unfamiliar process, such as sending patches to a mailing list. But most of it comes from the mailing list’s exacting standards paired with a terse and not exactly welcoming communication style.

• On the Git mailing list, it’s conventional to CC people who might be interested in your patch. On GitHub, I might find it a little irritating to be @-mentioned by someone I don’t know. But CCing someone you don’t know is ordinary practice on the Git mailing list. There’s even a script, git-contacts to help do this. It finds people who had previously authored or reviewed the code you’re modifying and formats the CC header for you.

• I got a little help from Julia Evans, especially her writing on contributing new docs to Git and the resources she linked to. I probably wouldn’t have thought to contribute to Git without reading about her experience first. For example, I wouldn’t have known that GitGitGadget eases contribution for people like me who are used to GitHub’s fork-and-pull model.

Now that I’ve gotten over the initial difficulty, I’m less intimidated. In all, it was nice to contribute to a tool that I rely on, even if with just a one-line docs patch.