Write a short guide on "how to actually be helpful"

[pipermerriam]

I think there's a document I'll try to produce this week which I'll title something like "how to actually be helpful".

The desire to help is easy. Actually being helpful is often much harder.

The blanket offer of help is often not actually helpful. "Hi, how can I help?". It may appear on the surface that you are being helpful, but actually taking advantage of this type of offer is profoundly difficult. We don't know what you are good at. We don't know what you know. And we're often already busy with other things so taking the time to tease this information out and guide you towards an appropriate task is often significant.

The best help comes from those that take responsibility of doing the discovery work themselves. Take time to look through open github issues for ones that appear within your ability.

Another type of "non-help" I've run into is over-planning. Someone might find an issue, and then spend a lot of time laying out a very well thought through plan for how they plan to execute on it. Then they ask me for feedback on their plan. The feedback I have is almost always the same: "Lets see what the implementation actually looks like".

The best type of help is the type that still asks questions when necessary, but also puts forth an effort to figure things out for themselves. Have you actually read the contributing documentation? Have you actually looked through other pull requests to see how things are typically done? Have you actually spent any real effort trying to answer the question yourself before asking? The best help is the type that takes initiative.