I found a “< 0” comparison instead of a “<= 0” in a conditional check once for someone else’s audio library I was using which caused random lockups in the decoding loop only ever so often when decoding MP3s. It was for a function that removed ID3 data on the fly while decoding and then checked for more to strip out. Took a day to finally pinpoint what was happening, test my change, and then notified the author, who immediately fixed it. It felt great.
You don’t gotta be a rockstar 10x developer working on 50 projects at once to help out.
One time I figured out why a strange dependency was needed in a LaTeX book. It’s part of the official documentation of a project and the author had opened an issue about it. I dug deep into the package code and figured out why, came up with a fix, and contacted the author about the solution. That was two years ago and they have not replied or fixed it, but just worked on different things. I don’t demand anything, but I haven’t felt motivated to help out since then in that documentation project.
