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ahartmetzyesterday at 9:47 PM1 replyview on HN

If you already know it's not good enough, you can just say so by calling it a proof of concept or hack to demonstrate what needs to be done. Such code is often very useful when writing the real fix.


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greiskulyesterday at 10:14 PM

Yup, some of my first contributions when I was a teenager, was to an open source project where I was able to find a couple of bugs, and implement a hacky solution that I shared with the team on the forum. My code was absolutely awful, but by having done both the effort of tracking down the cause of the bug, and one possible way of fixing it (which was badly coded, but worked), made the developers able to quickly turn around and edit my patches into actual patches that got merged into the project.

And it was actually a pretty good feeling. Made me feel that even as a newbie programmer, I was adding value to the community, which I was!

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