Felix Geisendörfer

felixge.de · Personal blog · on HN since 2013

Felix Geisendörfer is a Go and PostgreSQL engineer who writes about open source maintenance, profiling, state machines and TCP details.

What HN saysHN links it for The Pull Request Hack, about handing commit access to contributors. Commenters share similar maintainer handover stories and discuss the practice.
26HN people shared it
14linked it in comments
22stories submitted
563story points
10 months agolast shared
2013people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    The Pull Request Hack
    14 people · 204 points · first shared 2013 · 34 comments on HN
  2. 2
    The Pull Request Hack (2013)
    5 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
  3. 3
    Implementing State Machines in PostgreSQL
    3 people · 209 points · first shared 2017 · 86 comments on HN
  4. 4
    Open Source And Responsibility
    2 people · 54 points · first shared 2013 · 25 comments on HN
  5. 5
    Using TCP keepalive with Go
    1 people · 36 points · first shared 2014 · 4 comments on HN
  6. 6
    Implementing State Machines in PostgreSQL (2017)
    1 people · 30 points · first shared 2025 · 6 comments on HN
  7. 7
    Connecting Go Profiling with Tracing
    1 people · 6 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    Let's Fix File Uploading
    1 people · 5 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
    PostgreSQL operations that you can't EXPLAIN
    1 people · 4 points · first shared 2017 · 2 comments on HN
  10. 10
    GoDrone - A Parrot AR Drone 2.0 Firmware written in Go
    1 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
  11. 11
    Vim Trick: Open current line on GitHub
    1 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
  12. 12
    Advent of Go Profiling: Day 1-1
    1 people · 2 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  13. 13
  14. 14
    Advent of Go Profiling: Day 1-1: Branchless Go
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  15. 15
    Profiling Improvements in Go 1.18
    1 people · 1 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

ptx · 2018-11-27
"Since the early days of node/npm, sharing commit access/publish rights, with other contributors was a widespread community practice. https://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html open source is driven by sharing! It's great!" Yes, but, quoting from his post he cites: "So should you really do this for all pull requests? Probably not. While I've given a large amount of users access to various projects of mine, I'm still looking for: "Github profile: Does this user stand to lose a reputation by doing something stupid? "Skill: Based on the patch, do I think the user could be a good developer? "Usefulness: Is this patch solving a valid problem?"
felixge · 2017-08-01
Apple | Backend (Go, PostgreSQL) engineer | Shanghai, China | ONSITE | Full Time We're a small team that is having a huge impact on the mass production of Apple's products. If you're an expert in Go or PostgreSQL (ideally both), we'd love to talk to you. But perhaps even more importantly, you should be a good communicator and fast learner. Relocation is possible. My e-mail is in my profile. You might also enjoy enjoy this recent blog post of mine that gives you a small glimpse on the kind of things my team is up to: http://felixge.de/2017/07/27/implementing-state-machines-in-postgresql… (The example is not the problem domain we're working in, it was made up for the post)
captn3m0 · 2015-05-06
I see that you already have 25 contributors, so you might wanna try filing an issue asking for someone to take over. A very good advice I've gotten is to grant commit access to anyone who files a PR that gets merged[0]. The best person to take over is probably in this list[1]. [0]: http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html [1]: https://github.com/eneifert/ZendeskApi_v2/graphs/contributors
rg3 · 2013-04-14
A similar thing happened to me with youtube-dl. I handed the project over and gave commit access to a couple of contributors who are now doing an excellent job at keeping the program up to date. Not long ago, this story was discussed here and makes a similar recommendation: http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
jacobr · 2013-04-14
If the OP would consider becoming a maintainer of a project they contribute to, and then follow their own advice, they do have some warrant to their complaints, otherwise not so much, for the reasons you state. I got a substantial pull request to an open source project of mine [1] that I don't have much time for, and followed the "Pull Request Hack" [2] and made the committer a maintainer. My GitHub notifications for that project now follows this pattern: "Random user: Hi, please merge my changes", "Maintainer: Thanks for your contribution, I made some changes and merge it in!". That's pretty fulfilling. 1: https://github.com/jacobrask/node-upnp-device 2: http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html (although this was before I read the article)
deathanatos · 2015-09-11
> PS. I was truly impressed with Richard Hipp fixing each and every of these cases within a couple of hours of sending in a report. I can't stress how quickly this will turn me from "it's a good library" to "it's an amazing library". (Or prevent me from tacking on, "but it's kinda abandoned".) I've never sent patches SQLite's way, but I've sent patches to other open source projects, and whole quarters go by with nary a peep. This is not only frustrating, but often it feels like it pushes more work onto me than just accepting an even potentially buggy patch would cause. If I'm sending a patch, there's a good chance I'm using it myself, and thus your library has become a special-cased wart in my deployment process that I'd very much like to kill. (E.g., since I work in Python: I can't `pip install package==version` anymore; it needs to be on Github or something; thankfully pip makes this fairly easy; patches to things that some other package has decided to bundle rather than just use the package-manager approved version of are especially painful.) While I'm not sure I'd go this far, the lament reminds me of http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
relistan · 2025-02-14
Pretty sure it’s a reference to ideas like this: https://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack/ which have been popular for a long time in open source.
jimmytucson · 2023-07-15
This is a post about another post: https://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack/ The tl;dr is up top: Whenever somebody sends you a pull request, give them commit access to your project.
mizzao · 2023-05-30
Another similar article, "the pull request hack": https://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack/
j_s · 2017-09-11
The Pull Request Hack | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5357417 (March 2013) http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html > Whenever somebody sends you a pull request, give them commit access to your project. I agree with requiring more accountability before granting the ability to create official releases.
chrisdotcode · 2013-08-27
This was Felixge - former core Node.js developer - with his pull request hack [0]. [0] http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html
Glyptodon · 2013-04-04
Complaints and arguments about this were (I think) the genesis of this blog post previously discussed on HN: http://felixge.de/2013/03/07/open-source-and-responsibility.html
benilov · 2013-04-14
> I even considered not submitting this comment, for fear of anyone misunderstanding or taking this the wrong way, and the inevitable "open source is a responsibility" responses. I'm glad that you did, thank you for taking the time to respond. > The thing is, you're actually implying more than you're saying. What you really mean is, "You could always have the courtesy to acknowledge the bug or PR I’ve submitted as soon as I submit it." While I've definitely been guilty of impatience in the past, now I try to measure the response against some kind of "OSS time", which is a lot more forgiving. I appreciate that people are likely to be busy, or away with their kids in Hawaii for the past two weeks. Having said that... > The maintainer may just be really busy this month. Or maybe they've been really busy for 6 months. I think one month is a bit long to have to wait for a response. 6 months: most certainly too long. In those cases, the "pull request hack" [1] may be the way forward. [1] http://felixge.de/2013/03/11/the-pull-request-hack.html

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