Patch submitted to the Linux kernel by a 4 year old.

You done fucked up from the moment you turned 5. That's where you went wrong. You should have just stopped getting older

The Internet didn't even exist when I was four, let alone Linux, so I don't feel so bad.

she's going to one of those mythical 20 yo with 15 years of experience 😉

You can start now!

I am no developer, but I've submitted my first patch a few months ago.

It simply added my laptop to a list of quirks, in order to make the microphone work.

Unpaid child labour!

A girl read documentation and see that all the titles are underlined with -, but one of the letter isn't underlined like the others (that's the lonely s). Then she asks the person doing the commit to fix it and they fix it together.

So in the documentation they had

1.9 Ext4 file system parameters
------------------------------

As you can see the 's' doesn't get a '-' under it. So they changed the documentation to:

1.9 Ext4 file system parameters
-------------------------------

so the 's' in parameters gets a dash under it.

this seems to be the standard as everywhere else the dashes go for the same length of characters as the above line. Example:

2.0 /proc/consoles
------------------

The little girl said the 's' in parameters is sad because it didn't get the dash under it and it was all alone. So they added the dash.

See the first red box in the documentation text? The underline dashes don't go up to the last letter (s).

4 year old girl said the "s" was sad because of that, uncle submitted a patch to fix that, and it was accepted.

The line of code (well, documentation in the code) used to look like something like this (I'm not sure if this formatting will work on mobile, sorry):

The code ends with an s

----------------------

And after her changes it looks like this:

The code ends with an s

------------------------

See how I added an extra - in that second line? That makes the S happier because now it also has a - below it like all the other letters. This also just generally makes that line more consistent with other spots in the code. So it's not a bad change. It doesn't do anything really but making your code format nice, easy to read, and consistent is usually important in programming so although it doesn't do anything tangible it's still a valuable change!

She spotted that there was a missing - in the underline for a heading in a piece of documentation, and her parent helped her submit a fix.

The first red box shows that the dotted line underneith the text doesn't go all the way to the s in the text above. In the other red box, the dotted line goes all the way.

The neice submitted a patch to add the missing line.

You mean the inclusivity TED Talk.

Her coding style is on point, though.

Sphinx has warnings for these already. They're just suppressed and ignored :)

No but the parents can on her behalf

Which copyright assignment?

A bunch of = aren't copyrightable but even if they were, the child would retain the copyright.

Why wouldn't they be?

I think it's fucking adorable. And kudos to the Uncle for using it as a learning moment instead of just brushing her off or doing it for her. Curiosity should be encouraged and this is a great example why.

(งツ)ว

It's almost 9 years ago, I think we're good.

I just noticed it's from 2014.

Nope, I was smiling like a maniac the whole time I was reading. Reject cynicism 😀

Welcome to Open Source software where its ok to help once and never again. Thats actually not even a bad thing.

Imagine there is this one project that kicks everyones autism and has many issues. But only a team of 100 people is allowed to change its code. I'd rather want the world to change the code and make it improve for everyones liking. Even if it was just one commit and never again.

Think about it this way. It's a social project. Everybody does their part to help. If they can only help once, great! If they have time to help a few hours a week, great! If they want to help in a significant way, great!

With these social projects, the most important thing is to help, even once.

I would normally be inclined to agree but this isn't one of those "omg I just had the most intelligent conversation with my 4-yo today".

It's clearly someone sharing their hobby/job with their niece, and what better way to do that than by including them in a practical aspect. It also literally says they "helped her as she's 4 years old".

You commenting is only bringing more attention to the post by increasing the comment count so maybe reevaluate your approach in the future if you're so against wholesome content.