Use beta software!

Let me explain.

Many of us avoid alpha, beta, release-candidate, prerelease, whatever you wanna call software that is still unfinished. And that’s completely legit.

But I strongly believe that there can be something magical in the use of beta software.

I’d call this, “contributor euphoria” and it happened to me in the past for different projects, but lately I’ve been looking into VanillaOS and hopefully I’ll be able to help a useful project with a nice community.

Familiarizing with a fresh codebase and fixing problems that the maintainers have not yet found can really make you feel part of a project, even better if you can contribute with your own patches!

And if you don’t really have enough experience to look into someone else’s codebase, then you could simply help the community out by intercepting people that write in support chatrooms and directing them towards a fix for their problem.

Or you could help with internationalization, translating documentation and/or software interfaces. Many people all around the world know enough English to be able to translate documents in their own native language.

And the best part in all of this is, you are helping a new project grow and shape, by being present in the discussion, by partecipating in the making or simply by helping its userbase.

Conclusions #

Use betas if you can, if you have enough time on your hands or even an hour a day, you can be of great help to projects out there, even if you don’t believe so.

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