Perspective: Maintainers vs Contributors

One of the major goals as a software developer is to ensure that what you produce can be used by a variety of people. This concept may manifest itself in ensuring that your end users will find a piece of software as easy to use as the devs already think it is to use (it's obvious, isn't it?), or packaging your apps/coding environments into some kind of distributable container so that they will run consistently across differently configured machines.

What we do and produce is the product of our own perspective; we see the world through our own eyes, and without constant, unadulterated, inhuman, hypervigilance we may find ourselves overlooking certain details from time to time (oh, to be an inhumanly hypervigilant dev).

For example, as a repo creator, you might create a CONTRIBUTING.md file while using <a href="https://blog.github.com/2016-02-17-issue-and-pull-request-templates/">this great feature github has for creating templates for pull requests and issues</a>, which includes putting those new template files in a .github folder, along with your CONTRIBUTING.md to reduce clutter in your root directory  (Contributing.md was indeed in the root directory to start) in your repo that hold other code. Suddenly, unless you're paying attention, this move breaks any links that may have pointed to CONTRIBUTING.md, Like ones from README.md. If you're the owner of a repo, you probably know how to contribute to your own repo (unless it's been a while, or you're particularly decaffeinated), and probably won't be clicking around on various links to try to access information on how to contribute to the repo. As a visitor to a new repository you become a first time user of various bits of documentation associated with the repo. This means that you may look at things that the creator hasn't looked at in ages, or, with a fresh perspective, you may realize that certain documentation is missing or vague in terms or setting up the dev environment, etc. I found the issue of broken links to CONTRIBUTING.md while browsing a repo, and while the pull request was trivial, hopefully it helps anyone else who comes across the repo.




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