Eric J Ma's Website

I recently had a few PRs merged into the PyMC3 codebase. Really happy about it, and just like my previous bug fix, I thought I'd share a bit about how those PRs came about.

The first PR was an update to the docs on when to specify precision and when to specify standard deviation. They're related, so only one has to be specified, but I sometimes am sloppy when reading the docs and didn't pick up on that. Thus, I added a few lines to make sure this was crystal clear to sloppy readers like me.

The next PR was an update to the Mixture model docs, in which I added an example of the new API for specifying components of mixture models. It previously wasn't clear how to do this, as there were no examples provided, so I put in a documentation PR specifying examples.

The final PR was a patch to the Weibull distribution. I wanted to play around with trying mixture Weibulls at work, but mixture Weibulls wouldn't work because it didn't have a mode specified. I checked on Wikipedia, and found that Weibull's mode is conditional on the value of its parameters, and thus put in a PR to make this happen. Trying it out on some simulated/toy data, it worked! Thus, the devs allowed it to be merged.

A few lessons I've learned along the way:

(1) Docs are an awesome place to start. In fact, I made a few formatting mistakes in my first and second PRs that gave an opportunity for another guy to fix! Nothing is too small to be made as a contribution. FWIW, my first contribution to open source software were documentation fixes for matplotlib, and that was a superb learning journey!

(2) Friendly maintainers are crucial. The PyMC dev team can basically be described as, "generally super nice!" From the online and in-person interactions I've had with them, there's little in the way of egos, they're always learning, always being generally helpful. If they weren't that way, I very likely would have second thoughts trying putting in a PR there.

(3) Open source lets me fix bugs I find. This lets me work at the pace that I need to, without having to wait for commercial vendors to provide update patches. If the patch that I find turns out to be useful for others, then the work I did can possibly save a ton of people's time as well. Win-win scenario!