“You Can’t Just Fix the README”: An Interview with Vaclav

On hacking, hitting walls, and building better contributor journeys

“If it breaks, then it is wrong.”

Q: What kind of contributor are you?

Vaclav: ADHD-powered. I can’t stick to one thing for long. I move where I see impact. If a new protocol launches, like Codex, I’ll drop what I’m doing and jump in. I’m a lifelong generalist. I map the big picture, bridge gaps, and then move on.

Q: What’s your origin story? When did you start hacking things?

Vaclav: Childhood highlight: I plugged a 3.5 W light bulb straight into a wall socket. Beautiful explosion. Glass everywhere.

When I was eight, I borrowed a blue book from the library because the cover looked cool. It was about Prolog. I typed its code into a text file, had no clue how to run it, but I was hooked.

Teenage me read a PHP manual twice on a riverside camping trip. I came home, opened a text editor, and coded the whole thing from memory. Curiosity was the only IDE I had.

Q: First contribution? What was that like?

Vaclav: Day one at Red Hat, my boss left for a two-week vacation. “Figure it out,” they said.

My first real contribution was a GRUB Legacy bug fix for a power-plant data-center. I patched two of three regex lines. Next morning, Starbucks and the facility had thousands of boxes stuck in boot. QA was gone in a month. I learned to never trust duplicated code.

Q: Were you supported, or left to sink or swim?

Vaclav: Swim. Barely. The previous maintainer answered emails three days late, usually with “Hi, I don’t know.” I skip onboarding docs anyway. If a system shatters when a newcomer pokes it, the system is wrong.