I'm not a "real" developer. More of a savvy user or enthusiast. So I'm pretty pleased with myself after having my first pull request accepted for Steemit's condenser platform.
For those who don't know, the codebase for steemit.com is open source and available on github. Anybody with the skill and desire to do so can contribute to the web site. I have a few ideas for improvements to the site that seem simple enough, so I've looked around the source a bit. I wasn't able to figure out how to implement my ideas, but I recently came across a problem that put well meaning users at risk of losing SBD.
By now a lot of us have heard about @randowhale. He's a new whale account set up specifically to let users spend 2 SBD to get a random vote, which may end up increasing their earnings above the 2 SBD they spent. Cool idea, right?!
Well... Apparently somebody decided that it would be a good opportunity to take advantage of people, and essentially steal money from people for making a simple mistake....
Serial small time scammer and troll @noganoo registered the name @randomwhale in order to steal from the honest members of our community. By the time I learned about it, he had already taken 10 SBD from users who made a simple mistake. (which would not have been possible until he created his scam account... the blockchain won't let you send tokens to accounts which don't exist!)
From poking around before, I knew where to find the list of "bad actors" that the wallet warns you about during transfers.
I knew that by adding @randomwhale to the list, it might help users avoid the scam that others had already fallen victim to. It was a little thing, but it could help. So I decided to give it a shot. And with the help of @lukestokes, who walked me through the process of forking the repository, committing my changes, and finally submitting the pull request... I did it!
After a bit of time, I got a notification that it had been reviewed. @sneak accepted it and merged it! Soon, when a user accidentally fills in "randomwhale", they will get a notice to check the name they are sending to.
I'm remarkably proud for having done so little! :D