I went to a small hackathon that brought together a diverse cast of engineering students and software professionals and my team did not have an ambitious idea, so we fixed something unclear in the Ruby-on-Rails docs about what a standard library function does.

I hardly ever program in Ruby, but I contributed by looking at the C source code for that function and based on what I knew about C, confirmed they were right, so we added a few sentences and made a pull request then walked home with GitHub branded water bottles.

The core developers of Clojure are very busy and and they know the software very well so they are incapable of understanding what it is like for a noob -- a beginner has the unique viewpoint of what it feels like for a beginner.

A commercial software company has salespeople, sales engineers, product managers, project managers, designers as well as wildcat coders who try to simulate the "voice of the consumer" but in the case of open source you pay no money but you have to speak for yourself.

We've got free speech and you've got the right to complain. But really, if you are learning a subject like Physics you will go to a lecture or read and take notes as a basic part of understanding the material, programming is no different than that.

In the big picture it isn't much of a stretch to write your notes into the official documentation since the next time you need to look something up you'll see something great.

It is not at all like "making your own hardware" because this is a matter of making a the smallest possible change in something that already exists and typically has a good build system, version control, and tools in place to make the change.