Comment by meibo
1 day ago
Not sure if you've made this experience yet, but the one thing I've learned about being an involved maintainer of a sizeable open source project is that it's mostly about communicating.
You'll be talking to a lot of people and making sure that everyone is on the same page, and that's what's going on here, hopefully. If you just shut up and write code all day, you probably aren't gonna get there and there will be conflict, especially if other people are touching your systems and aren't expecting your changes.
In the 20 years that I've been working on sizeable closed source projects, it's also mostly about communicating. Even if the team is small, it's mostly about communicating. Occasionally some developers don't want to communicate, and prefer to shut up and write code all day, like you said. That usually creates more conflict due to different expectations, regardless of how brilliant you are.
And if the team is remote and distributed (like the Linux kernel team has been pretty much always), communication and documentation is even more important.
There is no "silent information" being distributed by random conversations around the office. If something is not explicitly written down, it did not happen and doesn't exist.