Wait until every line you write has to be code reviewed when you get a job.
Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
11–20 of 100 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
#12> I worry about other students being lazy and just ripping my hard work and claiming it as their own. That really pisses me off when I hear some horror stories like that.
Make the code part of your professional marketing. It’s not code for code sake but to enable you to blog, speak, etc about something interesting. Then there’s little chance some theoretical thief is also communicating those ideas. And if you’re good at evangelizing yourself it SHOULD happen that someone steals your code. If anyone looks up the ideas, they’ll be inundated by content you created. The code is secondary.
Re: Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
#13People have already given you practical reasons why you're better off keeping it public. To answer your question as to how to get over your fear, you need to ask yourself what you're afraid of. You've mentioned you're worried about someone ripping off your hard work and claiming it as their own. If you can understand the root of why the idea of that pisses you off, you will probably find it's an artificial construct of ego. Understand the root and the fear will loosen it's grip.
Re: Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
#14[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
#15One of the things you learn as you get older is other people don't think about you (or at all) as much you think they do/will. We are often our own worst critics - put your stuff out there, there is little to lose and some upside, if someone likes your demo and clicks through to see the code and can see it then that's a low friction path, by having to request access most people won't or will - but forget all about it…
thank you , yeah I think im overthinking this
Echoing what others have said: just post your stuff. If you're not intentionally publicizing yourself or your work, I can nearly guarantee that no one will ever even look at your work. I've been putting up my little personal projects up on my GitHub for over ten years, and yet no one's ever come around to look at them except when I intentionally posted links to those projects on places like HN.
No one's going to look unless you ask them to look. If you already have a big audience (over 100+ people daily using things you've built) no one is going to "get curious" about your projects. So just post them so folks can see them.
Re: Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
#16You're severely overthinking. The Code isn't important. It's what you build with it that people care about.
Re: Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
#17I’ve had several people steal my open-source code for different projects before. I’m talking copying (not cloning) the whole thing, changing the credit to their name, making no other modifications, and then republishing on their account. Fortunately they never gained much traction. The ones I know about I blocked on GitHub with a note. No idea if they ever found out or if they tried workarounds, but I figured there’s…
What license did you use? Most licenses require that forks change the name, few require credit except for original copyright headers, and no licenses require modification
Re: Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
#18Scott Hanselman have a good blog post about this suggesting you should detach yourself from your code:
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/you-are-not-your-code
Especially true when working as an employee where you don't own your code.
Re: Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
#19I think the thieves you worry about are actually going steal your code through LLM laundering, without even knowing who it was stolen from.
If you're not going to do a startup with your code, you probably need to focus on a mix of learning and self-promotion. With the market prioritizing self-promotion. Which probably means just trying to make sure that code that reflects well on you, does so.
Which probably means making it it open source, even if AI training data companies will steal it and give it away.
Re: Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
#20One of the things you learn as you get older is other people don't think about you (or at all) as much you think they do/will. We are often our own worst critics - put your stuff out there, there is little to lose and some upside, if someone likes your demo and clicks through to see the code and can see it then that's a low friction path, by having to request access most people won't or will - but forget all about it…
thank you , yeah I think im overthinking this
It’s a well studied psychological phenomena too.