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Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

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Re: Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

#41

Post by andai »

As long as you're learning, old code will make you cringe, though it gets subtler over time.

Though, sometimes things turned out rough because I was too impatient to learn the right way (especially for one-off programs).

My favorite example is when I didn't know how loops worked in PHP, so I wrote an ActionScript program that generated hundreds of lines of PHP instead...

Re: Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

#42

Post by jll29 »

jmclnx wrote: post #3

I have things out in github that is very embarrassing, so go for it. But I wonder if putting embarrassing things in github would hurt future job searches ? I very much doubt that since the people doing the hiring will not have any idea what they are looking at :)

One can put a disclaimer in the README to mitigate this saying "I wrote this when I was twelve", then future employers may forgive that your game code isn't optimized for 64 bit multi-core CPUs and your comments don't compare favourably to Fred Brooks' comments (may he Rest In Peace).

Re: Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

#44

Post by _fat_santa »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #38

I just published the source code for the first app I ever built, all the way back in 2003: https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/irooster It "turns your Mac into a $2,000 alarm clock." I originally made it because I had endless amounts of trouble waking up for my morning classes in college, and found that the only alarm that could get me up was a subwoofer right underneath my bed. So I hooked a 2.1 speaker system up to m…

Back when I was in college me and a few classmates put together a site where you could share files with others using a link. Looking back at it, there are so many issues with the code, from just about every perspective. Up until recently i still kept it as an item on my resume, described something like "my first web app project, preserved with all it's bad code and questionable practices".

https://github.com/sgolovine/transmit

Re: Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

#45

Post by eeue56 »

I tend to put anything other there that I consider interesting for others to see, or something that I might want to share with others. For example - ways to to abuse a type system, or how to do something weird like embedding Elm within React. The truth is that if you put out a lot of code, very few people will see any of it, unless you intentionally and directly share with them. If you're applying for a job, chose your favourite repos and send them over. If you want to avoid any form of judgement, just put a disclaimer in the readme. When it comes to games - there will never be enough open source games out there. Being able to see how something done, however hacky, will be great for hobby game programmers.

Re: Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

#46

Post by mauvehaus »

Go for it! Hell, I threw up some current code on GitHub that's arguably embarrassing (link in profile).

It's not like anybody posting crummy code in answers on stackoverflow is worried about the quality reflecting on them. Or the blog entries that are more or less "I've just learned $technology; now I'm going to tell the world!"

If you've at least got a fully baked project, even if it isn't up to your current standards, you're miles ahead of some of the code people publish.

Re: Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

#47

Post by mauvehaus »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #38

I just published the source code for the first app I ever built, all the way back in 2003: https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/irooster It "turns your Mac into a $2,000 alarm clock." I originally made it because I had endless amounts of trouble waking up for my morning classes in college, and found that the only alarm that could get me up was a subwoofer right underneath my bed. So I hooked a 2.1 speaker system up to m…

I realize that this may not be in the spirit of the question being asked, but could this not be done with the following?

   0 6 * * 1-5 open /path/to/bangin/tunes.mp3
I'm all about reinventing the wheel, but that's a lot of code to replace cron :-D

Re: Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

#48

Post by anxiously »

My suggestion is to go for it.

With that being said, do take the time to examine the git commit messages and code itself.

I have certainly caught myself from publishing projects that contained words or jokes that would not go over well in 2022 :)

Re: Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

#49

Post by Donckele »

I’ve had this thought for some time and only last week did I visit my github page to see what I could do. An idea was to merge all the “beginner” repos into a single repo.

Turns out that recent repos are not to shabby at all and all the other older repos are sort of kinda cute and show that I’ve been having about for some time.

And of course I have private repos for “pro” work.

My advice is to make public some recent serious work and all will be good.

Re: Ask HN: Publish old projects even though the source code embarrasses you by now?

#50

Post by pjmlp »

No problem being embarassed, I have stuff published from my high school days (used to carry a 1.44 floppy with MS-DOS 3.3 and TP stuff on it, to get an idea when it was), and university as well.

Headhunters are happy I can check the "I have stuff on github" bullet point, and that is about it.

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