Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?

I read all the comments. But I don't see anybody asking:

"Why do you think you need to share your code?"

"What benefit(s) do you expect to gain from sharing your code?"

I always found I learned a lot more when I expanded upon the coding assignments and added my own features. Not only did I learn more, I found it much more enjoyable. In some cases it took something that would have just been an assignment and turned it into something useful for me. I’m not sure why not being able to share the code with the world would change the value proposition of doing that stuff?

I also have to assume there is some limit on how long you’re expected to hide your work away? After you graduate, if you make the repo public, what are they going to do?

Well, I've enjoyed it too, but I'd rather spend that time contributing to OSS if it's potentially the difference between getting a job.

Old head engineering serial founder here with a partial grey beard that from reading the comments herein sees myself and my security practices as an edge case, an experienced lonely outlier it appears.

First to the OP mentions about schooling experiences which struck a nerve with me, I would add that in my 4th year of College programming classes; Assembly and C, I too helped the other 6 people in my class while in the computer lab. This was the 1990s long before the dotcom boom and classes were very small in software development, folks even laughed at me for taking programming then however they do not laugh at me now. The point in this paragraph is that I too had my entire projects stolen and turned in verbatim by 3 others in my class and the professor, who was a systems programmer at Bank of America at the time, knew whose work they had turned in since I was the only person in class that understood it. She spoke to me in private and advised me to not share my code with anyone and dumbass me should have carried that forward into the real world then.

Code theft has been a thing since code was first written and this should be no surprise when most people have no idea how to formulate large sets of code into a unified function for business let alone the time it takes to write and prove that approach. I started writing software professionally in the 1990s and was the architect and sole developer of a payment processors gateway that had PayPal and several other Fortune 500 clients for many years. My company acquired another small entity within this time and unknown to us our action of interest proved to be the point of proof needed to set in motion a lawsuit from an outside third party. That third party claimed that the acquired owner and his business we bought stole their code which in time laid the interest for us to acquire that business. 10 years later and after many a court hearing that acquired owner lost the lawsuit after he was proven to have stolen the code and built a business making significant revenue from that stolen code. He was fined 5+ MM USD and had his wages garnished which he likely is still paying to this day. Yes, code theft is a real thing but many here likely have no idea.

Fast forward some time later after I had entirely rewrote my intellectual property from the ground up again into version 5 and I founded another payment processor with my intellectual property work, Yup, that code was then too stolen and used to build yet another competing business by a former business partner that felt he was entitled to my intellectual property. Yes, code theft is a real thing or maybe it is just me?

A few weeks back I attended a patent meeting discussion North of Washington DC that had several tens of people there, many younger than myself. The lawyers running the presentation were cracking jokes about the current and coming tsunami of lawsuits involving A.I. code theft and after the presentation over half the people there in discussion groups stated they were attending in an attempt to patent their A.I. solutions. The lawyers very clearly stated that they would most likely be wasting their time and money as the courts were now wise to the trolls that have no intention of applying the patent they seek to a use other than just blanket patenting mass ideas in a hope to cash in on a patent lawsuit down the line.

After nearly 30 years of doing this it has taken many scars to understand the correct approach to protect my intellectual property that is still powering past payments companies of which I founded and built. I am now applying those lessons in a way for my next venture that will ensure only I can execute my ideas with my code since the world is overrun with many liars and cheats that now exist only to claim others work as their own in hopes to get rich easily from all the big tech hysteria and FOMO. I will continue on doing what I do using my old school proven ways to build what I am building now that continues to excite me even more with each passing day as that idea manifests into my next business venture that everyone alive will need, energy storage.

Your mileage will vary greatly from my own but I leave everyone with this point to think on; why hasn't Coke published their recipe on a publicly open forum? Code is just a recipe after all but maybe it's really the chef that matters?

Stay Healthy!

Isn't the whole purpose of publishing open source so people can "rip it off"? Just publish it with an an easy license (I like MIT). Anyone who strips the MIT license headers off your source isn't really likely to be somebody who's going to do something worthwhile with it. Grown-up programmers don't do that. And, I don't think I have EVER heard of a grown-up programmer claiming that somebody "stole their code". Is this something that actually really happens? I don't think so.

tbh, as someone who hires programmers, "here's a link to the code u can request independently of github" would be a dead giveaway that you are a junior programmer. It seems decidedly weird to me. Grown-up programmers don't really do that. If you want to share the code, then share it. If you don't, then don't. There's so much freely available source code available already that it seems vanishingly improbable that anyone is ever going to "request the code"; but if you just post it on github, there is a vanishing probability that somebody might actually find it useful, and.. well.. use it!

And if you are expecting potential employers to "request the code", don't. If you are a junior, it's a given that your code will be awful. Perfectly expected, and perfectly normal. Once you're hired, that will be fixed. Not a problem.

My vote: just publish it. Do it with purity of intent. You want to make code available that other people might find useful. And don't sweat the details.