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Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

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Re: Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

#31

Post by naspeh »

stevebmark wrote: post #30

The state of Webpack does not reflect a 400k/year budget. The docs, API, source code, ecosystem... so happy to hear people making software engineering money get a second salary to keep doing this. We're all waiting for the thing that will replace Webpack so we don't have to keep using it. Maybe we should just go and make it.

I think it does. This area where webpack is trying to shine is just over-complex, so the tool can't be simple, that's it.

And most importantly as for me, developers who works full-time on such projects can sustain the higher quality and improve it over time and if you chose it for now it may been relevant year later or 2-3... I hope at least.

Re: Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

#32

Post by thejosh »

linkmotif wrote: post #28
hguhghuff wrote: post #2

Maybe they could employ a programmer who knows how to turn unbelievably complex software into incredibly simple software that doesn't include constant relentless breaking changes.

People leave nonsense comments like this just to spread FUD are so irritating. I upgraded 1–>2 a while back and it took a few changes based on informative error messages. People like this made me dread the upgrade thinking it would be complicated. It was basically painless. I’m on version 3–something now and have encountered no other breaking changes. It’s a great tool. I guess people who leave comments like this hav…

Great it worked out for you, but if it wasn't such a pain to upgrade (I know this from personal experience), wouldn't there be lesser FUD?

Re: Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

#33

Post by acemarke »

stevebmark wrote: post #30

The state of Webpack does not reflect a 400k/year budget. The docs, API, source code, ecosystem... so happy to hear people making software engineering money get a second salary to keep doing this. We're all waiting for the thing that will replace Webpack so we don't have to keep using it. Maybe we should just go and make it.

Tobias Koppers isn't making a "second salary". He was working on Webpack in his spare time, and can now work on it full-time thanks to the funding that's come in.

Re: Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

#34

Post by aphextron »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #12

The difficulty I have with Webpack is that there does not seem to be any unifying principle of how things work. The stream model of gulp and the resulting highly structured code that most often results means that I can generally find and fix bugs quickly, this is even possible in the horribly convoluted gulp file that we use at my current working place. In my experience when you have even a bit of webpack and there i…

Completely agreed. Webpack faces the exact issue that Grunt ran into which is these huge 'config files of doom' that end up as snowflakes which are hard to understand.

Rather, defining the build process entirely in code lets you step through the whole thing logically.

Re: Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

#35

Post by perpetualcrayon »

"Ever since we were able to grow the budget large enough for Tobias to work on Webpack full time..."

This is what the open source community needs. Steal the maintainers of the top 1% of open source projects from the "free market". The projects not already sponsored by corporations that is.

Or, why not work toward pairing these maintainers w/ companies who will let them spend most of their time working on said project. Might make it easier as far as fund raising is concerned.

I bet there's a niche for this second idea. It's not always obvious to the people cutting the checks just how valuable these side projects are to the world.

Re: Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

#36

Post by always_good »

thejosh wrote: post #32
linkmotif wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People leave nonsense comments like this just to spread FUD are so irritating. I upgraded 1–>2 a while back and it took a few changes based on informative error messages. People like this made me dread the upgrade thinking it would be complicated. It was basically painless. I’m on version 3–something now and have encountered no other breaking changes. It’s a great tool. I guess people who leave comments like this hav…

Great it worked out for you, but if it wasn't such a pain to upgrade (I know this from personal experience), wouldn't there be lesser FUD?

Is this your first time on HN? People will complain about anything and everything. They'll incessantly dismiss anything that they think they could have done better in a weekend.

There's this whole FUD around Javascript in general. If you didn't know better, you'd think there were client-side tools in other ecosystems where you didn't have to learn or credentialize in anything to build a full-featured client.

Re: Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

#38

Post by solidr53 »

stevebmark wrote: post #30

The state of Webpack does not reflect a 400k/year budget. The docs, API, source code, ecosystem... so happy to hear people making software engineering money get a second salary to keep doing this. We're all waiting for the thing that will replace Webpack so we don't have to keep using it. Maybe we should just go and make it.

Brunch.io maybe?

Re: Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

#39

Post by untog »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #23
untog wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to use two loaders (one being loaded by totally non-standard syntax inside the other loader ), a plugin (that specifies the output filename nowhere near where the others are specified) and then using a JavaScript require() function to include a CSS file is utterly demented. I get that's how Webpack users are used to doing it, but when you're new to it (or just coming back to it from a different build system) i…

Maybe, but it's understandable after five minutes and you literally have code you can copy and paste. I've seen much worse in basically every other language. We had a 5k line project, after the first day of setup, we've had to touch the webpack config once or twice. Also, feel free to disagree about the CSS, I think it's a very intuitive way of including assets.

You can copy and paste Webpack config to your heart's content, but actually understanding them is something else.

I thought the breaking API changes with 2.0 would at least accommodate this incredibly common use of a bundler, but no.

Re: Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

#40

Post by zx2c4 »

Nice to hear there's some hope... I managed to get some small grants and donations and things for WireGuard over part of this last year -- https://www.wireguard.com/donations/ -- but I don't have much lined up for next year, and I'm hoping I can figure it out in time to do WireGuard things full time. The thing is just getting funding lined up for [part of] this last year was a pretty time consuming hustle, and I'd rather spend that time writing code. This leads me to think I should find somebody to handle "fund raising" or "community mumblemumble" or something, but as WireGuard is a security-oriented project, communicating correctly is important, and I could imagine that somehow backfiring. The other thing is that I'd feel really uncomfortable putting up one of those thermometer overlays on the wireguard.com website; just adding the "donate" link in the corner was a bit much for me. So, hm. Nice to see the Webpack guys figure it out. Maybe I'll take some clues from there.
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