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The Rust project has a burnout problem

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Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#131

Post by marcosdumay »

seagreen wrote: post #64
sph wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a good description of what life is like working on almost any significant open source project. Open contributions project. An open source project does not necessarily have to accept random contributions, issues or hatemail from the general public. [1] They just need to make the source available with a permissive licence, period. I believe that Linux with its idiosyncrasies in its communication model (mailin…

> Open contributions project. That's a useful distinction and a good term. So in total projects can be classified as: - Source available or not - Open source or not (a subset of source available) - Open contributions or not (also a subset of source available) - BDFL or community driven That's a lot of variation and may explain why so many conversations about open source sound like people are talking past each other--…

> That's a lot of variation and may explain why so many conversations about open source sound like people are talking past each other

Most of the discussion is people suffering through GitHub-style social networks. I don't see a lot of people talking through each other, as much as I see people assuming this is the way, and others pointing out it's just one option.

At some point we have to acknowledge that GitHub is a toxic social network. The toxicity is way more hidden than Facebook and others like it, but it's there too. Every universalist social network is toxic.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#132

Post by carimura »

rkangel wrote: post #10

Do other people react as strongly as I did to the lack of capitalisation at the start of sentences? The post is generally "well" written with good grammar and punctuation so I find it strange - it feels like a style choice. But the style choice just instinctively makes part of my brain feel like it's written by a child.

it feels like a "sad" melancholy tone by design. The OPPOSITE of all caps.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#133

Post by markphip »

janoc wrote: post #83
vmfunction wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of my open source work was in the pre-GitHub days when we used mailing lists, not pull requests, to build community. I do think there was something better about that for the project itself as it encouraged a lot more discussion and community building. PR's and Issues become silos and are not great for general discussion. I think they also encourage drive-by contributions which honestly are intoxicating initial…

The problem *is not the organization/categorization*. Any larger project is completely unsustainable if it is a disorganized chaos, with issues falling through the cracks because they can't be kept track of as the scope and team grows. These tools are a great help there. The problem is this tooling is used for the wrong job. If the only "discussion" about an issue is the bug report/pull request, that's wrong. That sh…

Well said, this is what I was getting at as well. I think the barrier to contribution was too high in the old days, and that is where GitHub brought improvements, but it came with the loss of community. Everything becomes about PR's and Issues and Discussion was just lost. In the Apache community, the expectation used to be that everything had to happen on the mailing list. Even if someone created an issue, there was an expectation it had to come out of a mailing list thread.

I am not saying this was perfect or even better. Just that the side effects were different. Probably a lot of people did not bother contributing because the barrier was too high, but overall I think it created healthier community dynamics and it was not uncommon to see people begin as users asking questions, and evolve into users answering questions and eventually contributing to the development.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#134

Post by nusl »

nightowl_games wrote: post #73

I'm a game dev at a small studio. I have a discord full of gamers who all want me to do something or at least pay attention to them. Every time I release something new, someone hates it. It was hard for a bit, but I've been doing this for years. Honestly you just gotta tune out the noise and prioritize what you want. Open source project is a bit harder because you have to collaborate more than I have to collaborate w…

I don't think it's in any way possible to please everyone, and even if you find the objectively-best solution, someone will hate it and be very vocal about it. Most of the folks will carry on and not say anything.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#135

Post by wavemode »

rkangel wrote: post #10

Do other people react as strongly as I did to the lack of capitalisation at the start of sentences? The post is generally "well" written with good grammar and punctuation so I find it strange - it feels like a style choice. But the style choice just instinctively makes part of my brain feel like it's written by a child.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I barely noticed. I thought so little of it that, after reading your comment, I had to first go back to the article and verify that it even was the case.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#136

Post by fraaancis »

rkangel wrote: post #10

Do other people react as strongly as I did to the lack of capitalisation at the start of sentences? The post is generally "well" written with good grammar and punctuation so I find it strange - it feels like a style choice. But the style choice just instinctively makes part of my brain feel like it's written by a child.

    In a comment on another Rust-related post, the author noted that, "rust definitely skews younger than average. i don't have statistics on hand, but almost all people i know working on the project are younger than 35, and a surprising number are 17-25."  
    I've messed with Rust a bit and I like it.  I like the ideas and lack of compromise.  But good ideas and a lack of compromises are what you get from youth,  along with the arrogance of style choices that make things harder to understand.  Will Rust stick around once these folks have bigger responsibilities?

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#137

Post by voakbasda »

cozzyd wrote: post #127
throwaway17_17 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would assume, in the context of Microsoft encouraging engagement (specifically the PR feature of GitHub), the more engagement they have the more code is put into their system, thereby allowing them more data to train Copilot and other ML models.

conspiracy theory: GH is Microsoft's ploy to kill open source once and for all by facilitating burnout. (obviously false, but entertaining to think about)

What makes it “obvious”? They tried to kill Linux and Open Source. I will never forgive them, and I sure as hell would never trust them not to try again.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#138

Post by amelius »

Buttons840 wrote: post #60
cjs_ac wrote: post #4

> the best way to help the project is to keep contributing for it for years. to do that, you have to avoid burning out, which means you have to treat yourself well. When I was a schoolteacher, the way I expressed this is that you have to do the job in such a way today that you're capable of doing it again tomorrow. This did not go down well and I am no longer a teacher.

Similarly, the optimal amount of exercise is the amount that maximizes the probability that you will exercise tomorrow.

... times the amount of exercise.

Otherwise the amount would be arbitrarily close to zero.

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#139

Post by nusl »

medo-bear wrote: post #67

> if you are paid to work on rust, you likely started as an unpaid contributor and got the job later. treat it like a job now. do not work overtime; do not volunteer at every turn; do not work on things far outside your job description. But if I don't work overtime how can I rewrite everything in Rust?

Ask your employer to let you do it in work hours rather than burning employees out with overtime for essential maintenance tasks

Re: The Rust project has a burnout problem

#140

Post by CyberDildonics »

On top of the usual problems of a project becoming about maintenance and negativity, languages are destined to become diminishing returns and new languages always end up ruining themselves trying to add more to the foundations.

You can see with D, Rust, haskell, and whatever else, the transition to working on an ecosystem with easy to use and polished tools, IDEs, debuggers, autocompletion just never happens. The languages that get heavy use like C++, java and python solved the chicken and egg problem of having an ecosystem at some point where there was an actual workflow instead of just a hacked plugin and a command line.

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