I used to release some writing and publish code publicly but the mean comments got to me.
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Publishing your work increases your luck
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#22I used to release some writing and publish code publicly but the mean comments got to me.
If it makes you feel better, on reddit, I shared my very first blog post about deprecating mysql_* functions in php. As a result, someone said something mean about my mother. I figured the web was full of trolls.
But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delete my blog. I was so embarrassed.
When I came back, there was a reply to that comment. It said something like "that's a good thing, 7th grade level writing means we can all understand it easily". And that was enough to keep me going. 13 years so far.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#23> Having your OSS library take off All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world. I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interest…
Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing.
Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)?
An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#24I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else.
Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money.
This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me.
Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all.
There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#25I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?
When we become ghost content producers for LLMs, you are not supposed to hear something in reply to your post, book, or other work. Most of the time, your work will be ingested by a handful of companies as training data; the readers benefitting from your work will pay these companies, and in return these companies will thoroughly shield and insulate you from being thanked by the people you helped. These companies will do their best to ensure you are motivated to continue producing honest content that can keep their LLMs from choking on their own output.
The exceptions to this are closed (or semi-closed) communities and forums where you directly interact with humans, either by inertia due to a large established human user base or (for newer, smaller communities) via personal vetting of participants.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#26> Having your OSS library take off All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world. I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interest…
I recently unpublished a couple libraries because I was so fed up with maintaining them.
Lot's of entitled "I want to speak to the manager" types ruined it for me.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#27translated from marketing-droid-ese: > greetings peasants! er, sorry, valued open source contributors! > remember, without you feeding us training data, we won't be able to train our AI to replace you at your dayjob! > now, get back to work
I’m sure they probably train on private repos too
self hosting git is very easy.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#28> Having your OSS library take off All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world. I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interest…
Exactly this. Word by word. Some of my OSS projects got popular accidentally and oh boy… pain in the butt for real.
And for little benefits to myself. Hitting HN front page or r/programming was nice for my ego. But that’s about it.
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#29Sounds like Fallout mechanics
Re: Publishing your work increases your luck
#30The article was written by „Aaron Francis, Marketing Engineer“.
I’m not a language purist, but are we really calling people who work in marketing „marketing _enginners_“ nowadays?
That seems like going a bit too far with the meaning of engineering…