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Publishing your work increases your luck

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Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#41

Post by michaelt »

FabCH wrote: post #30

The 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…

Some fields of engineering have long had roles with names like that.

Want to do something with motors, but don’t know how to calculate the right combination of motor, gearbox, brake, encoder and controller? Maxon’s sales engineers will happily walk you through the calculations.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#43

Post by pona-a »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #37
notarobot123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it. However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?

I think srchut is one solution. Its email workflow does successfully deter less experienced/curious people, for better or worse, and it still has some project discovery bit not social signals like stars.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#44

Post by esperent »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #17

> 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've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about.

Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".

There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#46

Post by Agraillo »

foxfired wrote: post #22
ronbenton wrote: post #8

I 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 delet…

Thanks for sharing. After reading that comment, I realized we should encourage ourselves and others (who are more or less civilized human beings) to be the kind of person who wrote "that's a good thing..." - because fighting trolls is a game with unknown results, but encouraging people works much better. It doesn't always work, though, because sometimes the platform's nature prevents it. Like on Stack Overflow, where commenting on reactions will probably get you downvoted for being off-topic.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#47

Post by dmezzetti »

The message here is good. I've now spent over 5 years in the OSS world (https://github.com/neuml). I started by picking a problem I was interested in and checking the work into GitHub. I've been extremely fortunate to have gained a following over the years.

Even with a following, most of the time when you publish it goes into the abyss. Every once in a while something hits but most of the time it takes a lot of patience and resolve. I've had some good visibility over the years from Reddit and Hacker News (though any post I make now on HN is marked as [dead]). It's not always fair and others can "pay" to get the visibility.

I've seen some of the other comments talking about the burden of OSS but I haven't felt that. I set my own agenda and fix what I want to fix. If someone wants to change my priorities that becomes a paid effort.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#48

Post by [deleted] »

ayuhito wrote: post #39

I strongly relate to this in many ways. Because of OSS, I’ve never actually applied for a job or done a Leetcode interview. I’ve gotten multiple direct offers through Twitter DMs (I don’t post) and multiple referrals through random encounters that I never used. E.g. Debugging an interesting issue with GitHub customer support eventually led to a referral for Microsoft by an MD. Similar stories with Cloudflare and more…

[deleted]

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#49

Post by tor825gl »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #17

> 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…

A counterpart to TFA which somewhat chimes with your position:https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...

It's an article about how some of the best people do work that engages with public view and discussion either very trivially or not at all (or both).

Hard to describe more clearly but it has been a huge influence on me.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#50

Post by blitzar »

esperent wrote: post #44
crystal_revenge wrote: post #17

> 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've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR". There's alre…

"when your fix is accepted you are the new maintainer"
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