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Publishing your work increases your luck

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Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#61

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

This resonates with how I’ve been thinking about open source. I see the steps as:

1. Personally identify a pain in your own work, and it most likely will be a pain for many others.

2. Build a solution to solve for it.

3. Organically talk about it in forums — for me this is Reddit, HN lately and to some extent Bluesky.

When people ask why I build open source, I say it’s about signaling. As other comments have mentioned, if you’re fortunate enough that it gains traction, it becomes your calling card and can lead to consulting and jobs. It’s analogous to academic publishing (used to do more of that) but with different dynamics.

My personal examples of solving for a pain are:

[A] I started building the Langroid LLM agent framework after having a look at LangChain in Apr 2023, at a time when there was hardly any talk of LLM-agents. The aim was to create a principled, hackable, lightweight library for building LLM applications, and agents happened to be a good abstraction: https://github.com/langroid/langroid

[B] With the explosion of Claude Code and similar CLI coding agents, there were several interesting problems to solve for myself, and I started collecting them here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools One such tool is a lossless alternative to compaction, and a Tmux-CLI tool/skill for CLI agents to interact with others.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#64

Post by zrail »

sph wrote: post #58
CatMustard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?" "I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history." "Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."

I like this, turning software maintenance into a long-running game of tag.

I like to refer to it as the cooties ownership model. I.e. once you touch it you have cooties.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#65

Post by saghm »

CatMustard wrote: post #57
ozim wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what we do in closed source corporate code.

"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?" "I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history." "Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."

I'd be tempted to try to trick them into merging a small change so then they're the new owner and have to figure it out themselves.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#67

Post by ghaff »

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…

You're sort of describing networks more broadly whether you initiate a connection or someone at a company does. Latterly, I didn't apply in the usual sense for 25 years or so.

Don't code a lot but have written books which led to book signings at conferences that probably led to other opportunities if I had the need to exploit them.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#68

Post by ghaff »

ItsYan wrote: post #12
volkercraig wrote: post #5

I 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?

I am going through interviews with founders on https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ and it is indeed what happens. It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show. And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the…

"Becoming known" (the definition of which I leave as an exercise for the reader) isn't an automatic meal ticket but it does, as I allude to in another comment, lead to connections that you can sometimes take advantage of in various ways.

Whether that's open source code, writing, various consulting, speaking at conferences, etc. will vary with the person. And the more you can do on a company's dime the better.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#69

Post by CatMustard »

saghm wrote: post #65
CatMustard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?" "I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history." "Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."

I'd be tempted to try to trick them into merging a small change so then they're the new owner and have to figure it out themselves.

The Passing of the Curse

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#70

Post by jckahn »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #66

I wrote a few math books. Does it increase my luck? A little bit, here or there. Will I recoup the 1200+ hours working on the project and be paid at least minimum wage for that? No chance.

I've had a similar experience with being a relatively prolific OSS contributor. It's a decent look professionally, but it hasn't led to employment.
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