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What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

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Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#61

Post by quasque »

flatfilefan wrote: post #42
brotchie wrote: post #14

There exist two types of people: 1. "Hur hur, sed piped with other tools already does this, you loser, why did you waste your time?" 2. "Cool, a different take on sed written in Javascript. They've written some basic doco and made a npm package, I might try it." Ignore #1 online and in-person, be friends with #2. People who adhere to type 1 behaviour are alien to me. I fundamentally don't understand what their motiva…

I guess the point of the #1 is they may be trying to hit you with a clue. sometmes not in a most efficient way, hurted feeling stay in the way of learning.

Perhaps, but comments like "I cannot even make this stuff up" and "eyes bleeding!" are not constructive criticism, just pointless mockery.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#62

Post by ryan-allen »

I kind of expect more from Corey Haines, he's supposed to have a reasonable reputation according to people I know and trust. I'm supposed to be going to one of his 'Code Retreats' in Melbourne this year. I hope I don't get made fun of!

Good code seems to be whatever the majority of nodding heads agree upon, and rarely that is merit based. It seems to me that unfortunately most of the nodding heads are people who act like this.

I've been ridiculed for my code by people like this, even in situations whereby I've been trying to help solve their annoying problem (and in fact, did help solve their problem). What did I get back? Mostly condescension & ridicule, and no credit.

Anyway, if anyone wonders why valuable people run screaming from the software industry, it's people acting like this.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#63

Post by zem »

jrockway wrote: post #20

I don't really see the problem. I never remember sed syntax and instead just use perl -e. It follows that someone may want to use JavaScript instead though I would personally avoid JavaScript at nearly any cost. As for haters on the Internet, yeah, welcome to the Internet. If you do something, chances are someone hates you. Why? They are jealous that you are getting attention instead of them. They could write a bette…

the worst bit is that a lot of the ridicule seems motivated by the fact that it's fashionable to hate on node.js. this tweet as much as admitted it: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/293831920872194050

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#64

Post by thezoid »

redmattred wrote: post #26

People will criticize your work, good or bad, can't take every comment on twitter to heart.

The fact that these are "big deal" developers on some pretty important projects is the problem.

Also the fact that Mr. Haines is always promoting improving ones craft by writing code makes his comments even worse.

I feel that this comment on being a dick by jbrennan to be pretty decent:

"Next time you feel like mocking another developer for his or her lack of skills in a certain area, stop yourself. Talk to the person and explain to them why you think something they are doing is incorrect or how it could be done better. This way, you don’t come off as a jerk, and the other developer learns something new and improves. And I’d be surprised if you didn’t learn something from the experience, too."

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#65

Post by nesquena »

mintplant wrote: post #58
nesquena wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a great idea to go around calling other people stupid for creating personal open-source projects that they enjoy using, mocking their competence and treating them as if they should go away because they aren't as good as you. What a productive use of a developer's time.

Even stranger is the fact that harther isn't exactly a novice programmer: apparently, she's part of Mozilla [1], and wrote brain.js [2], a neural network library in JavaScript with almost 1,400 stars on GitHub. [1] https://twitter.com/harthvader [2] https://github.com/harthur/brain

brain looks pretty cool and I also noticed she not only works at mozilla but also regularly speaks at conferences. Weird how judging a person's competence based on looking at a single for fun open source project may not be a great idea.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#66

Post by tiktaktoe »

This is pretty awful. Steve and Corey are both well-known in the Ruby community.

Steve is an instructor at gSchool in Denver, for example, which trains software engineers. It's bad enough that they're both respected in the community, but being a student is a vulnerable position. If Steve were my teacher and he reacted that way to a project I released, I'd be absolutely humiliated.

http://www.gschool.it/#instructors

I don't think encouraging participation in open source and being a good teacher are that different. A more productive response would've been to submit some issues or pull requests to Heather's project.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#67

Post by jmillikin »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #39

I get a fair amount of ridicule any time anything I write makes it into sites like reddit, and a small amount (depending on topic) when it makes it onto HN. When one of my posts hit the front page yesterday, I decided to re-read "How to Disagree": http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html Having done that, I can now just privately laugh at anyone who fails to come up with an adequate refutation of my central point. Peo…

  > Regarding the actual program, I don't write shell
  > utilities in JavaScript so I can't say whether it's a
  > good or a bad implementation. It's just not my space.
According to some other posts here, the quoted mockers are Ruby programmers. I believe the Twitter posts are about the concept of writing sed in Node-Javascript, not necessarily the implementation. As I understand it there's something of a rivalry between the Ruby and Node communities, and the Ruby community is known to be tolerant of boorish behavior.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#68

Post by jlongster »

doktrin wrote: post #46
jlongster wrote: post #36

What the fuck. (And I rarely say that word.) We've got to grow up. This is 9th grade all over again. You know, those weird people that do things that you don't understand? They're the ones that grow up and make big impacts on the world. Why can't we get over our negativity? We can't stop ourselves from thinking horrible things, or even saying them out loud to people around us, but surely we can restrain ourselves fro…

>> If I ever start a company the #1 thing I will look for in others is positivity. I wouldn't stand for this crap. What's conspicuously lacking here is not positivity per se, it's the absence of civility & decency. Those are two very different sets of attributes. Lack of an outright positive demeanor won't sink a team. Lacking civility and decency, however, will stick a severe wrench in any project. edit : On a perso…

I guess you're right. Civility also sounds less cheesy than positivity! I find that teams can be balanced with people positive and negative, and it's how you handle negativity that's important, which is what you point out.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#69

Post by paulgb »

jmillikin wrote: post #22

> Then I see these people’s follower count, and I sob > harder. I can’t help but think of potential future > employers that are no longer potential. My name and > avatar are part of its identity, and it’s just one step > for a slightly curious person to see the idiot behind > this code. Oh come on now. Potential employers are not going to be crawling through your github on the off chance they can find a hastily-writt…

> If you put a quick explanation in the README, like "I wanted a 'sed' that used Javascript regex syntax", then I doubt anyone would make any such fuss.

The second sentence of the readme is "It's similar to sed but there are a few differences"

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#70

Post by bmmayer1 »

For years I have been terrified about putting my code on Github for fear of rage and retribution from the programmer community. This is a real problem for us amateur coders who enjoy hacking but don't necessarily have the chops to go head-to-head with the serious guys.
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