That's good advice in the same spirit here's another one. Don't trust in neat websites nor in pretty documentation; always read the code first.
If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First
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Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First
#22> I won’t claim to be great at this, but it’s something I spend time on trying to improve, even if it’s at the cost of learning some new language or framework. It’s an ongoing process, and this blog post is part of that process.
This basically means that he could have been one of the guys who called out the badness of the replace code and just took the opportunity to get some attention by posting about a hot topic.
Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First
#23I see a lot of people saying you're going to keep personal projects to yourself (instead of putting them on GitHub or similar) because of this fracas.
Please don't. The Twitter snark isn't normal, it's an exceptional case. It wouldn't be on the front page of HN if that kind of behavior were the norm. And it's the jerks on Twitter who came out looking bad here, not the author of the code.
I really like how GitHub has encouraged people to err on the side of releasing their personal experiments. I was doing it myself in pre-GitHub days by publishing Darcs repo URLs on my website, but it didn't have the social aspect and Darcs never caught on like Git has. It's lovely to see the idea of "share all your code, by default" so validated as it is on GitHub.
Whether or not you release your code, assholes will still exist and they'll still find a way to be assholes. So don't let them ruin a good thing.
Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First
#24I propose a solidarity movement: Heather Arthur day: On this special day we post useful code that we might otherwise be unwilling to post because of what other people might think of it. Because some people have the courage to do this anyway and when they do, it makes the world a better place. If just a few people do this, they might be considered crazy and laughed at, but if all of us do it, why then we'd have a move…
We'd run out of calendar days if we had a "solidarity day" made up everytime something like this happened.
I think you just made a very important point.
Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First
#25> Now, I’m all for bad projects and bad code being called out. Bullshit, sorry. Questions to ask yourself before "calling out bad code". 1. Does this code belong to someone on your team? 2. Does your code rely on this code? 3. Does the code represent a risk to you or your business in some way? 4. Do you have the direct contact info for the developer so you can appropriately, discretely and professionally inform them…
This, a million times this. Criticizing other people's code is a good idea if you have been asked for input, or if the developer is encouraging the public at large to use their code. Otherwise, it's just unwarranted negativity which has the net effect of discouraging other members of the community from sharing code which might be useful to someone. I have plenty of code that I'm not proud of but would push to Github anyway for the sake of an extra backup/convenience.
Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First
#26I propose a solidarity movement: Heather Arthur day: On this special day we post useful code that we might otherwise be unwilling to post because of what other people might think of it. Because some people have the courage to do this anyway and when they do, it makes the world a better place. If just a few people do this, they might be considered crazy and laughed at, but if all of us do it, why then we'd have a move…
It's a good start, but this shouldn't be a special day. It should be every day.
Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First
#27> Now, I’m all for bad projects and bad code being called out. Bullshit, sorry. Questions to ask yourself before "calling out bad code". 1. Does this code belong to someone on your team? 2. Does your code rely on this code? 3. Does the code represent a risk to you or your business in some way? 4. Do you have the direct contact info for the developer so you can appropriately, discretely and professionally inform them…
How can we as a development community rationally expect to grow the open source ecosystem and encourage people with this type of snobbery? There's one lesson that I'm personally taking from this, after unsolicited ridicule, one sincere apology, one bullshit non-apology, and one arrogant I have nothing to apologize for! If I build a small thing to scratch my own itch (which I often do) I'm going to think twice about s…
Let's face it, there seems to be nothing anyone can share on the Internet without someone else demonstrating John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [1]. I'm not saying everyone should always just let it slide, but try not to let it get to you, either.
Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First
#28Another issue in the "is Node right for this" is that it's very very portable, significantly more so that shell scripts (Mac uses BSD utilities, windows has nothing unless you have cygwin), and even slightly more portable than python.
Not sure I follow. OS X comes with the Bash shell and I have plenty of shell scripts (bash and perl) for automating my dev environment and numerous other tasks that run fine on both Ubuntu and OS X. OS X using FreeBSD as its Unix layer doesn't preclude it from interoperability with other *nix like systems.
Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First
#29> Now, I’m all for bad projects and bad code being called out. Bullshit, sorry. Questions to ask yourself before "calling out bad code". 1. Does this code belong to someone on your team? 2. Does your code rely on this code? 3. Does the code represent a risk to you or your business in some way? 4. Do you have the direct contact info for the developer so you can appropriately, discretely and professionally inform them…
Yes, the author came off as an Agile snob. Might be helpful to LivingSocial's plans (which lead nowhere BTW) but this attitude is toxic to the development community at large.
Agile? Could you elaborate on that?
Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First
#30> Now, I’m all for bad projects and bad code being called out. Bullshit, sorry. Questions to ask yourself before "calling out bad code". 1. Does this code belong to someone on your team? 2. Does your code rely on this code? 3. Does the code represent a risk to you or your business in some way? 4. Do you have the direct contact info for the developer so you can appropriately, discretely and professionally inform them…
I guess it all comes down to how you present it (and yes, I'm ignoring the "replace" issue for the moment). I honestly don't think everything under the sun should be made publicly available just because you can or because it's easy. The reason being primarily because these sorts of things tend to be copied and re-used all over the place. So, a quick hack on a project you don't care much about can end up in many other projects. This is amplified by whatever your clout is.
Having said that, a reasonable disclaimer about what your project really is more than assuages that concern for me. Or if it's small enough, rolling it up into a gist might be an option for proof-of-concept stuff.