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Side projects

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Re: Side projects

#61

Post by bglazer »

tegeek wrote: post #54
bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

I've been in this situation for as long as I can think of. But lately I've found something which is working for the time being. I don't use my car to commute to office. It takes 25 minutes via public transport (one way), so I use that time and build all the complex logic/data structure/algos in that time for my hobby project. Cooking doesn't break my mental loop. So I keep thinking & solving things regarding my hobby…

Thanks. Unfortunately public transit is non-existent where I live. I'd love to spend my commute time working on the project rather than hoping that a distracted uninsured driver doesn't smash into me.

I do enjoy thinking about the project while cooking.

Good luck on your project!

Re: Side projects

#62

Post by jorendorffmoz »

seiji wrote: post #37
famousactress wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been broadly thinking about ways to take a bite out of this challenge. I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. As the company scales it has a massive effect on their culture. I visited New Belgium Brewing (makers of Fat Tire) for instance, and a huge number of their employees are so…

I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. Interesting approach, but I bet those companies also aren't high growth tech startups/companies. The only goal at a growing tech company is reduce costs, increase revenue. They aren't looking for new ways to pay for things they legally get for free…

I do want to argue the point. :)

The strange miracle of open source software is that when companies use something like Redis to make a lot of money, they end up investing in it, they contribute work to the project, and the community does gain from their contributions. In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time.

Most open source development is commercial.

To take an example from my day job: Bloomberg (the financial media giant) sponsored Andy Wingo (of Igalia, that guy is a genius) to contribute support for ES6 generators to both Mozilla's JS engine and Chrome's. An example of his amazing work:

http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-firefo...

Companies use all things to get richer. That's the operating principle of companies. The competing model to open source is commercial software, in which the company owning the software has a monopoly over it and uses it to get richer... and the companies licensing it still use it to get richer.

In corporate welfare, the money given to companies is taken from someone else's pocket. Open source software is cheap because it eliminates the artificial costs of copyright monopolies.

Re: Side projects

#63

Post by jorendorffmoz »

seiji wrote: post #59
caniszczyk wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to argue your point and you should read heavily into the "tragedy of the commons" problem that plagues many open source communities, but companies can give back in many ways, in terms of bug fixes, features and improvements to the projects they use (at least wise companies do). In Twitter's case, we've also contributed to the Redis ecosystem via twemproxy: https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy Twemproxy h…

can give back in many ways The standard way society compensates persons for useful goods and services is by exchanging currency, not by bartering favors or by saying "look! we made a billion dollars using your software, here, have these free 40 lines of code as a bug fix. thx." Unrelated note: every time I see these (needlessly?) optimized string compare statements, I fall out of my chair laughing and/or crying: http…

I guess what I'm saying is, I don't see how your (or anyone's) interests would be served by the cost of Redis being a lot higher.

Re: Side projects

#64

Post by bglazer »

josephschmoe wrote: post #51
bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

The only way to do it is to have a job where you can complete the work in less than 5 hours a day. Preferably one that gives you the freedom to leave early/come in late so long as you're doing well on your work. No one actually works 8 hours a day and comes home to work 4 hours sustainably. I couldn't see someone doing that for more than two months without getting burned out.

This is very interesting. I'm not sure how my company culture would tolerate my leaving early, but it does seem like the most practical option for actually getting work done.

I feel like I probably have enough autonomy to do this, but it's tricky business.

Re: Side projects

#65

Post by burntsushi »

robotkilla wrote: post #38
binarymax wrote: post #2

I hope this question isn't too forward - but my main question is 'how did you afford to do this?' I have had plenty of fun little side projects (some finished some not), but my main project is my salaried position. Aside from being independently wealthy, how can one create and maintain a long term open source project as a full time job. Consulting on the side? Donations? Something else? P.S. Thanks for Redis :)

as someone who works on a lot of side projects: figure out where most of your free time goes and decide if you can sacrifice the hours you spend on those activities for side projects... and then actually do it. I watch very little TV. I have only a couple of friends that I see every few months max. I don't go to meetups, I don't use social media and I don't play a lot of video games. I can hardly stand to see a day g…

This post is nearly a mirror image of myself! I tend to relax on the major holidays (xmas and nye), but everything else is the same. My brain is constantly working on some problem that is of interest to me. I have time to do side projects because that is what I do for fun.

I have the same sleep schedule as you (I work in Cambridge, MA but live West of 495), although I'm not sure if I'd voluntarily choose it. Working alone in the mornings is quite productive though.

And I second the sentiment "it's important to switch off for days at a time."

I expect much of this will change when kids come along though. ;-)

Re: Side projects

#66

Post by gdubs »

bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

"Or work on an art project"

Well, you might want to ask yourself if this project is really something you want to work on. That is, do you love it? If you'd rather be working on an art project, why not do that?

There's that famous Steve Jobs quote that goes something like, "you only make great things when you love what you do."

Re: Side projects

#67

Post by famousactress »

seiji wrote: post #37
famousactress wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been broadly thinking about ways to take a bite out of this challenge. I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. As the company scales it has a massive effect on their culture. I visited New Belgium Brewing (makers of Fat Tire) for instance, and a huge number of their employees are so…

I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. Interesting approach, but I bet those companies also aren't high growth tech startups/companies. The only goal at a growing tech company is reduce costs, increase revenue. They aren't looking for new ways to pay for things they legally get for free…

That's pretty much exactly the point. I think this is a commitment that probably ought to be baked in from the beginning, before a company scales. It's hard for a large company to make a commitment like this commensurate with it's size without making the commitment early and scaling it along with everything else.

As for size, NBB is the second largest craft brewer in the country and Patagonia is a very large player in outdoor apparel.

>The only goal at a growing tech company is reduce costs, increase revenue.

Right. Fuck that, because that's not actually (ever) really the goal. Money's always a means to some end, so another way of looking at this is to put a stake in some particular end that you want to share with everyone at the company. That's culture. Culture is shared values, and this is a way to make culture measurable and something the organization is held accountable for over time.

Yet another way to look at this is what happens if when Larry and Sergey decided on "Don't be Evil" someone told them "That's adorable, but why don't you think harder about how to turn this into something measurable".

Re: Side projects

#68

Post by seiji »

jorendorffmoz wrote: post #62
seiji wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've visited a couple of 1% for the planet[1] companies and been really inspired by what I've seen. In short, these companies pledge 1% of revenue to environmental causes. Interesting approach, but I bet those companies also aren't high growth tech startups/companies. The only goal at a growing tech company is reduce costs, increase revenue. They aren't looking for new ways to pay for things they legally get for free…

I do want to argue the point. :) The strange miracle of open source software is that when companies use something like Redis to make a lot of money, they end up investing in it, they contribute work to the project, and the community does gain from their contributions. In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time . Most open source development is commerci…

In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time.

It's a matter of project scale too. Nobody cares about exploiting Hadoop because it's millions of lines of low quality code written by thousands of day-job developers.

But, if a project is clearly the work of, say, 2-5 individual developers, it's easier to see how those individuals are creating much more value than anybody is possibly compensating them for.

The main complaint seems to be "offering things for free then expecting good things to happen" doesn't work. So the only solution is "offer things for free and also provide support/services/hosting/accoutrement to companies with big pockets."

The trick is: how do you incentive companies to pay in the first place? There's the mongodb model: market, popularize, and aggressively sell broken software so people must buy support or else nothing works at all, or there's the RedHat model: target big companies and become their source of trust/knowledge for complicated things the buying company doesn't want to manage/understand themselves.

It can be difficult to sell highly popular, non-broken, simple software. It works, people use it, there are no problems, so, why pay, even when it runs your multi-billion dollar company (especially when the free support resolves all issues in less than 20 minutes anyway)?

Re: Side projects

#69

Post by bglazer »

seiji wrote: post #53
bglazer wrote: post #42

I'm working on a side project now that will eventually be an open source project. I think it could benefit a lot of people. My problem is that I have a full time job. When I come home at night I want to cook dinner, run, socialize, drink a beer with a friend, or work on an art project. I don't particularly want to configure Ansible or read the OpenVPN docs. At most I can get 3-5 hours of productive work per week on t…

Please, step into my parlor of unsolicited advice for a moment... will eventually be an open source project. Lean Software people are right about one thing — you've gotta get software in front of users as quickly as possible. If the project timeline is "work for 6-8 months, then show people" it's possible you built an amazing thing only you know how to use and nobody else really wants. Release early, release often. M…

> If the project timeline is "work for 6-8 months, then show people" it's possible you built an amazing thing only you know how to use and nobody else really wants.

This absolutely terrifies me.

> The simplest hack here: wake up earlier and use your first (and best) 2-3 productive brain hours on your project then go to work. You'll use your best performance (refreshed, alert, not tired) for your project while still not being fired.

I really, really enjoy my sleep :). This is certainly very practical advice, but it requires that I'm disciplined enough to go to sleep earlier the preceding night. That's difficult but certainly possible.

> Non-practical advise is: screw work, if you're not happy, save money and do what you want.

It's incredibly tempting. The problem (that actually isn't a problem) is that I enjoy my full-time work as well.

Thank you for the advice!

Re: Side projects

#70

Post by vinceguidry »

dragonwriter wrote: post #26
norswap wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about dual licensing? People who don't pay get GPL, while those who pay get BSD/MIT?

Then one person pays, gets BSD/MIT code, and shares it freely. So, if you set the cost of BSD/MIT code for each release enough for one sale to fund the whole cost of the release, it might work.

They have to maintain it too if they want other people to use it. Red Hat and CentOS comes to mind. Nobody can run OSS RHEL without doing the same work the CentOS people are doing.
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