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My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

mike.zwobble.org

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Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#111

Post by inson »

p4bl0 wrote: post #18

I'm a CS associate professor. I teach a course which consists in contributing to a free software, in third year at my uni. A few years ago a couple of students decided to make a contribution to GNU ls. The change was to have the output color independent of capitalisation (it is based on filename extension). Their code was accepted. It was a tiny tiny contribution, but it's probable that these few lines of code are an…

That the best way of teaching CS! Bravo! I wish the US professors have the same attitude like yours.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#114

Post by cdubzzz »

My first side project[0] is almost four years old at this point and continues to get lots of interest and use. It’s been really fun to engage with its users.

My second side project[1] has not got nearly as much traction but also has a much smaller target audience and I haven’t really got fully finished.

I do find my professional work rewarding and valuable but there is definitely something different about the side projects. They feel like much bigger accomplishments.

[0] https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy

[1] https://github.com/kcal-app/kcal

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#115

Post by jjeaff »

logotype wrote: post #49

I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to automate trades, but I keep working on the library f…

There is a common refrain in charitable organizations that are focused on helping the poor:

"Sometimes you have to feed the greedy to get to the truly needy."

In other words, the greedy will always take advantage, but that doesn't diminish the help you give to the needy. There is simply no way to totally filter for the greedy.

This doesn't really apply directly to your situation, but at least for every greedy company that benefits from free products like yours, there are a lot of jobs created and benefit to society as a whole when these companies create useful products.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#116

Post by sheetjs »

Our story is very similar. I wrote a small library for converting XLSX and XLS files to CSV. Over the years, that grew into one of the most popular open source libraries on npm/github: https://github.com/SheetJS/sheetjs

Back in 2015, 'patio11 reached out to us. In addition to a structured license purchase, he gave great insights and actually wrote a blog post about the experience https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementati...

Today, we offer paid software builds to solve related problems and it allows us to work on SheetJS full-time!

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#117

Post by cortesoft »

jjeaff wrote: post #115
logotype wrote: post #49

I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to automate trades, but I keep working on the library f…

There is a common refrain in charitable organizations that are focused on helping the poor: "Sometimes you have to feed the greedy to get to the truly needy." In other words, the greedy will always take advantage, but that doesn't diminish the help you give to the needy. There is simply no way to totally filter for the greedy. This doesn't really apply directly to your situation, but at least for every greedy company…

I do find this aspect of human morality interesting... people get REALLY upset at freeloaders, to a degree that is not proportionate to the cost they add. We choose to spend a ton of resources to prevent freeloading, even when the amount we spend to stop them is more than we actually lose to the freeloaders.

I guess it kinda makes sense as social creatures, but it can be frustrating at times when you are trying to help people.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#118

Post by [deleted] »

DrOctagon wrote: post #10

Quite a few years ago as a (very) junior FE dev I used mammoth.js to automate the generation of a biennial report. Three months had been earmarked for the task as this is what it had taken in previous years (due to bad tools and lack of expertise). I had it done in less than a week by using mammoth. Mike was also very accommodating with questions I'm pleased I cant remember as I'm sure they were embarrassingly simple…

[deleted]

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#119

Post by ElFitz »

jpalawaga wrote: post #54
oogali wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jmp f000:e05b Between fiddling with debug.exe and discovering that fixed address, that put me on the path to demystifying technology (or at least understanding everything is approachable).

I feel like everyone has an ah-ha moment when software's facade of magic gives way to a genuine feeling that nothing in software is inunderstandable. I was helping my brother through some CS classes, and he had to use some sort of graphics library, and things just weren't clicking. I opened the source of the graphics library so he could see what was going on under the hood and he was like "whoa... It's all just... Re…

I remember when a friend and I, both with barely any experience at all, tried building our first SaaS.

We went crazy over access control, roles, etc, wondering how operating systems and databases did it, driving ourselves mad over how to implement it at the lowest possible levels so the rest of the stack couldn’t possibly go around it…

We were pretty certain there was some highly complex dark magic behind it all.

A few years later, I worked on a project where we built a SaaS MVP for a client, with access control.

Turns out most people apparently consider ABAC overkill and will go with a few simple if statements if they can afford to.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#120

Post by agumonkey »

alien_ wrote: post #110
agumonkey wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

old people are a special demographics (I encounter a few of them regularly, for IT reasons or not) the obvious fields in the list: - education - healthcare - justice someone on HN showed an app for people to find good workers for home rework, this kind of stuff could be tremendously useful, and more generally the organization layer of society is very lacking. This also match the issues at the courthouse, basically ma…

There's a lot to be done to address digital divide especially for the elderly. The other week I witnessed first hand how multiple 50-something folks who own smartphones struggled with something as easy as filling a form on a website for making an appointment (in this case for getting a passport) and confirming the appointment by clicking an email. Or think about the thousands of vulnerable/old people who will die of…

biggest problem in digital anything is the amount of bs and randomness

non tech saavy people rely on rote learning at surface layers, and every year comes a new way, new look, new lingo .. they feel it's yet another big knowledge gap to learn when in fact there's almost nothing new under the sun (algorithms are as old as civilisation, logic doesn't change much)

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