I put some creativity into my thank you note...
Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#22Idea: Let's create a Thank you day for all creators and maintainers by opening one issue for whatever we use. Let's star them and like them. Or is it a bad idea for some reason?
I was thinking the same thing actually!
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#23Thank yous do help a lot. And they help outweigh the nasty stuff many maintainers get (harassment, death threats, rape threats, doxing, etc).
why would anyone do this to dev? I mean I can bitch about aspects of some app, but can't imagine why would anyone do any of those
real question for me would be if devs prefer donation/buying the app or thank you, which one is more helpful
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#24In my recent job search, google's email response suggestions have been eerily positive, upbeat and on target while dealing with recruiters and interview scheduling. I don't know how fine tuned these things are, but it could probably help shift the average tone & sentiment of interactions on Github to preseed comments with suggested response options.
One concern would probably be training suggestions a toxic data set might only come up with equally toxic options, so some sort of sentiment estimator or pre-seeding might be in order.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#25Oh my god, right. Having someone recognize you for your work is such an incredible feeling.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#26pipenv[1] and other GitHub repos have a little badge in the REAMDE.md entitled "say thanks", which takes you to a simple form [2] where you can say thanks. I thought it was a cool idea.
[1] - https://github.com/kennethreitz/pipenv [2] - https://saythanks.io
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#27Thank yous do help a lot. And they help outweigh the nasty stuff many maintainers get (harassment, death threats, rape threats, doxing, etc).
why would anyone do this to dev? I mean I can bitch about aspects of some app, but can't imagine why would anyone do any of those real question for me would be if devs prefer donation/buying the app or thank you, which one is more helpful
Most helpful for me is some detailed info on how my open source "thing" helped them.
Like, hey...we use your library to do X with clients like Y, and we pump Z transactions a day through it...really appreciate the leg up.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#28I maintain a moderately successful JavaScript library and there are a few things that absolutely make my day: people sending me an email telling me how they're using it (I see dependent projects on NPM but I love hearing about cool things!), people saying thanks, and people sending me any donation. I've had a handful of people send me a few bucks over the years and I was absolutely floored each time. In total I might be able to buy myself a beer with the donations but it means a surprisingly large amount knowing someone is willing to go through the hassle to send you money.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#29I maintain an open source app that gets about 180,000 MAU, and can confirm that I see probably a 10:1 or worse ratio of ‘your thing is broken’ emails to ‘thank you’s.
The grumpy emails take a meaningful toll on me. I don’t get paid for my work, so why would I continue given that the primary output (user feedback) I get to my input (time and energy/nights and weekends) is negative?
Long story short: send a thank you message, apropos of nothing, to your favorite OSS project. They’ll greatly appreciate hearing it.
Postscript: as luck would have it, the app I work on is consumer-focused, and my partner is a daily user of it. I probably would be less likely to continue working on it if she didn’t rely on it on a day to day basis.
Re: Sometimes all a maintainer needs is a “thank you”
#30I'm running free Linux terminal site for 7 years now. Before that written few open-source tools.
Receiving a mail from user with simple message like "Thanks for the your effort" will give great source of energy and motivation to carry on.
Because from time to time, like everything some doubts arise like "is this project still useful to others?". Thank you notes will help to clear those doubts :D