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Sorry everybody, I failed with you
201–210 of 357 posts
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#202and of course: it's javascript! because literally every other community would have no problem if their doc-generator got unmaintained, because it would probably run for another ten years...
There’s also a defective culture meme that believes software that hasn’t been updated in the past week is dying. This is a conceptual hack to avoid considering the state of the ecosystem.
It's been a big adjustment to me switching all my recreational programming over to Common Lisp. In the CL community, it's not uncommon for a widely used library to not have been updated in 5-10 years. In any other language community, that would mean unmaintained, bitrotted, unusable. In the CL community, it usually means it's finished, and doesn't need any more changes.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
I maintain two slightly popular open source apps, and my experience is that there are a lot of people interested in using your product, but very few people interested in contributing to it. I've had a few people offer help over the course of the years, but unfortunately they don't always have all the skills needed, so they can only help with a part of the project. When they do have the necessary skills, they don't ha…
> I've had a few people offer help over the course of the years, but unfortunately they don't always have all the skills needed, so they can only help with a part of the project. So whats wrong with allowing them to help with those parts?
This seems like one of the potential tragedies of the "all volunteer" development model. Many of the factors that play into Brooks's Law apply just as much to volunteer efforts as they do to commercial efforts.
One of them is the cost of communication. My sense is that the overall cost of communication scales in a manner that's more in line with the number of active contributors than it does with the actual volume of communication that they produce. Even the actual time spent communicating may not do so, but the kinds of communication - getting to know new people and new teams, negotiating different and potentially conflicting needs, stuff like that - tend to be more tiring than the communication you get in a stable team of people who have been working together for a while.
But, if you can't make a living doing it, then you probably aren't prepared to contribute more than a very small amount of your time. A large group of people doing that might have an outrageous communication cost relative to its productive output. With the brunt of that being born by the maintainer.
I would imagine that, if we could figure out a better way to enable maintainers to support themselves and their families while also working on their project full time, things might work out better. More time spent programming means less need to negotiate with and review contributions from others, and the work getting done more quickly because it's being done by the person who knows the code best, and the job being both less tiring and less thankless, and possibly leads to higher quality (by virtue of being more coherently designed) software in the long run.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone can just do it. They literally can't though. Only the owner or a maintainer has permission to merge PRs in to the main branch. Anyone can fork a repo, write a patch, and PR it, but that's where outside contributions stop. It still takes someone from the original team to accept a contribution. Forking a project and then maintaining that fork as a separate project is an option, but it's divisive one that a lot o…
There's version control other that Git / GitHub / etc. It's even possible to forego version control and just release tarballs somewhere.
Ok, but you'd hope there's some form of access control that stops someone just overwriting the canonical source with their own version. That's the same as the maintainer having to accept changes.
If there isn't, and anyone can write straight to the source, then good luck to anyone using that package because it's probably not very safe.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice. I'm super happy when people just "Buy me a coffee"--not for the coffee but for the feedback you get that someone is using your project, so it's valuable for someone. I'm very grateful for that, even without financial support. I think GitH…
> I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project. Well "stars" are kind of like that. Also the insights page tells you how many times your repo is being cloned per day, so that's one metric you can use to see how "used" your project is. You can also search GitHub for the name of your project and see how many other projects are cross referenci…
The problem with stuff like stars or even lists of "who uses this" is that they need to be refreshed every so often. Just because someone used your project ten years ago, doesn't mean they're using it today. Maybe a list with a "latest update" date and gently asking and reminding people to update it each year if they're still using the project would help...
As for cloning, I don't clone projects I use every day. Maybe I cloned them once a year ago. Maybe I'm using a package from somewhere and not interacting with your repo at all.
The cross-referencing sounds like a useful metric though, at least for open source use, but many projects are more useful in non-open-source environments (eg how many open source projects are using something like http://riemann.io/ ?)
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice. I'm super happy when people just "Buy me a coffee"--not for the coffee but for the feedback you get that someone is using your project, so it's valuable for someone. I'm very grateful for that, even without financial support. I think GitH…
> I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project. Well "stars" are kind of like that. Also the insights page tells you how many times your repo is being cloned per day, so that's one metric you can use to see how "used" your project is. You can also search GitHub for the name of your project and see how many other projects are cross referenci…
The social stars aspect of GitHub is what makes it toxic. I would support more visibility for open, not centralized initiatives like humans.txt and contribute.json (https://www.contributejson.org/).
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#207Reminds me of a phenomenon I see again and again in small business: owners struggling to keep up with demand and sacrificing their sanity in the process.
The correct answer there is to raise prices.
Another thing that happens a lot is that lower prices bring in worse customers who are more demanding and less respectful of your time.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's version control other that Git / GitHub / etc. It's even possible to forego version control and just release tarballs somewhere.
Ok, but you'd hope there's some form of access control that stops someone just overwriting the canonical source with their own version. That's the same as the maintainer having to accept changes. If there isn't, and anyone can write straight to the source, then good luck to anyone using that package because it's probably not very safe.
Or you maintain your own version. My projects got booted of GitHub when I did; I don't maintain a site anymore; but there's several forked versions of them floating out there somewhere, presumably because someone's still using them.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've actively resisted open sourcing some things I've written at work - including stuff that I'm sure others would like - precisely because of fears that it would be a career-limiting move. For my employer, these libraries are only valuable to the extent that they help us build things for which we can charge money. An open source library would not be one of those things, but it would take time (and therefore company…
I think getting your name and work out in the world with open source work is a career _advancing_ move.
I've honestly never been at a job interview where people gave a crap about my open source contributions. They're typically much more interested in hearing war stories from the closed source projects I've worked on.
The thing about open source projects is, they tend to be slightly generic things like "file format," "widget library," or "machine learning algorithm" that most companies see as the kind of thing they can typically get for free from open source. (They're not wrong there - the fact that we're talking about my open source contributions here makes it almost tautological.) They also tend to involve the sorts of generic programming skills that, by virtue of being stuff that we all know at least somewhat well, aren't all that valuable. Supply and demand works with job skills, too.
By contrast, my commercial work tends to involve a lot of specialized knowledge that's quite uncommon, and also tends to produce the kinds of software that people are quite happy to pay a lot of money for.
Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice. I'm super happy when people just "Buy me a coffee"--not for the coffee but for the feedback you get that someone is using your project, so it's valuable for someone. I'm very grateful for that, even without financial support. I think GitH…
There are a lot of facets to open source contributions. One big facet is the whole itch-scratching thing. If you know longer itch, stop scratching. That's ok. Maybe when you stop scratching, it will start to itch again for you or for someone else. If nobody steps up, it just means it doesn't itch enough. Abandonware is not such a bad thing. It served its purpose for a season, then the world moved on. Nobody's out the…
There's also libraries that are simple enough that they just work fine without constant updates. I have numerous libraries that I use that haven't had commits pushed for 2+ years. This is the other aspect: burnout is so rampant because it feels like it never stops and you can come up for air.