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It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

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Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#261

Post by gpeal »

wolco wrote: post #243
bigiain wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to draw to your attention the magnitude of that task, with a recent link from another HN comment discussion: http://npm.anvaka.com/#/view/2d/react-native and https://github.com/microsoft/react-native-windows/blob/maste... Turns out left-pad.js is on line 8571 of that 14+k line yarn.lock file. How many React Native developers do you suppose have reviewed every line of code in every library referenced in t…

In react's case you put your trust in facebook and because of the size most issues get discovered and someone has an article on how to fix before breakfast. When you include left-pad in your own project you should audit it. In the end you are the only line of defense. With react it's larger so you can trust others.

I think that's exactly the problem because of things like this: https://twitter.com/ZacSweers/status/1259176799235387393?s=1...

I am the sole maintainer of airbnb/lottie-android despite the fact that I left the company almost 2 years ago and it is used by tens of thousands of companies including Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Uber, Netflix, and countless others.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#262

Post by jasonv »

CalRobert wrote: post #210
Justsignedup wrote: post #89

I once wrote a library in backbone.js to have a data-synchronized list. It allowed me to provide an array, and it'll keep that array sync'd up to what I saw. I had a kid and a fulltime job and going through a divorce. I happened to use it at my job, but everyone kept asking for me to integrate it into new up and coming repos which I didn't have time for. Honestly I felt bad about not caring, but the reality is that I…

Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally. Old boss used to loudly thank my colleague for doing tickets on the weekends, and too often people seem to assume I want to spend my weekend "brushing up" on some implementation detail for a project I don't care about. Even "why doesn't he come to after work drinks?" Is hard to answer with "because my spouse is _also_ an exhausted wreck at the end of the d…

I’ve somehow managed to work in this industry twenty years and never be pressured to work on weekends, except for occasional emergencies or exceptional releases, and I’ve never felt pressured to happy hour with anyone. In SF, no less. I’m also a single co-parent, from the time he was born.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#263

Post by salamanderman »

ssanders82 wrote: post #255
BurningFrog wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally Sure, but people with kids win at life. Let the DINK make some extra money. You still have it better.

> people with kids win at life That's a pretty insulting statement for those of us who can't have / don't want children. It's not a competition. We've chosen different paths than you. Not worse, just different.

It definitely isn't a competition, because us parents clearly won ;-)

... That was dripping sarcasm. Please don't down vote.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#264

Post by galonk »

fendy3002 wrote: post #151
galonk wrote: post #87

I wrote a Python library that was pretty popular at one time. I gave a talk on it at PyCon, at one point it was in the top 200 most downloaded packages on PyPI. Since my employer told me I was no longer allowed to work on it at work, I have felt quite a lot of guilt about all but abandoning fixing bugs and reading the mailing list. I've been working on a "next generation" version, almost a rewrite, but I don't see a…

Have you put some disclaimer about your situation and said that this repo won't be maintained and feel free to fork? I think it'll be the best resolution for your situation.

Luckily there is a "community" fork on GitHub, and I've offered to help them with questions :)

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#265

Post by franciscop »

a_cool_username wrote: post #47
nerdbaggy wrote: post #2

I had a GitHub project that got a few hundred stars. The amount of mean, crazy, and entitled people is crazy. I have no idea how the bigger projects can deal with it.

I partially maintain a GitHub project with ~1500 stars, many of my users are not very technically skilled. I rarely encounter entitled/mean/crazy people - we probably average one obnoxious contributor a year, two or three if you count the ones who go away when you politely tell them it's not going to happen. I get a lot of PRs and reasonably well-written issues from users whose profiles indicate it's their first cont…

Totally agree. I have 100+ repositories open sourced (Just launched this website yesterday! https://statux.dev/), a handful of them with 1k+ stars, and for the most part it's just me maintaining those.

This is besides my fulltime job, friends and hobbies. So I don't really have much time for growing a community, I've done some effort in the past when I had more time and it worked fairly well, but I found it to be very project-oriented in general so if you do many smaller projects (as opposed to few large ones) the community approach doesn't scale well.

I don't encounter many mean/crazy people! I can count them with one hand. I find few entitled people, but most people I've found are nice.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#266

Post by Chris2048 »

fovc wrote: post #259
nicoburns wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fine to not have time to maintain code you open source. However, if your library ends up gaining a significant user base and you don't have time to maintain it, then I think you have a duty to either: 1. Allow others to step in as maintainers and review/approve new features and bug fixes in your stead. or (if you want to maintain control of your library) 2. Be clear that your library is in maintenance mo…

Wholeheartedly disagree. Vetting a possible maintener or fork is >0 work, and you don't owe us anything. If you had to go to the trouble of creating your library in the first place, it means either A) "the community" had not met your specific need, so why would they start now? Or B) you did this for fun/learning/visibility/coping with a mania, in which case you still don't owe us any favors. That said, doing either o…

> Vetting a possible maintener or fork is >0 work

Who said anything about vetting?

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#267

Post by tuesday20 »

CalRobert wrote: post #210
Justsignedup wrote: post #89

I once wrote a library in backbone.js to have a data-synchronized list. It allowed me to provide an array, and it'll keep that array sync'd up to what I saw. I had a kid and a fulltime job and going through a divorce. I happened to use it at my job, but everyone kept asking for me to integrate it into new up and coming repos which I didn't have time for. Honestly I felt bad about not caring, but the reality is that I…

Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally. Old boss used to loudly thank my colleague for doing tickets on the weekends, and too often people seem to assume I want to spend my weekend "brushing up" on some implementation detail for a project I don't care about. Even "why doesn't he come to after work drinks?" Is hard to answer with "because my spouse is _also_ an exhausted wreck at the end of the d…

This seems more in certain cultures than others - American and Japanese from my anecdotal experience. I worked with Europeans (French especially), they don’t seem to wear long hours as a badge of honor.

My American boss regularly feels proud that he puts in 12-14 hour days. In my opinion, that amount of hours makes sense if I am working on my own business or something that truly benefits humanity (like a vaccine for COVID-19 for example). It is hard to do good work more than 6-7 hours per day anyway and much harder to sustain it for long periods of time

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#268

Post by dclusin »

sgillen wrote: post #60
noitsnot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's understandable. You closed issues for bugs you didn't resolve.

Maybe you know the OP, but in my experience a lot of issues are not bug reports but very low quality, uninformed or unreasonable requests or questions. Like questions made about basic functionality that is answered in the documentation/faq, or requests for features that are completely outside the scope of the project. Another popular category is requests for basic education e.g. “how does DQN work?”. That’s fine if i…

I've done this after scouring the documentation and being unable to find an answer. When there isn't a newsgroup or email list setup it's often really the only way to get in touch with a developer or maintainer. Suboptimal for sure, but if a library seems like it may solve your problem, it's worth a shot.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#269

Post by vxNsr »

scambier wrote: post #116
vxNsr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

off-topic: I still don't understand the use case that left-pad solved. I'm not into js at all but why do you need a dependency to add space to text? I'm asking honestly, I just don't get what the use for this was.

Literally what it says: https://github.com/left-pad/left-pad/blob/master/index.js Now if you ask "but why?", ultra-small packages like this are popular in JS because of the lack of a standard lib. Lots of devs prefer to install a dependency for each one-liner utility rather than write them themselves. The only added value of those packages is that they're usually unit-tested against weird edge-cases that you might mi…

You're misunderstanding, what is the use-case of that specific package? like I've never found myself needing to pad text on the left, just trying to understand why this was such an important package.

Re: It’s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty (2015)

#270

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

ssanders82 wrote: post #255
BurningFrog wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally Sure, but people with kids win at life. Let the DINK make some extra money. You still have it better.

> people with kids win at life That's a pretty insulting statement for those of us who can't have / don't want children. It's not a competition. We've chosen different paths than you. Not worse, just different.

Kids make you happy, but only when they move out as as long as they don’t break the bank. Truth is having kids is a kiss of death for your creative and professional career.

E: Of course downvotes. Truth hurts. Let’s see how grey my comment gets.

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