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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)

#291

Post by ProZsolt »

nanoscopic wrote: post #127

I agree with this to the extent that "open source your library" means "publish it on Github". Adding it into a package management system, be it one for a language or one for a Linux distro, is implying some level of stability and functionality. This is especially true if you choose a desirable namespace for your project on a system that doesn't differentiate by username. Essentially; do publish all work you possibly…

If you want to others use it, then document it. I really appreciate it. Otherwise, if you only wrote it for yourself you did enough. Undocumented code is better than no code. If you didn't publish at all I would have to start from zero.

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

#292

Post by HereBeBeasties »

smichel17 wrote: post #173
redis_mlc wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not into js at all Programming in JS is just this way. I had to include moment.js yesterday just to format a date. Nothing fancy, but no easy way around it.

I'm not sure this is a good example; dates are actually pretty complicated.

Yes, dates are very complicated. But that doesn't stop pretty much every modern language from having good built-in support for doing this, because it's such a totally common task. JavaScript is such a mess. It doesn't even support integers, for crying out loud, let alone decent date/time/timezone handling. That moment.js is the most popular band-aid to fix this, despite it having a nasty gotcha API that mixes mutable and immutable functions/types in confusing ways just rubs salt into the wound. Heck, you can't even compare two moment dates with inequality operators without either casting them by prepending a plus sign, or calling functions - it just silently does the wrong thing.

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

#293

Post by qhwudbebd »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #246
wpietri wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have it open for issues and then handle the responses they have invited poorly, then yes, that's rude. A douchebag doesn't magically stop being a douchebag because they've open-sourced some code.

fair, I actually didn’t know you could disable issues.

Alas you /still/ can’t disable pull requests, even when a Github mirror is completely the wrong place to submit patches.

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

#294

Post by esotericn »

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 mean, this isn't necessarily a 'dual income' thing, this is a 'cares exclusively about work' thing.

I have no children. I like my job. I spend my free time doing things that aren't software development.

I theoretically could work outside of work hours, sure, if I were a boring person with no interests.

I think that most people who treat their jobs as their 'calling' and burn themselves out on them ruin the world for both themselves and the rest of us. Races to the bottom everywhere.

It doesn't bother me too much though, since ultimately the selection pressure is such that the brown-nosers end up being abused by their managers whilst the stubborn lot get promoted. YMMV.

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

#295

Post by 1-KB-OK »

A dilemma that we are running into at work is that we have all our software open source and readily available on github but use an internal bug tracker to manage bugs picked up by QE and other people in our org. These bugs are given significantly higher priority than our GH issues and we end up with a pile of GH issues that no one has the time or ability to adequately track. As our team recently set up its own open source working group and generally is making open source contributions in other projects a higher priority I see this problem getting worse. Does anyone have any suggestions how to overcome such an issue?

And I guess I'd just like to add my two cents: sometimes your issues are not being adequately triaged because the project is using another system for bug tracking and the engineers are slammed fixing those bugs instead lol.

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

#296

Post by RussianCow »

catalogia wrote: post #284
sabas123 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I have no reasonable way of fully understanding the code nor being able to judge the author on their trustworthiness (even disregarding that this isn't constant). As a community we need to accept that the above mentioned DOES happen. Pretending otherwise only hurts us all.

There are many things short of reading the code in full you can do to lower the chances of this happening. A lot of half-assed libraries have obviously incomplete APIs that you can notice if you think about the interface provided and the nature of what the library claims to be doing. You can also look at repo activity; was it all coded in one week 8 years ago and never touched again? Does it have lots of outstanding…

This. In my experience, GitHub issues and PRs tell you most everything you need to know about an open source library: if issues are responded to (and how quickly), the attitude of the maintainer with regards to new features, etc. Most of this can be gleamed within 20 minutes of browsing, and when you combine that with a quick 5-minute look at dependencies and tests, you can make a pretty good, educated decision about whether to use the library, and those 25-30 minutes save you hours or days of potential headaches down the road.

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

#297

Post by nbardy »

zhoujianfu wrote: post #281
ssanders82 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Agreed... I remember a study on “do kids make you happier” and their conclusion was “kids make you happier if you want kids”.. people who didn’t want kids but had them or wanted kids but couldn’t have them were sadder, but people who didn’t want kids and didn’t have them were just as happy. Which I guess makes sense... people are happy when they get what they want!

If you're having kids you're striving for things that aren't happiness. Often trading exhaustion for purpose and meaning.

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

#298

Post by goliatone »

gboss wrote: post #217
CalRobert wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's terrible. I am a manager and actively discourage people from working late / weekends. I find it's not sustainable. People who do that, regardless of children status are much less predictable in their output. They go through peaks of productivity and then they crash. It also ends up happening that they work on the wrong thing because no one is around at night or weekends to answer basic questions that may unfor…

> It also ends up happening that they work on the wrong thing because no one is around at night or weekends to answer basic questions that may unfortunately not be in the ticket.

I know the comment came from a good place and you meant well. The situation you describe of “developers working on the wrong thing” can and sometimes does happen, however, as a manager the effective way to handle those situations is to address the root cause. Is it because the task is too big, not enough details, is it too early in the project that the requirements haven’t really surfaced organically? You want your team to be autonomous, you want to empower your team to make mistakes and at the same time actively minimize the chance for mistakes by greasing “things” so people around you can be more effective.

There are few things as negative for a team performance as an insecure manager that needs to be making tactical decisions for the team as if developers were little kids.

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

#299

Post by esotericn »

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.

Yo, it's a joke, they literally have "won at life" ;).

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

#300

Post by esotericn »

tuesday20 wrote: post #267
CalRobert wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right. In large parts of Europe it's pretty much the opposite.

If you have a job that's ultimately pointless, then you want to work as little as possible so that you have time for leisure and/or useful work.

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