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The secret life of open source developers [video]

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Re: The secret life of open source developers [video]

#31

Post by mikekchar »

fenomas wrote: post #15
tonyjstark wrote: post #6

I once got a mail for a free software I published: "You're product sucks, I don't like it, why are you even doing this? There are much better alternatives out there.". So what to do with that? I have to admit that this mail really stung for a while. Maybe I should have asked, why it sucked for this person, but then, why should I care about someone rude? It didn't take me long to learn that some percentage of people t…

I got a weird reverse one a few years back, to the effect of "your result is great, best I've seen, but the code is awful and I think you're not a good developer". What can you do? I just said something like "thanks, if you have any specific feedback please open an issue". One thing that's nice about getting this via GitHub is, at least the rude comment maybe gets a couple of :thumbsdown:s on it, which can help you b…

The internet is such a vacuum, though. Having someone actually read your code at all is kind of like a massive compliment. That they take the effort to email you about how much they hate it... In a weird way, it's kind of gratifying.

Great artists are never recognised in their time ;-) But seriously, I think you can think of it the same way. Would an artist ever make a new work if they didn't think they could make something better than their previous work? So there will always be truth about the deficiencies in a work. But can the reviewer understand the good parts?

Sometimes I get great pleasure in pieces of code that I wrote that I think nobody else will appreciate. It's kind of like an inside joke. If someone can't see it, it's not really unexpected -- perhaps more surprising if someone does see it.

I try to enjoy the fact that someone read my code. The hate mail is just the proof :-D

Re: The secret life of open source developers [video]

#32

Post by pramsey »

neves wrote: post #28

I'm curious: where the "secret life of" comes from? The earlier example that I could find was "the secret life of plants" a Stevie Wonder music.

I'd guess "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", which is actually about his daydreams, his internal secret life, not some real world life behind closed doors.

Re: The secret life of open source developers [video]

#33

Post by derekp7 »

tonyjstark wrote: post #6

I once got a mail for a free software I published: "You're product sucks, I don't like it, why are you even doing this? There are much better alternatives out there.". So what to do with that? I have to admit that this mail really stung for a while. Maybe I should have asked, why it sucked for this person, but then, why should I care about someone rude? It didn't take me long to learn that some percentage of people t…

I would be happy if I could find an appropriate way to get more visibility for one of my open source projects (a snapshot backup system, called Snebu). My problem is that I don't want to feel spammy by throwing out references whenever an opportunity comes up (like I just did here), however on the flip side the more people that use it, the more support tickets that will come in that may ask for things that are outside of the design scope. And I would feel bad if I can't make something work for everybody.

Re: The secret life of open source developers [video]

#35

Post by mmmrk »

sprash wrote: post #21
lordgrenville wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, being abused by someone is not valuable and even very mature, confident people find it hard to handle emotionally. Negative feedback is helpful if presented politely or neutrally. Otherwise the form destroys the value of the content. (And by the way, positive feedback can be very valuable as well.)

> even very mature, confident people find it hard to handle emotionally. One of the defining qualities of being "mature" and "confident" is to be able to fade out the emotional components and concentrate on the substance. This is the essential quality that seperates children from adults. If you are fazed by some comments of random people on the internet then you are neither "mature" nor "confident". You either got to…

> If you are fazed by some comments of random people on the internet then you are neither "mature" nor "confident". You either got to grow up or you will have a hard time.

Not sure if you're trying to troll here, but being fazed by negativity is a perfectly normal human response. Framing it as a matter of maturity or confidence seems disingenuous to me. One can be trained to handle it better and turn it around or into something productive (i.e. conflict training for health care professionals) but the response remains.

Re: The secret life of open source developers [video]

#36

Post by hnlmorg »

sprash wrote: post #30
hnlmorg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative feedback can fall into two categories: * constructive - which are polite and informative * deconstructive - which are basically just someone being an arsehole. The former stuff can be great at time but the examples being discussed fall firmly in the latter category.

Getting actually constructive feedback is super rare. When you ask emotionally engaged poeple to be more specific and precise about their problem they usually rationalize their anger and stop being angry when they actually notice what exactly they are angry about.

Constructive feedback shouldn't be angry nor emotionally charged. That's just bad feedback.

I also don't think constructive feedback is super rare either. But I guess it depends on the project. eg some projects might have an appeal to different communities who are less often less patient with maintainers.

I think it's also worth remembering that maintainers do also need to be patient with the community. Sometimes I've seen maintainers not handle themselves well even when that feedback is PR fixing a bug or security vulnerability and there's no comment, suggestion nor anything else about the existing code base. In those instances you either just have to accept the maintainers vision (even when you disagree with it) or fork their project and maintain it yourself (which I've had to do before).

Ultimately though, most people I interact within OSS are friendly enough.

Re: The secret life of open source developers [video]

#37

Post by Jur »

neves wrote: post #28

I'm curious: where the "secret life of" comes from? The earlier example that I could find was "the secret life of plants" a Stevie Wonder music.

My guess is it's meant as a hint at the misunderstanding from OSS-users with how open source developers benefit and contribute, which is unlike a commercial product or company

Re: The secret life of open source developers [video]

#38

Post by unionpivo »

sprash wrote: post #23
imtringued wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does negative feedback come with an obligation to slave away for a person that doesn't even care about what you are doing?

If you want your product to be good you have the "obligation" to listen to negative feedback. But you don't have the "obligation" to make a good product. If you don't care about your product you are going to ignore the feedback anyways. > a person that doesn't even care This is a misconception. People giving emotially loaded negative feedback actually "care" about your product much more than the average user.

> Your product sucks is not "negative feedback". It useless statement.

If you are paid and want to go fish to see if you can turn that into actual feedback, go ahead. It will take a lot of time and energy to pull something out, that will be useful. Posting your project to hn, various reddits or just twitter will get you a lot of more constructive feedback for less effort.

Besides I don't like rude people, responding to them just validates to them, that rudeness pays.

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