Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sorry everybody, I failed with you

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–357 of 357 posts

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#351

Post by pjmlp »

WalterBright wrote: post #350
pjmlp wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if living in tier 1 countries, I can assure you there are countries where both professions have equal chances of success, and probably the musicians get the upper hand on opportunities. In many of such places you will probably live better from tourist tips than trying to make it as programmer.

That's no longer true in these days of working remotely.

To work remotely, there are certain requirements on the life pyramid that need to be fulfilled.

It starts by living on a country whose technology infrastructure makes it possible at all.

Then it follows on how much the tier 1 customers are willing to pay to their offshored devs, with the race to the bottom on the dollar per hour rate.

There is also the culture of the country, if programming is seen as a servant job only used as stepping stone for a real job, or if it is seen as master of universe Silicon Valley style.

Working as software developer is privilege, not seen through the same lens across the world.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#352

Post by csharptwdec19 »

glangdale wrote: post #124
tester34 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's why telemetry is imporant If I were doing serious OSS I'd really hard consider adding just something like a once-a-week ping just to be aware of users count ofc with an ability to disable it

SaaS or something explicitly that people know will 'phone home' is one thing, but putting unexpected telemetry into a library would be staggeringly unprofessional.

Frankly, there could be some value to OSS contributors in saying 'There is Telemetry' very up front, but also in the same breath telling people that instructions for disabling Telemetry is in the Docs.

Could help lower the number of GH issues that are filed because people don't read said docs...

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#353

Post by jka »

bin_bash wrote: post #255
supportlocal4h wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The hard part of OSS management is dealing with change requests. Something comes in and now it's on the maintainer to ensure that the new fix doesn't break anything existing, or the new feature doesn't collide with anything else that comes down the pipe later. It's not work that can be done by volunteers, it's something that can only be done by long-term maintainers. When I worked on an OSS project I hated getting PR…

Thanks for writing this; it matches an undescribed feeling that I've experienced for a few codebases.

What I'd add in response is that this "change request load" is much easier to manage for small, well-maintained projects with fewer quirks.

And if the entire project architecture can fit within your mental buffer space at one time, then it's much easier and faster to parry those incoming change requests and pull requests into clear, effective feedback and code.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#354

Post by pizza234 »

pizza234 wrote: post #333
j1elo wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe an easy solution is to do the thing everybody seems to discourage: add a clause to your preferred OSS license, stating that usage of the code is subject to sending a mandatory thank-you email. That change alone might be enough to break the fragile conditions that allow the license to be considered Open Source... but who cares, the mental health and happiness of OSS devs affected by the difficulties mentioned in…

That's Postcardware!¹ :) I remember using one, but I not exactly which one; it's not in the Wikipedia list. ¹= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcardware#Postcardware

Found: it was (not anymore) Exact Audio Copy¹.

¹=https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/...

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#355

Post by dimitrios1 »

marlor wrote: post #321
dimitrios1 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Burnout is made worse when you take on too many complex interactions and dependencies. OSS works best when it’s a small project that does a single thing and does it well, but doesn’t rely on too many upstream projects for its functionality. As soon as the project tries to do too much, it virtually needs a committee to coordinate it all. If it relies on too many upstream dependencies, then the maintainer will be hamme…

The irony is we demand constant updates, pushes, recent commits, and maintenance, yet we use OSes with libraries and tools that were written decades ago and see little to no updates at times. Some of us go happily along using a decade old version of zlibc, for example. But when it comes to that latest NPM dependency -- if it doesn't have a commit within the last six months, psh! must be abandonware.

Re: Sorry everybody, I failed with you

#357

Post by kxc42 »

gabereiser wrote: post #200

What’s really sad about this (and other open source devs with pressure from users) is the lack of support _from the users_. Open source should be about being able to dive in and add the wishlist item you have. A lot of people put up this wall that only changes can be made by the author, proliferating this onslaught of requests from the user and in the end burning out the author. If you manage an open source project,…

I was surprised that nobody mentioned the Collective Code Construction Contract of zeromq/Pieter Hintjens [1]. It tries to minimise the friction created by maintaining & contributing to open source projects.

It is not perfect of course, but at least it is a good start. Especially the "value-" & opinion-based discussions can be reduced considerably.

[1]: https://rfc.zeromq.org/spec/42/

Post reply on HN