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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)

#41

Post by chii »

laurentdc wrote: post #39
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 agree it's an audience problem. I had a Wordpress plugin up and I'd get all sorts of entitled requests, borderline "plz fix my website you broke it". But also had some C libraries for Arm STM32 and only ever got solid pull requests and people eager to help. You see the same thing in IRC / Discord channels of those technologies.

> I'd get all sorts of entitled requests, borderline "plz fix my website you broke it"

which will be interesting to see if you ask them for payment for fixes, would they pay?

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

#42

Post by munchbunny »

andrewstuart wrote: post #19
ashtonkem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a hiring manager, I have never done that.

Do you ask to look at their github? If yes, then what's the point if you're not trying to see the quality of the code and the tests?

I’ve evaluated GitHub profiles and contributions in the past. As long as there’s a body of work with reasonable complexity and no big red flags like a nasty argument or a bug-riddled PR, I consider it a positive signal that they can code. I specifically look at their opened issues and PR’s, rather than their commits, as a way to gauge their ability to code in a team setting.

I won’t try to guess how good they are at coding from GitHub alone. Most of my own public contributions are cases of “four days studying, two hours coding.” So as an exercise in tempering my interviewer ego, I remind myself that by just looking their work, I am very likely missing a lot of the picture.

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

#43

Post by noitsnot »

franciscop wrote: post #22
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 have few projects on 1k+ stars; the ones that are more beginner-friendly are normally where I get most unrelated requests. I used to help people where possible, but now I just don't have the time (or TBH, motivation). So I closed the issues on those two projects that got most low-quality issues. People started to open PR to tell me I was wrong and I should open the issues. This cemented my decision, oh the entitlem…

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

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

#45

Post by aetherspawn »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #21
andrewstuart wrote: post #16

But when potential employers come looking at your work they'll say "hey this code is shitty! It's not a work of art with 100% code coverage tests and perfect in every way. We can't possibly give you a job. Every line of code in our corporate repo is Mona Lisa quality, we can't let rubbishy developers like you in."

The first thing you learn when you're proud of your Github profile is that nobody is actually clicking into your projects and reading code, with few exceptions. Sure, at small companies where developers interview you, or maybe if you link to a specific relevant project in your cover letter, you might get a pair of eyeballs. But I think people vastly overestimate the readership of their repos when looking for jobs.

I learnt this when I uploaded a project that claimed to do something but was only like 10% finished and you couldn’t run it.

It got cross-posted across the internet and a ton of stars and even referenced in some else’s project repo as a competitor/alternative and reasons why theirs was better!

This experience really made me smile. Nobody even tried to run it.

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

#46

Post by travisjungroth »

chii wrote: post #41
laurentdc wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it's an audience problem. I had a Wordpress plugin up and I'd get all sorts of entitled requests, borderline "plz fix my website you broke it". But also had some C libraries for Arm STM32 and only ever got solid pull requests and people eager to help. You see the same thing in IRC / Discord channels of those technologies.

> I'd get all sorts of entitled requests, borderline "plz fix my website you broke it" which will be interesting to see if you ask them for payment for fixes, would they pay?

They’d probably consider it ransomware lol

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

#47

Post by a_cool_username »

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 contribution.

I think a lot of this has to do with the effort you put into community management. We put tons of energy into making it easy to make good contributions: PR/issue templates, we're on slack, we respond to emails, we make it as easy as possible to get your code in as long as it passes tests. It's a lot of effort and I can't imagine doing it for something that was just a personal project, but I think that's how the bigger projects deal with it.

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

#48

Post by bredren »

franciscop wrote: post #32
grogenaut wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing I do is just check commit history for recent commits. Usually a good indicator a thing is abandoned

How do you define if a small library has been stable for years?

Issues filed. Their recency and concerns.

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

#49

Post by andrewstuart »

munchbunny wrote: post #42
andrewstuart wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you ask to look at their github? If yes, then what's the point if you're not trying to see the quality of the code and the tests?

I’ve evaluated GitHub profiles and contributions in the past. As long as there’s a body of work with reasonable complexity and no big red flags like a nasty argument or a bug-riddled PR, I consider it a positive signal that they can code. I specifically look at their opened issues and PR’s, rather than their commits, as a way to gauge their ability to code in a team setting. I won’t try to guess how good they are at…

I'm pretty cynical about how any code evaluation is done.

Amongst the many many ways code evaluations fail, the worst and most typical IMO is that the evaluator has an air of superiority, who marks down things they don't understand, and thinks their own coding is that of an artistic genius, approaches the tasks with zero science or rigor and is unable to articulate anything hard to back up their vague assertions coming out of the assessment "process".

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

#50

Post by maple3142 »

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.

Same experience. I have a project that can be used by non programmers, and it also gained some popularity in some community. So, I often found people who don't know how to set it up by following the README opening issues ask how to do that. What's more, they don't even bother to search issues before creating a new issue.
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