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My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

mike.zwobble.org

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Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#81

Post by boulos »

inamiyar wrote: post #26
p4bl0 wrote: post #18

I'm a CS associate professor. I teach a course which consists in contributing to a free software, in third year at my uni. A few years ago a couple of students decided to make a contribution to GNU ls. The change was to have the output color independent of capitalisation (it is based on filename extension). Their code was accepted. It was a tiny tiny contribution, but it's probable that these few lines of code are an…

That's so cool! Are you able/willing to share the course name/a course page?

Looks like https://pablo.rauzy.name/teaching/2016-2020.html#ddll (via profile)

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#82

Post by mattwad »

formerly_proven wrote: post #77
tppiotrowski wrote: post #50

Companies isolate devs from customers by using Product Managers. PMs interview customers and then decide what to build. By the time the tasks get to the dev it’s hard to understand the motivation and impact. The best companies I’ve worked at put the engineers and customers in close contact so they understood the impact and shortcomings in their work. Alternately you need to foster a culture of shared purpose where yo…

The project I'm currently the "lead developer" on never had a PM, so we directly communicate with users/customers. Often we are able to implement changes and make them available in a test environment within the hour - people are amazed, because they're used to everything taking days at the very least, usually weeks or months, with a lot of stuff never being fixed and so on.

just be careful, without a PM you can end up building lots of little features for each client, making individuals happy, but then you end up losing sight of what problem you were trying to solve, and suddenly your product feels very "heavy" for everyone...

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#83

Post by tppiotrowski »

davidivadavid wrote: post #74
tppiotrowski wrote: post #50

Companies isolate devs from customers by using Product Managers. PMs interview customers and then decide what to build. By the time the tasks get to the dev it’s hard to understand the motivation and impact. The best companies I’ve worked at put the engineers and customers in close contact so they understood the impact and shortcomings in their work. Alternately you need to foster a culture of shared purpose where yo…

Documenting and communicating motivation and impact are often pretty high up the priority list for PMs, otherwise you're just a context-free ticket factory, which typically results in subpar products.

Not in my experience or maybe large companies have so much hierarchy that the PM gives kudos to the dev manager that never trickles down to the individual devs

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#84

Post by agumonkey »

akudha wrote: post #72
agumonkey wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to find niches where positive feedback loops have a nicer effect on society (right now trying to help courthouse daily duties for instance)

It would be nice to make a list of such niches. Things that wouldn’t take more than a couple of hundred hours to make (at max) and are tremendously useful, especially to vulnerable populations like old people, people with limited internet connection, physically challenged people etc. These need not be super polished, optimized etc. They just need to work correctly and solve a problem quickly and easily

old people are a special demographics (I encounter a few of them regularly, for IT reasons or not)

the obvious fields in the list:

- education

- healthcare

- justice

someone on HN showed an app for people to find good workers for home rework, this kind of stuff could be tremendously useful, and more generally the organization layer of society is very lacking. This also match the issues at the courthouse, basically making people well informed, and communicating issues/info smoothly (instead of waiting days to get a fake answer by someone shady)

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#85

Post by kragen »

This is the magic of free software licensing: by removing barriers to sharing, it multiplies the usefulness of whatever is licensed by a much larger number of users, who are all free to repurpose it as they see fit. Most of my own free software is pretty radically useless, but I've written Wikipedia pages that thousands of people read every day, and made improvements to countless others. It would be difficult for anything I do in a normal job to have as big an effect on the world, either positive or negative.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#86

Post by andreilys »

mattwad wrote: post #82
formerly_proven wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The project I'm currently the "lead developer" on never had a PM, so we directly communicate with users/customers. Often we are able to implement changes and make them available in a test environment within the hour - people are amazed, because they're used to everything taking days at the very least, usually weeks or months, with a lot of stuff never being fixed and so on.

just be careful, without a PM you can end up building lots of little features for each client, making individuals happy, but then you end up losing sight of what problem you were trying to solve, and suddenly your product feels very "heavy" for everyone...

Why do you need a PM for that?

That’s what a good tech lead with a robust roadmap is for.

PMs sprung out of the notion that engineers are anti-social and need someone to keep customers/internal teams at bay so eng can focus on coding.

Of course in reality there are plenty of highly competent tech leads who can both negotiate with customers on a roadmap and build it.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#87

Post by georgeburdell »

As a dev at a large company, I'm wondering how the author went about open sourcing the side project. My employment contract stipulates that anything I write for work is owned by the company. This company wouldn't have any motivation to let me open source the work I do, which in my case does not go into any product.

The reason I ask is that I have written, as part of my day job, a scientific library in C# that doesn't appear to have any public equivalent and I know addresses common tasks in the industry. I would love to open source it, if not for beer money, but for visibility to help my career --- I'm at that point where promotions only happen with externally-visible accomplishments.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#88

Post by eloff »

alien_ wrote: post #75
logotype wrote: post #49

I work in finance. About 5 years ago I started building a FIX library on my spare time, out of curiosity. Over the years it has been countless fin tech start-ups as well as big companies reaching out to me about the library, suggesting fixes and features. Since then I have long lost the interest in the technology which enables connectivity to financial exchanges to automate trades, but I keep working on the library f…

I'd probably offer some sort of support/consultancy services and prioritize the work of the paying users, making it clear when filing github issues and pull requests. This could easily sustain you in a passive income way so you can spend most of your time working on things that matter more to humanity.

Yeah, I think especially in finance companies would be willing to pay for support and feature development. There has to be a way to monetize the project and make it so at least it pays for your time.

There's nothing wrong with a labor of love, but the companies using your software can afford to pay for your time.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#89

Post by robertlagrant »

andreilys wrote: post #86
mattwad wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just be careful, without a PM you can end up building lots of little features for each client, making individuals happy, but then you end up losing sight of what problem you were trying to solve, and suddenly your product feels very "heavy" for everyone...

Why do you need a PM for that? That’s what a good tech lead with a robust roadmap is for. PMs sprung out of the notion that engineers are anti-social and need someone to keep customers/internal teams at bay so eng can focus on coding. Of course in reality there are plenty of highly competent tech leads who can both negotiate with customers on a roadmap and build it.

I think we'd call them PMs once the job gets big enough to need that work done (almost) full time.

Re: My tiny side project has had more impact than my decade in the software industry

#90

Post by akudha »

agumonkey wrote: post #84
akudha wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice to make a list of such niches. Things that wouldn’t take more than a couple of hundred hours to make (at max) and are tremendously useful, especially to vulnerable populations like old people, people with limited internet connection, physically challenged people etc. These need not be super polished, optimized etc. They just need to work correctly and solve a problem quickly and easily

old people are a special demographics (I encounter a few of them regularly, for IT reasons or not) the obvious fields in the list: - education - healthcare - justice someone on HN showed an app for people to find good workers for home rework, this kind of stuff could be tremendously useful, and more generally the organization layer of society is very lacking. This also match the issues at the courthouse, basically ma…

Physically challenged people are another group that could use a lot of help. One of my friends has cerebral palsy, until I met her, I had zero idea about the problems they face.

These groups of people aren’t served because there is not much money in it :(

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