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Publishing your work increases your luck

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Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#81

Post by neoCrimeLabs »

I can attest at least some of this is true.

My blogging and publishing almost never comes up during an interview. Afterwards, I am openly told it's why they either asked for me, or why they chose me over another candidate. This has happened at almost every job I've accepted.

My writing style or content is not all that special. As the saying goes, 90% of success is simply showing up.

Just being explain complex topics in simple ways can go a long way, even if you're not an amazing author.

---

Addition: This is especially true with topics so expansive that even great LLM often conflates subtopics in weird ways. While this gap is rapidly closing, being able to clearly explain complex interconnected topics in simple ways is absolutely an advantage.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#82

Post by Hendrikto »

pona-a wrote: post #43
PaulRobinson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it. However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?

I think srchut is one solution. Its email workflow does successfully deter less experienced/curious people, for better or worse, and it still has some project discovery bit not social signals like stars.

It’s not a neutral service though. The owner is very opinionated and likes to get involved in what projects are and are not allowed to be hosted there, and changes these rules on a whim.

In my eyes, this disqualifies Sourcehut for anything serious. You could get booted off any second, if Drew decides that he does not like you.

(I like Drew, and I like opinionated and outspoken people. But Service Providers should be neutral, and only involve themselves as far as required by law.)

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#84

Post by didgetmaster »

Aurornis wrote: post #76
esperent wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR". There's alre…

> Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR". The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you…

I wonder how effective it is for an OSS maintainer to try to prevent someone from 'stealing their project' when doing the fork is huge with plenty of resources (engineering, marketing, and legal) vs just some startup that is trying to gain some traction.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#85

Post by cmrdporcupine »

hypfer wrote: post #24

I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else. Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money. This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me. Which does make sense I guess, given…

I keep waiting for this younger generation to wake up to why we invented the GPL in the first place. Entities that are happy to use your brains for a while, and then eagerly dispose of you when they can.

They love your free labour. "Thanks for your OSS project! No, no, we're not hiring... and you'd never make it through out interview process!"

One should make free software for other free software developers and grateful end users. Not for parasites. Recognition doesn't pay the mortgage. And now you won't even get that because your work will just end distilled into weights in a large language model.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#86

Post by didgetmaster »

CatMustard wrote: post #57
ozim wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what we do in closed source corporate code.

"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?" "I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history." "Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."

Makes you wonder if the reason why some trivial bug in a closed source project goes unfixed for years; is because all the engineers are afraid to touch the code in some obscure library and instantly become its new 'owner'.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#87

Post by MasterScrat »

didip wrote: post #28
crystal_revenge wrote: post #17

> Having your OSS library take off All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world. I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interest…

Exactly this. Word by word. Some of my OSS projects got popular accidentally and oh boy… pain in the butt for real. And for little benefits to myself. Hitting HN front page or r/programming was nice for my ego. But that’s about it.

Exactly - best case scenario is Reddit/HN front page with a cool project you enjoyed working on, have some nice conversations there, reach a few 100s stars which look good on your CV, and that’s it.

If you expect more long term support you better be paying me for my time.

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#89

Post by Jaauthor »

As an author, I dig what this is saying since it resonates so well with my journey as an author. Everything I publish is one more chance to connect with people who are drawn to other people in motion. I'm still learhing how to bring people along and inspiring others to create.

Here's some of my work - it's free until Jan 1. https://inkican.com/smashwords-white-hot-scifi-winter/

Re: Publishing your work increases your luck

#90

Post by tacker2000 »

bob1029 wrote: post #79
crystal_revenge wrote: post #17

> Having your OSS library take off All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world. I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interest…

I have started a new OSS project and intend to provide optional enterprise offerings on top. I really don't care if someone steals the ideas presented in code because they're actually fairly pedestrian. The much bigger concern for me is the fact that if I do not make my source open by default, I will have a very hard time developing trust in the community and prospective customers. I know I nearly instantly walk away…

This is pretty much the only way open source doesnt lead to burnout and continues to be maintained, and a lot of projects are doing this already successfully.

Get “street cred” in the dev space by being open source, and let the enterprise customers “pay” for it.

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