6 ms·

Throwing random code over the wall is fairly harmless, until it sees any level of popularity, at which point you become the sole point of contact for a sea of p

• shp0ngle 9y ago
  Yeah, this is my experience as well Before open sourcing, I have that anxiety that people will look at my shitty code and judge. Nobody really looks at the code in reality. People just come, write some terribly written bug report, and then they write "+1" in github issues.
  • yev 9y ago
    It is 100% same in my case..
  • Klathmon 9y ago
    Until your code gets linked on HN or Reddit where people will then read the code and then proclaim that the person who created it must be dumb because of all of the obvious mistakes they made (generally ignoring the reasons for some of those choices as bad reasons). That's what is pushing me away from releasing code to the public. It's really crushing to my self worth as a developer to feel good about a project only to be told how awful it is and how it's broken by design.
    • zzzcpan 9y ago
      Why would you care what others think about your code? Nobody knows anything in this industry. There is so little important criticism, that even finding it if you really want to is super hard.
      • Klathmon 9y ago
        I know that on the surface, but it does something to me as a person when I see it. I can tell myself it doesn't matter I can tell myself that they don't know the details or the trade offs that were made, but regardless it still takes the steam out of my willingness to work on it.
        • mixedCase 9y ago
          It helps me to remember the following: - I am not my work. - All software sucks. Some suck less than others. - I have simultaneously been catastrophically wrong and full of confidence in the past. Be open minded to the possibility there's a very different way to do things that will make you a better professional. Be similarly open to the possibility the other guy is full of shit. - Developing a thick skin will make your life (in general) easier. It's better to do it in a short, intense period of time than prolonging the pain over decades of your life.
          • codeisawesome 9y ago
            Did you make these discoveries when someone complained about "mixed casing" in your code? :-) Seriously though, well put! Thanks for the reminder.
    • shp0ngle 9y ago
      I had code on HN (on a different handle) and really, people never nitpicked code. Nobody cares about that one misnamed function or that global variable or that useless abstraction layer. People, however, do like the one-note replies. "Why isn't this in Rust instead." "Why isn't the license GPL instead of MIT" (or vice versa). "The name is immature." "Will this be on Mac OS X too? Why not?"
    • rayalez 9y ago
      I found the opposite to be true. I am often surprised at how friendly and constructive comments on my projects are. After sharing them on /r/webdev, /r/react, or HN, I've had multiple messages with people helping me fix bugs, teaching me how to do things better, or just encouraging me to do more.
      • kerneldeveloper 9y ago
        You are lucky. Some projects have difficulty because everyone wants to use it but no one wants to contribute to it. The inbox of the maintainers may be full filled with bug reports and they have to spend one or two hours to handle these problems. They are tired.
  • X86BSD 9y ago
    Why would others care about his/her code being trashed publicly? Because we are all human beings. We all have feelings. Some of us are tougher than others emotionally but even those of us who don't give AF what others think feel something when hordes of anonymous master coder warriors on the net trash your work. It's also a reason people like joe rogan don't even read social media anymore because of all the hate generated by throngs of basement dwellers. It takes a toll on you to get a tsunami of criticism from internet trolls and those who just love to tear others down sadly. Why would anyone want to inflict that on themselves?
• __s 9y ago
  Care to share the python project? Asking as someone who's made PRs to CPython's core in the past
  • harrisi 9y ago
    Not OP, but I believe they're referencing py-lmdb. https://github.com/dw/py-lmdb/ https://github.com/dw/py-lmdb/
• erikb 9y ago
  Exactly this experience happens in big teams internally as well. It works like this according to my experience: You see a problem before it really does financial harm to the company. You start developing a solution. You expect to get rewarded with prices, raises, titles and public encouragement, because you solved the problem before anybody even saw it. But instead this will happen: The employees who run into the problem first and therefore would be the one who suffer from it, find that your solution may be an answer. But instead of making it work they find ways to complain about it publicly. Since management hasn't yet realized that there is a problem, they just hear that you are not doing your job and put pressure on you to fix all the bugs, because of your bugs nobody else can work, so it seems. This is not stupid by the other people or by accident. The moment they have found a way to complain about you it doesn't matter anymore if the task will be successful or not, since a failure wouldn't be blamed on them anymore as well. Everybody knows that the bugs are your fault, right? In this regard open source seems less harmful to me. In open source at least there is no boss who can push you to solve the bugs, or fire you if you don't.
  • BeetleB 9y ago
    I had somewhat a similar experience in a previous job. Automated a lot of stuff to speed up our workflow. Never got anything material out of it (bonus/raise, etc). The reward was an expectation to increase our output ("Now that it takes half the time to do X, everyone should double their output.") The other reward was maintaining my code while expected to double the output. At one point the manager made it clear I would not get a promotion based on this. I left, and in my next job I tested the waters a little to see if they'd value such contributions. They did, and so I happily continue to make them. Had they not, I would have stopped quickly and moved on to another job. As an engineer, my job is to solve problems that need to be solved. I could be like everyone else and just go along with it (not solve them and maintain the status quo), but that's not why I became an engineer.
  • icebraining 9y ago
    Companies are generally hierarchical systems. By developing the solution on your own initiative, you bypassed that. You should never expect a good reaction from a social system when you break its rules, even if for its own benefit.
• shimo5037 9y ago
  This matches my experience. Even now, depending on the day, I might be looking at around 30-50 emails of varying, usually depressingly low quality per day. I've had some relatively successful one man projects in the past and at peak popularity it would take me several hours per day to sift through everything.
• oss_workhorse 9y ago
  Yeah, and 10 years ago one could at least flame back at unpleasant people and freeloaders, but now everyone is expected to be a good silent work horse on GitHub with no firm opinions at all. Open source is no longer worth the trouble.
• carussell 9y ago
  > None of the regular project users have stepped up Most projects' development processes are under-documented, even healthy projects and those run by people not looking to get out. This may be the case with yours. Have you written up a short description of your practices and the things that a maintenance takeover would entail?
• irremediable 9y ago
  What's the project, out of interest?
• jnwatson 9y ago
  Sorry, I've had a personal thing come up. I'll help you out soon. Small world.