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My most popular open-source project [1] I talk about at conferences, mostly C++ ones (last example [2]). I was lucky to also land a paper about it at ICFP'17 [
by arximboldi 9y ago
My most popular open-source project [1] I talk about at conferences, mostly C++ ones (last example [2]). I was lucky to also land a paper about it at ICFP'17 [3]. On Friday I will talk at the MeetingCpp conference in Berlin about a new library I am building (kind of experimental Redux for C++ with time-travelling debugger!).
I work as a freelancer and at the moment I do client work 3 days a week and dedicate the rest of the time to the open-source work. The open-source work includes doing research and implementing these tools, but also preparing the talks, which is a very time consuming task for me. Doing conference talks is very emotionally exhausting, I dread the previous weeks to the talk---but the feeling afterwards is very good and it is a good way to get exposure, I hope.
My dream is to some day form a social company with a coop structure that works full-time on open-source, either directly or indirectly helping clients use these tools in their system. I hope I am set up in the right direction.
Recently I opened a Twitter account to talk mostly about my open-source stuff [1]. I admittedly hate Twitter as a social network, but I've been convinced that it is a good place for networking in our industry, so I just play the game.
I keep telling myself that I should open blog too, but then I realize that one can't simply do everything all the time, so I guess maybe I'll never do it.
To your last question: is it unfair to not do marketing to your work? Totally not. Just do whatever feels right to you. If one day you realize you have built something really useful, probably you'll get the urge to tell people about it.
[1] Immutable data-structures for C++:
https://github.com/arximboldi/immer https://github.com/arximboldi/immer
Example usage: https://github.com/arximboldi/ewig https://github.com/arximboldi/ewig
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPhpelUfu8Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPhpelUfu8Q
[3] https://public.sinusoid.es/misc/immer/immer-icfp17.pdf https://public.sinusoid.es/misc/immer/immer-icfp17.pdf
[4] https://twitter.com/sinusoidalen https://twitter.com/sinusoidalen
- arximboldi 9y agoNow that I think about it! that is not my most popular open source project, my most popular one is this one: https://github.com/arximboldi/gnujump https://github.com/arximboldi/gnujump That is an oldie, that I did in high-school, just scratching my own itch (I was addicted to a game called XJump, but wanted a better version). The major marketing thing I did was submitting it to the GNU project, which helped it get some exposure. It also got packaged into Debian, which also got it into Ubuntu, which helped it get visibility and ease of install. For a while a few times a year I would receive recordings of "high scores" that people would send me to upload to the official website, where I kept a ranking. The website is now down sadly (ooops!).
- ioddly 9y agoWell, I'm kinda intrigued by the Redux/C++ idea. Will there be notes or video from the conference? I looked through the talks page but couldn't find anything that seemed like that.
- arximboldi 9y agoThanks! The talk is called "The most valuable values". A lot of it will be about "thinking in value semantics" and then I'll show the architecture of interactive software as an example. There will be video, I think :-)