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Oh this is infuriating: > You will be told that you need to develop a thick skin. It's the equivalent of a bully taunting with "stop crying!" I have been doi

Oh this is infuriating: > You will be told that you need to develop a thick skin. It's the equivalent of a bully taunting with "stop crying!" I have been doing open source for about 10 years. A couple of my projects have 1000+ stars on gh for what it's worth. Most people are chill. Some people disagree without being disagreeable. Then there's others who are completely toxic. A guy who was cto of a company and wanted to use one of my libraries made me absolutely miserable for weeks. Wrote about the experience here: http://charlesleifer.com/blog/your-idea-sucks/ http://charlesleifer.com/blog/your-idea-sucks/

dennisgorelik 8y ago
This is a good story to learn from. I also found 1-year old follow-up discussion on Redit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/69ehe6/your_idea_sucks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/69ehe6/your_id... That story can be useful for interviewing project managers and team leads for software projects. Q1: Could you please read this story and identify the most significant mistakes key players made? Q2: What would you do if you were one of these players? Q3: Why?
etimberg 8y ago
Chiming in to add that I've definitely had my ups and downs with open source. When it's going well it feels incredibly rewarding but when it's not, it absolutely sucks and I've gotten to the point where I avoid GitHub and try to take a break. It's part of the reason I've avoided taking donations for any project I work on. I'd feel a lot worse about taking a break if people were paying for higher expectations.
- coleifer 8y ago
  In 10 years, really the only negative experience that in any way affected my well-being was the incident I wrote about in the linked blog post. That covers probably a couple thousand GitHub issues. So really overwhelmingly positive stuff. Amazing how much I let one guy fuck up my day, in retrospect.

dennisgorelik 8y ago

This is a good story to learn from. I also found 1-year old follow-up discussion on Redit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/69ehe6/your_idea_sucks/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/69ehe6/your_id... That story can be useful for interviewing project managers and team leads for software projects. Q1: Could you please read this story and identify the most significant mistakes key players made? Q2: What would you do if you were one of these players? Q3: Why?

etimberg 8y ago

Chiming in to add that I've definitely had my ups and downs with open source. When it's going well it feels incredibly rewarding but when it's not, it absolutely sucks and I've gotten to the point where I avoid GitHub and try to take a break. It's part of the reason I've avoided taking donations for any project I work on. I'd feel a lot worse about taking a break if people were paying for higher expectations.

coleifer 8y ago
In 10 years, really the only negative experience that in any way affected my well-being was the incident I wrote about in the linked blog post. That covers probably a couple thousand GitHub issues. So really overwhelmingly positive stuff. Amazing how much I let one guy fuck up my day, in retrospect.