5 ms·

This mirrors my experience 100%. I'd like to say that you are not alone but...well... We are all alone together.

by bai0 7y ago

moron4hire 7y ago
I wonder if Linus Torvalds--without the name recognition--would be able to release Linux today? His first posts about it were met with some complaints about "GNU Herd will be here any day", but despite being super primitive, he somehow still got enough people on board to become a self-sustaining project. Hell, I wonder if anyone other than Google, Apple, or Microsoft could successfully release a brand new operating system today. Everything seems to be about consolidation to a single norm of "like Linux". Where did the diversity of tech go?
- z3t4 7y ago
  I remember in the 90's you could publish anything and people would try it out because boredom I guess. Now there is so much to choose from. But I think its still possible if you find a good channel. Literally an IRC channel or niche forum where you will find your first users. Before starting a project, ask yourself who will be the first users and where do I find them.
  - moron4hire 7y ago
    My first user is always myself. I write code to make my work easier. It grows over time and then I start thinking others might also find it helps them with similar work.
    - z3t4 7y ago
      Also allow yourself a budget and to search for an existing solution. If you are gonna spend 100 hours on something, a couple of thousand dollars is not that much if you can just buy an already existing solution. For example, I wanted a feature in my text/code editor, and the only product that had that feature cost 1000/month, I thought that was too much so I spent several hundred hours creating my own editor ... And of course no one is interested in my editor besides myself. That's a lot of opportunity cost, time that I could have spent doing something else.
      - rabidrat 7y ago
        Of course the fear is that you spend a few thousand dollars on a potential solution, use it for a few months only to discover that it does only about 60% of what you really need and/or it's painful/difficult to use. So now you're either stuck with a substandard solution, or you are going to do the work yourself anyway, and are out the few thousand dollars besides.
      - atq2119 7y ago
        It's ironic that so many people here are complaining about their solo projects not gaining traction, but nobody seems to want to pitch into somebody else's project and make it their own. Please don't take it personally, I simply noted a pattern and the fact that I'm writing this on your comment in particular is just random chance. In your example, why would you start yet another editor? There are hundreds, possibly thousands, already out there. Instead of writing your own, you could have taken the one that's popular and closest to what you want, and started to change it to fit your needs (or written a plugin, if the editor allowed for it). One of my own favourite experiences with open source development was when I basically revived an existing project by starting to make contributions to it, which then pulled the original creator back in and ultimately others as well.
        z3t4 7y ago
        In my case I couldn't actually find any project I could contribute to, until after I had the editor I wanted. But similar projects kept popping up, some backed my big corp. I thought about abandoning my own editor and implement the features I needed in any of the similar projects, but I didn't like the architecture and they where made in languages that I didn't like. My editor also was ahead. Although it did not take long until the other projects surpassed my editor in capabilities. I have also later found many projects like mine that are now abandoned. It's very ironic indeed. I kept working on it hoping that I could pivot and find market fit to make some money off it, but it seems dead impossible. And at the same time similar projects are backed by investors.
        atq2119 7y ago
bai0 7y ago
Just checked your profile, didn't realize you were the author of PrimroseVR. Now I feel even more alone-together with you, I'm the sole developer for JanusWeb and my experience completely matches what you describe. Pretty depressing how open source projects by individuals can at best hope to "inspire" devs at FAANG companies to just do the same thing and then use their company's immense resources and developer relation teams to promote their project over the ones that existed before them. I wonder how many talented devs have had this happen to them only to give up and stop trying.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  LOL, thanks. I tend to think the only reason Primrose had any attention was because it was the only complete framework for WebVR in the browser at the time. I remember using JanusVR in 2014 at a VR meetup on someone's DK2 and really liking it. But all I had at home was a smartphone in a cardboard box that I had hacked together myself shortly after seeing the Google Cardboard announcement. I only got a DK2 after Tojiro started releasing his WebVR builds of Chromium, then got lucky that my design was similar enough to his early WebVR API design that the port only took a day. Primrose existed for a year before A-Frame came out. And overnight, I somehow became the copycat. In the second year, I even saw claims I was copying ReactVR. Incidentally, way early on, I had been planning to extend Primrose to run in JanusVR. But after the third year, I just couldn't get past the burnout and was getting professional dev work only for Unity. So here I am now, I'm the head of VR at a foreign language instruction company, where I'm working exclusively in Unity. I have a new framework I call Juniper, but I haven't really told anyone about it because I just don't care anymore. It's good enough that it's just for me. It's open on Github, and if someone stumbles on it, that's ok, but otherwise I'd rather focus on working for money than working for criticism on HN.
  - bai0 7y ago
    Yup, very similar story here. I'd been working on a WebGL engine called Elation Engine since 2011, and when VR hit the scene, I quickly added support for barrel shader and WebSocket tracking, then when WebVR was a thing added support for that as well. Those times were exciting, it felt like indies and hackers were driving the technology, and the possibilities were endless. I joined Janus in 2016, after Facebook bought my previous employer and fired my team. I'd added support for loading Janus worlds within my engine, which opened it up to normal web browsers, and the team at Janus was excited for the possibilities. It was a great story of how I was able to turn an open source project into a paying job, and people were EXCITED about what we were building! We had investors and users, everything was great! Fast forward to today. The team is broken and burnt out. Many left when we couldn't secure another round of funding and the paychecks dried up. The code is in a poor state because we kept chasing what platform gatekeepers and potential investors told us THEY wanted to see. The founder and myself both had kids within a month of each other and can no longer work like we used to. One guy's wife left him because he was spending so much time travelling and promoting the project. We have less users than ever, despite our tech being years ahead of what people think is possible. We still pretend like we're a normal healthy happy company, because we still believe in the idea and nobody's going to invest in a company of depressed burnt out people. But now even that fantasy is unsustainable, it's probably time to just give up and get a regular old job. Of course success was never guaranteed, but what we didn't expect was how we'd just end up shunned and ignored. When A-Frame first launched, they listed Janus as an inspiration, but once they reached some level of success and saw us as competitors, they wrote us out of that history book - literally just removed us from the list of inspirations, but kept other projects like SceneVR (whose author also credits Janus as his inspiration). We've got literally thousands of interconnected worlds people have built which nobody visits or links to, but if someone makes a similar world with A-Frame or Babylon, we're sure to hear all about how great and new and innovative it is. Modern open source is not the same scene it used to be. I don't know what's next. It's pretty depressing.

This mirrors my experience 100%. I'd like to say that you are not alone but...well... We are all alone together.

by bai0 7y ago

This mirrors my experience 100%. I'd like to say that you are not alone but...well... We are all alone together.

I wonder if Linus Torvalds--without the name recognition--would be able to release Linux today? His first posts about it were met with some complaints about "GNU Herd will be here any day", but despite being super primitive, he somehow still got enough people on board to become a self-sustaining project. Hell, I wonder if anyone other than Google, Apple, or Microsoft could successfully release a brand new operating system today. Everything seems to be about consolidation to a single norm of "like Linux". Where did the diversity of tech go?

z3t4 7y ago
I remember in the 90's you could publish anything and people would try it out because boredom I guess. Now there is so much to choose from. But I think its still possible if you find a good channel. Literally an IRC channel or niche forum where you will find your first users. Before starting a project, ask yourself who will be the first users and where do I find them.
- moron4hire 7y ago
  My first user is always myself. I write code to make my work easier. It grows over time and then I start thinking others might also find it helps them with similar work.
  - z3t4 7y ago
    Also allow yourself a budget and to search for an existing solution. If you are gonna spend 100 hours on something, a couple of thousand dollars is not that much if you can just buy an already existing solution. For example, I wanted a feature in my text/code editor, and the only product that had that feature cost 1000/month, I thought that was too much so I spent several hundred hours creating my own editor ... And of course no one is interested in my editor besides myself. That's a lot of opportunity cost, time that I could have spent doing something else.
    - rabidrat 7y ago
      Of course the fear is that you spend a few thousand dollars on a potential solution, use it for a few months only to discover that it does only about 60% of what you really need and/or it's painful/difficult to use. So now you're either stuck with a substandard solution, or you are going to do the work yourself anyway, and are out the few thousand dollars besides.
    - atq2119 7y ago
      It's ironic that so many people here are complaining about their solo projects not gaining traction, but nobody seems to want to pitch into somebody else's project and make it their own. Please don't take it personally, I simply noted a pattern and the fact that I'm writing this on your comment in particular is just random chance. In your example, why would you start yet another editor? There are hundreds, possibly thousands, already out there. Instead of writing your own, you could have taken the one that's popular and closest to what you want, and started to change it to fit your needs (or written a plugin, if the editor allowed for it). One of my own favourite experiences with open source development was when I basically revived an existing project by starting to make contributions to it, which then pulled the original creator back in and ultimately others as well.
      - z3t4 7y ago
        In my case I couldn't actually find any project I could contribute to, until after I had the editor I wanted. But similar projects kept popping up, some backed my big corp. I thought about abandoning my own editor and implement the features I needed in any of the similar projects, but I didn't like the architecture and they where made in languages that I didn't like. My editor also was ahead. Although it did not take long until the other projects surpassed my editor in capabilities. I have also later found many projects like mine that are now abandoned. It's very ironic indeed. I kept working on it hoping that I could pivot and find market fit to make some money off it, but it seems dead impossible. And at the same time similar projects are backed by investors.
        atq2119 7y ago

bai0 7y ago

Just checked your profile, didn't realize you were the author of PrimroseVR. Now I feel even more alone-together with you, I'm the sole developer for JanusWeb and my experience completely matches what you describe. Pretty depressing how open source projects by individuals can at best hope to "inspire" devs at FAANG companies to just do the same thing and then use their company's immense resources and developer relation teams to promote their project over the ones that existed before them. I wonder how many talented devs have had this happen to them only to give up and stop trying.

moron4hire 7y ago
LOL, thanks. I tend to think the only reason Primrose had any attention was because it was the only complete framework for WebVR in the browser at the time. I remember using JanusVR in 2014 at a VR meetup on someone's DK2 and really liking it. But all I had at home was a smartphone in a cardboard box that I had hacked together myself shortly after seeing the Google Cardboard announcement. I only got a DK2 after Tojiro started releasing his WebVR builds of Chromium, then got lucky that my design was similar enough to his early WebVR API design that the port only took a day. Primrose existed for a year before A-Frame came out. And overnight, I somehow became the copycat. In the second year, I even saw claims I was copying ReactVR. Incidentally, way early on, I had been planning to extend Primrose to run in JanusVR. But after the third year, I just couldn't get past the burnout and was getting professional dev work only for Unity. So here I am now, I'm the head of VR at a foreign language instruction company, where I'm working exclusively in Unity. I have a new framework I call Juniper, but I haven't really told anyone about it because I just don't care anymore. It's good enough that it's just for me. It's open on Github, and if someone stumbles on it, that's ok, but otherwise I'd rather focus on working for money than working for criticism on HN.
- bai0 7y ago
  Yup, very similar story here. I'd been working on a WebGL engine called Elation Engine since 2011, and when VR hit the scene, I quickly added support for barrel shader and WebSocket tracking, then when WebVR was a thing added support for that as well. Those times were exciting, it felt like indies and hackers were driving the technology, and the possibilities were endless. I joined Janus in 2016, after Facebook bought my previous employer and fired my team. I'd added support for loading Janus worlds within my engine, which opened it up to normal web browsers, and the team at Janus was excited for the possibilities. It was a great story of how I was able to turn an open source project into a paying job, and people were EXCITED about what we were building! We had investors and users, everything was great! Fast forward to today. The team is broken and burnt out. Many left when we couldn't secure another round of funding and the paychecks dried up. The code is in a poor state because we kept chasing what platform gatekeepers and potential investors told us THEY wanted to see. The founder and myself both had kids within a month of each other and can no longer work like we used to. One guy's wife left him because he was spending so much time travelling and promoting the project. We have less users than ever, despite our tech being years ahead of what people think is possible. We still pretend like we're a normal healthy happy company, because we still believe in the idea and nobody's going to invest in a company of depressed burnt out people. But now even that fantasy is unsustainable, it's probably time to just give up and get a regular old job. Of course success was never guaranteed, but what we didn't expect was how we'd just end up shunned and ignored. When A-Frame first launched, they listed Janus as an inspiration, but once they reached some level of success and saw us as competitors, they wrote us out of that history book - literally just removed us from the list of inspirations, but kept other projects like SceneVR (whose author also credits Janus as his inspiration). We've got literally thousands of interconnected worlds people have built which nobody visits or links to, but if someone makes a similar world with A-Frame or Babylon, we're sure to hear all about how great and new and innovative it is. Modern open source is not the same scene it used to be. I don't know what's next. It's pretty depressing.