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I once wrote a library in backbone.js to have a data-synchronized list. It allowed me to provide an array, and it'll keep that array sync'd up to what I saw. I

I once wrote a library in backbone.js to have a data-synchronized list. It allowed me to provide an array, and it'll keep that array sync'd up to what I saw. I had a kid and a fulltime job and going through a divorce. I happened to use it at my job, but everyone kept asking for me to integrate it into new up and coming repos which I didn't have time for. Honestly I felt bad about not caring, but the reality is that I didn't. I had other things on my mind. Some people are DINKs (dual income, no kids) and get bored so instead of video games they'll make a side project. Some people have totally other circumstances. For me I wanted my spare time to either zone out to some games, or zone in to spending time with my daughter. I had plenty of coding to do at work.

pjmlp 6y ago
I can fully related to you. Whatever I put outside is more to keep HR happy when they ask for a github link than anything else. It is all a bit crappy collection from university projects, or tiny stuff I did on side either to learn an algorithm or a quick and dirty solution for something. The good stuff I rather do it at work.
yuribro 6y ago
Why would you feel bad? The whole point of open source is they could have done it themselves, if they wanted some integration they needed and you didn't. And then they could either contribute it back, fork your project or just keep it to themselves, if the license allows it. At any rate, you already helped them...
- qu83rt 6y ago
  Different people have wildly different ideas about what the point of open source is.
- mattlondon 6y ago
  People often act very entitled about open source I've found. You'll often get angry irate emails/issues raised demanding you help them or add a new feature or whatever. Some people are just clueless and need help, others are just dicks. It is often not worth the hassle in my opinion, but then everyone's circumstances and motivations are different and I am glad that a lot of people do think it is worth it.
  - bartread 6y ago
    > People often act very entitled about open source I've found. It's interesting. For me there are at least two classes of open source. 1) Project with a single maintainer, or perhaps a small number of key people, nothing in the way of corporate backing, often worked on in spare time, but which can still be very popular and widely used. I always think back to the example of NDoc, which was a great tool for taking raw XML doc comments from .NET code and turning them into beautiful Javadoc-style HTML documentation. It worked incredibly well for .NET 1.x but the .NET 2 support was never finished because the author, Kevin Downs, received abuse and threats via mail-bomb due to it not being ready "fast enough" for some people. Understandable he decided to quit and, as far as I'm aware, not a peep has been heard from him since in terms of OSS contributions. The way Kevin was treated, and the way other OSS maintainers have been treated by both individuals and corporations, is absolutely despicable and completely unacceptable. 2) Corporate backed OSS projects that are actively evangelised: projects like .NET Core, Node, npm, TypeScript, React, Angular. You might even think of something like Firefox in this category since, although Mozilla is a foundation, it's substantially funded by corporate sponsors (mainly Google?), has full time employees paid to work on the products, etc. Some of these might at times have been considered open source in name only: i.e., source code is absolutely available, but there is little or no way for most people outside of the sponsoring organisation to meaningfully contribute. With these I take a slightly different attitude, and I certainly expect sponsoring organisations to take more responsibility for the projects. If you're actively evangelising people to use a project (and especially if you've succeeded in recruiting large numbers of people to use your project), and you're not giving them much opportunity to contribute, then absolutely you need to take responsibility for making sure the project is supported appropriately. That might even include paid support options. And I suppose perhaps these represent the extremes of a spectrum (perhaps - I don't claim to have this absolutely right, by any means). Clearly there are a lot of people who would disagree with me on both sides. E.g., people who think every open source project should be like (2) and that all authors bear an equal responsibility for supporting their code. On the flipside, since I've been flamed on this before, I know there are people who think I'm a walking manifestation of all human evil because I've suggested that any open source project might perhaps fall into category (2). Fundamentally though I think your point stands: a lot of people behave in a way that's very entitled towards individual maintainers of OSS projects. As you say, depending on your circumstances, often not worth the hassle.
- austincheney 6y ago
  > is they could have done it themselves Absolutely, but that is often not the expectation. When I have pointed this out in the past people have gotten hysterically angry demonstrating a degree of entitlement. The mere mention they could do it themselves or submit a pull request has been regarded as a hostile personal insult like declaring war or perhaps worse than making sexually profane and racial commentary about their spouse.
CalRobert 6y ago
Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally. Old boss used to loudly thank my colleague for doing tickets on the weekends, and too often people seem to assume I want to spend my weekend "brushing up" on some implementation detail for a project I don't care about. Even "why doesn't he come to after work drinks?" Is hard to answer with "because my spouse is _also_ an exhausted wreck at the end of the day and I already barely have any time for them, much less my real friends, much less you lot".
- gboss 6y ago
  That's terrible. I am a manager and actively discourage people from working late / weekends. I find it's not sustainable. People who do that, regardless of children status are much less predictable in their output. They go through peaks of productivity and then they crash. It also ends up happening that they work on the wrong thing because no one is around at night or weekends to answer basic questions that may unfortunately not be in the ticket. Some of our employees with highest productivity have kids. I think your story means you should look for a new job when it is possible for you.
  - goliatone 6y ago
    > It also ends up happening that they work on the wrong thing because no one is around at night or weekends to answer basic questions that may unfortunately not be in the ticket. I know the comment came from a good place and you meant well. The situation you describe of “developers working on the wrong thing” can and sometimes does happen, however, as a manager the effective way to handle those situations is to address the root cause. Is it because the task is too big, not enough details, is it too early in the project that the requirements haven’t really surfaced organically? You want your team to be autonomous, you want to empower your team to make mistakes and at the same time actively minimize the chance for mistakes by greasing “things” so people around you can be more effective. There are few things as negative for a team performance as an insecure manager that needs to be making tactical decisions for the team as if developers were little kids.
    - 6y ago
jlengrand 6y ago
A bit tangential but it's been very relatable to me lately : 80% of my coworkers : OMG working from home gets you so much done! I've passed this and this certif and also did that side-project. Amazing. And you ? Well, I've tried to manage being a good parent while working with kids at home and god knows that was hard enough. And that's taking into account we're the lucky ones that can work from home and keep getting a salary
nicoburns 6y ago
I think it's fine to not have time to maintain code you open source. However, if your library ends up gaining a significant user base and you don't have time to maintain it, then I think you have a duty to either: 1. Allow others to step in as maintainers and review/approve new features and bug fixes in your stead. or (if you want to maintain control of your library) 2. Be clear that your library is in maintenance mode, and encourage and bless (by linking from your README) a fork (or forks) that work for those who were using your library but want the extra features that you don't want or have time to implement in your library. Otherwise your project is actively getting in the way of the community organising development of similar.
- fovc 6y ago
  Wholeheartedly disagree. Vetting a possible maintener or fork is >0 work, and you don't owe us anything. If you had to go to the trouble of creating your library in the first place, it means either A) "the community" had not met your specific need, so why would they start now? Or B) you did this for fun/learning/visibility/coping with a mania, in which case you still don't owe us any favors. That said, doing either of the above would be nice and appreciated, but you don't have to donate anything above and beyond what you are have.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    > Vetting a possible maintener or fork is >0 work Who said anything about vetting?
    - UncleMeat 6y ago
      Because people also complain when new maintainers are added and those maintainers cause problems or even abuse the project to insert malware. You can't win.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - 6y ago
tomByrer 6y ago
I find many prolific GH OSS authors to be single, but do code instead of gaming like you said. Or their job lets them OSS some of the code they use at work while on the clock.

pjmlp 6y ago

I can fully related to you. Whatever I put outside is more to keep HR happy when they ask for a github link than anything else. It is all a bit crappy collection from university projects, or tiny stuff I did on side either to learn an algorithm or a quick and dirty solution for something. The good stuff I rather do it at work.

yuribro 6y ago

Why would you feel bad? The whole point of open source is they could have done it themselves, if they wanted some integration they needed and you didn't. And then they could either contribute it back, fork your project or just keep it to themselves, if the license allows it. At any rate, you already helped them...

qu83rt 6y ago
Different people have wildly different ideas about what the point of open source is.
mattlondon 6y ago
People often act very entitled about open source I've found. You'll often get angry irate emails/issues raised demanding you help them or add a new feature or whatever. Some people are just clueless and need help, others are just dicks. It is often not worth the hassle in my opinion, but then everyone's circumstances and motivations are different and I am glad that a lot of people do think it is worth it.
- bartread 6y ago
  > People often act very entitled about open source I've found. It's interesting. For me there are at least two classes of open source. 1) Project with a single maintainer, or perhaps a small number of key people, nothing in the way of corporate backing, often worked on in spare time, but which can still be very popular and widely used. I always think back to the example of NDoc, which was a great tool for taking raw XML doc comments from .NET code and turning them into beautiful Javadoc-style HTML documentation. It worked incredibly well for .NET 1.x but the .NET 2 support was never finished because the author, Kevin Downs, received abuse and threats via mail-bomb due to it not being ready "fast enough" for some people. Understandable he decided to quit and, as far as I'm aware, not a peep has been heard from him since in terms of OSS contributions. The way Kevin was treated, and the way other OSS maintainers have been treated by both individuals and corporations, is absolutely despicable and completely unacceptable. 2) Corporate backed OSS projects that are actively evangelised: projects like .NET Core, Node, npm, TypeScript, React, Angular. You might even think of something like Firefox in this category since, although Mozilla is a foundation, it's substantially funded by corporate sponsors (mainly Google?), has full time employees paid to work on the products, etc. Some of these might at times have been considered open source in name only: i.e., source code is absolutely available, but there is little or no way for most people outside of the sponsoring organisation to meaningfully contribute. With these I take a slightly different attitude, and I certainly expect sponsoring organisations to take more responsibility for the projects. If you're actively evangelising people to use a project (and especially if you've succeeded in recruiting large numbers of people to use your project), and you're not giving them much opportunity to contribute, then absolutely you need to take responsibility for making sure the project is supported appropriately. That might even include paid support options. And I suppose perhaps these represent the extremes of a spectrum (perhaps - I don't claim to have this absolutely right, by any means). Clearly there are a lot of people who would disagree with me on both sides. E.g., people who think every open source project should be like (2) and that all authors bear an equal responsibility for supporting their code. On the flipside, since I've been flamed on this before, I know there are people who think I'm a walking manifestation of all human evil because I've suggested that any open source project might perhaps fall into category (2). Fundamentally though I think your point stands: a lot of people behave in a way that's very entitled towards individual maintainers of OSS projects. As you say, depending on your circumstances, often not worth the hassle.
austincheney 6y ago
> is they could have done it themselves Absolutely, but that is often not the expectation. When I have pointed this out in the past people have gotten hysterically angry demonstrating a degree of entitlement. The mere mention they could do it themselves or submit a pull request has been regarded as a hostile personal insult like declaring war or perhaps worse than making sexually profane and racial commentary about their spouse.

CalRobert 6y ago

Unfortunately, DINKs are hard to compete with professionally. Old boss used to loudly thank my colleague for doing tickets on the weekends, and too often people seem to assume I want to spend my weekend "brushing up" on some implementation detail for a project I don't care about. Even "why doesn't he come to after work drinks?" Is hard to answer with "because my spouse is _also_ an exhausted wreck at the end of the day and I already barely have any time for them, much less my real friends, much less you lot".

gboss 6y ago
That's terrible. I am a manager and actively discourage people from working late / weekends. I find it's not sustainable. People who do that, regardless of children status are much less predictable in their output. They go through peaks of productivity and then they crash. It also ends up happening that they work on the wrong thing because no one is around at night or weekends to answer basic questions that may unfortunately not be in the ticket. Some of our employees with highest productivity have kids. I think your story means you should look for a new job when it is possible for you.
- goliatone 6y ago
  > It also ends up happening that they work on the wrong thing because no one is around at night or weekends to answer basic questions that may unfortunately not be in the ticket. I know the comment came from a good place and you meant well. The situation you describe of “developers working on the wrong thing” can and sometimes does happen, however, as a manager the effective way to handle those situations is to address the root cause. Is it because the task is too big, not enough details, is it too early in the project that the requirements haven’t really surfaced organically? You want your team to be autonomous, you want to empower your team to make mistakes and at the same time actively minimize the chance for mistakes by greasing “things” so people around you can be more effective. There are few things as negative for a team performance as an insecure manager that needs to be making tactical decisions for the team as if developers were little kids.
  - 6y ago

jlengrand 6y ago

A bit tangential but it's been very relatable to me lately : 80% of my coworkers : OMG working from home gets you so much done! I've passed this and this certif and also did that side-project. Amazing. And you ? Well, I've tried to manage being a good parent while working with kids at home and god knows that was hard enough. And that's taking into account we're the lucky ones that can work from home and keep getting a salary

nicoburns 6y ago

I think it's fine to not have time to maintain code you open source. However, if your library ends up gaining a significant user base and you don't have time to maintain it, then I think you have a duty to either: 1. Allow others to step in as maintainers and review/approve new features and bug fixes in your stead. or (if you want to maintain control of your library) 2. Be clear that your library is in maintenance mode, and encourage and bless (by linking from your README) a fork (or forks) that work for those who were using your library but want the extra features that you don't want or have time to implement in your library. Otherwise your project is actively getting in the way of the community organising development of similar.

fovc 6y ago
Wholeheartedly disagree. Vetting a possible maintener or fork is >0 work, and you don't owe us anything. If you had to go to the trouble of creating your library in the first place, it means either A) "the community" had not met your specific need, so why would they start now? Or B) you did this for fun/learning/visibility/coping with a mania, in which case you still don't owe us any favors. That said, doing either of the above would be nice and appreciated, but you don't have to donate anything above and beyond what you are have.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  > Vetting a possible maintener or fork is >0 work Who said anything about vetting?
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    Because people also complain when new maintainers are added and those maintainers cause problems or even abuse the project to insert malware. You can't win.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - 6y ago

tomByrer 6y ago

I find many prolific GH OSS authors to be single, but do code instead of gaming like you said. Or their job lets them OSS some of the code they use at work while on the clock.