5 ms·

I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've been close to burnout and letting

by altf4 5y ago

I agree. I've been working on a Go library for 8 years now that I'm sure is used by quite some people and companies, and I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice. I'm super happy when people just "Buy me a coffee"--not for the coffee but for the feedback you get that someone is using your project, so it's valuable for someone. I'm very grateful for that, even without financial support. I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project. Maybe that'd even help to get into contact with your users and the companies building solutions on top of your product. Maybe it's just me, but I often feel blind to how and where your project is being used. EDIT: Typo.

throwaway894345 5y ago
What’s the library, out of curiosity?
usrusr 5y ago
In the Java world we have the Maven repository dependency aggregators like mvnrepository.com that accidentally serve as some kind of citeseer equivalent. I assume similar things exist for the package managers of other languages as well? But obviously most commercial usage remains invisible. I could imagine a hybrid cultural/technological approach were dev teams publish/are allowed to publish at least usage metadata were they can't publish source (or actually contribute). There's a huge tie-in with security, I remember heated discussions were one side tries to establish this as an audit mechanism ("how vulnerable is product x really, in terms of outdated dependencies?") and incentive for updating, while the other side is crazy scared of punishing a list of potential attack surfaces. Perhaps the implied attribution benefit should become part this discussion as well?
- josephg 5y ago
  For javascript packages, npm lists which other packages which depend on any given package, and how many times a package was downloaded in the last week. That gives you a rough sense of usage, but it can also be super mysterious. As an example, here's a package I wrote which I haven't touched in 3 years: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jumprope https://www.npmjs.com/package/jumprope There are no projects on npm which depend on this, and yet it gets downloaded about 3000 times per week. Who's using it? I have no idea. Are they running into any problems? I suppose not, I mean, there aren't any issues on github. Its kinda spooky.
  - ratww 5y ago
    You can possibly find some users in Github: https://github.com/search?q=jumprope+filename%3Apackage.json+language%3AJSON+language%3AJSON&type=Code&ref=advsearch&l=JSON&l=JSON https://github.com/search?q=jumprope+filename%3Apackage.json...
    - josephg 5y ago
      Oh good idea! It looks like Github also tracks a project's dependancy tree explicitly, though those 3000 downloads per week remain a mystery: https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents
      - ianwalter 5y ago
        I've heard that the vast majority of those downloads are from CI systems. It would be cool if GitHub could draw anonymous metrics from GitHub Actions and help with this mystery.
    - ianwalter 5y ago
      I really wish GitHub would invest more in the dependency graph, like allow you to sort by stars at least: https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Rope took 5610 ms. 0.001122 ms per iteration, 891k iterations per second JS toString took 3463 ms. 0.003463 ms per iteration, 288k iterations per second I guess you have a typo there in total time?
  - usrusr 5y ago
    Thanks, just like I expected. Hopefully every at least remotely modern dependency/package manager has some sort of citeseer equivalent in its ecosystem. And your last paragraph nicely illustrates the blindness we get from closed projects/products not publishing their dependency metadata. I suppose that for client side js a tiny subset of usage stats could be generated by CDN distribution, but repackaging is a thing (and for good reason, in many cases)
supportlocal4h 5y ago
There are a lot of facets to open source contributions. One big facet is the whole itch-scratching thing. If you know longer itch, stop scratching. That's ok. Maybe when you stop scratching, it will start to itch again for you or for someone else. If nobody steps up, it just means it doesn't itch enough. Abandonware is not such a bad thing. It served its purpose for a season, then the world moved on. Nobody's out there trying to breath life into the Apollo program. Or into Mosaic. And that's ok. It doesn't diminish how awesome they were at the time.
- rileytg 5y ago
  This applies well for things like a java package where the itchy generally have the skills to scratch. I think of these things as having numerous benefits, namely saves your company/team time; most of the time, in this case I think boo-hoo if the person working tirelessly for no compensation stops doing that... Pay them or do it yourself. (I am currently doing-it-myself with an abandoned java package my team relies on.) However, this logic fails for situations where the itchy often aren't capable of scratching. For example, a wordpress plugin. In this case, I think it's a grey area. Maybe users should have to pay since they can't write it themselves. But that attitude would still fail for situations where a library is widely used and security patches would be for the "greater good".
  - thefunnyman 5y ago
    In such a case, maybe Wordpress themselves should extend some engineering capacity for maintaining popular OSS plugins for their ecosystem.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  There's also libraries that are simple enough that they just work fine without constant updates. I have numerous libraries that I use that haven't had commits pushed for 2+ years. This is the other aspect: burnout is so rampant because it feels like it never stops and you can come up for air.
  - 5y ago
indigochill 5y ago
> I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project I kind of use forking that way (although more when I like a project, it's not necessarily a promise that I'm using it anywhere). This ensures that I have a copy of the project in the state that I originally liked. Then if the project is either (a) taken in a disagreeable direction or (b) deleted, I still have my local copy. I can also always update from upstream if future development occurs that I want to benefit from. That said, I don't fork all the open source packages I use, although maybe I should.
bachmeier 5y ago
> I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice Why don't you? That's how you get people to step up.
umvi 5y ago
> I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project. Well "stars" are kind of like that. Also the insights page tells you how many times your repo is being cloned per day, so that's one metric you can use to see how "used" your project is. You can also search GitHub for the name of your project and see how many other projects are cross referencing it.
- gkilmain 5y ago
  "stars", at least from my perspective, doesn't map to usage. I've stared plenty of projects I don't use. I like the latter two metrics - thank you for sharing!
  - johnnyanmac 5y ago
    Devil's advocate: no action short of landing your own project will prove that you use a library. I've donated to stuff like Godot (which I have yet to open myself) and Blender (which I only know the bare basics of; I haven't even tried the new UI overhaul) years back because they are projects I appreciate an open source alternative for these very complex problems. of course, giving cash is a much bigger gesture than just pressing a star button, but it sounds like the star button is closer in vein to the kinds of acknowledgement people are asking for here.
- jeffasinger 5y ago
  One thing you may encounter is that a large company may be using it for many things internally, and that still shows up as just a handful of clones, because they have some central artifact caching service in place.
- scrps 5y ago
  It would be nice to have a similar system to the language metric at the bottom of a repo, have something like a library metric that list what external libraries a project uses and feed those metrics back to the maintainers.
  - 5y ago
andrenatalbr 5y ago
Github allows any repo owner to adda donation button. That should be a more widespread practice.

by altf4 5y ago

throwaway894345 5y ago

What’s the library, out of curiosity?

usrusr 5y ago

In the Java world we have the Maven repository dependency aggregators like mvnrepository.com that accidentally serve as some kind of citeseer equivalent. I assume similar things exist for the package managers of other languages as well? But obviously most commercial usage remains invisible. I could imagine a hybrid cultural/technological approach were dev teams publish/are allowed to publish at least usage metadata were they can't publish source (or actually contribute). There's a huge tie-in with security, I remember heated discussions were one side tries to establish this as an audit mechanism ("how vulnerable is product x really, in terms of outdated dependencies?") and incentive for updating, while the other side is crazy scared of punishing a list of potential attack surfaces. Perhaps the implied attribution benefit should become part this discussion as well?

josephg 5y ago
For javascript packages, npm lists which other packages which depend on any given package, and how many times a package was downloaded in the last week. That gives you a rough sense of usage, but it can also be super mysterious. As an example, here's a package I wrote which I haven't touched in 3 years: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jumprope https://www.npmjs.com/package/jumprope There are no projects on npm which depend on this, and yet it gets downloaded about 3000 times per week. Who's using it? I have no idea. Are they running into any problems? I suppose not, I mean, there aren't any issues on github. Its kinda spooky.
- ratww 5y ago
  You can possibly find some users in Github: https://github.com/search?q=jumprope+filename%3Apackage.json+language%3AJSON+language%3AJSON&type=Code&ref=advsearch&l=JSON&l=JSON https://github.com/search?q=jumprope+filename%3Apackage.json...
  - josephg 5y ago
    Oh good idea! It looks like Github also tracks a project's dependancy tree explicitly, though those 3000 downloads per week remain a mystery: https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents
    - ianwalter 5y ago
      I've heard that the vast majority of those downloads are from CI systems. It would be cool if GitHub could draw anonymous metrics from GitHub Actions and help with this mystery.
  - ianwalter 5y ago
    I really wish GitHub would invest more in the dependency graph, like allow you to sort by stars at least: https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents https://github.com/josephg/jumprope/network/dependents
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Rope took 5610 ms. 0.001122 ms per iteration, 891k iterations per second JS toString took 3463 ms. 0.003463 ms per iteration, 288k iterations per second I guess you have a typo there in total time?
- usrusr 5y ago
  Thanks, just like I expected. Hopefully every at least remotely modern dependency/package manager has some sort of citeseer equivalent in its ecosystem. And your last paragraph nicely illustrates the blindness we get from closed projects/products not publishing their dependency metadata. I suppose that for client side js a tiny subset of usage stats could be generated by CDN distribution, but repackaging is a thing (and for good reason, in many cases)

supportlocal4h 5y ago

There are a lot of facets to open source contributions. One big facet is the whole itch-scratching thing. If you know longer itch, stop scratching. That's ok. Maybe when you stop scratching, it will start to itch again for you or for someone else. If nobody steps up, it just means it doesn't itch enough. Abandonware is not such a bad thing. It served its purpose for a season, then the world moved on. Nobody's out there trying to breath life into the Apollo program. Or into Mosaic. And that's ok. It doesn't diminish how awesome they were at the time.

rileytg 5y ago
This applies well for things like a java package where the itchy generally have the skills to scratch. I think of these things as having numerous benefits, namely saves your company/team time; most of the time, in this case I think boo-hoo if the person working tirelessly for no compensation stops doing that... Pay them or do it yourself. (I am currently doing-it-myself with an abandoned java package my team relies on.) However, this logic fails for situations where the itchy often aren't capable of scratching. For example, a wordpress plugin. In this case, I think it's a grey area. Maybe users should have to pay since they can't write it themselves. But that attitude would still fail for situations where a library is widely used and security patches would be for the "greater good".
- thefunnyman 5y ago
  In such a case, maybe Wordpress themselves should extend some engineering capacity for maintaining popular OSS plugins for their ecosystem.
dimitrios1 5y ago
There's also libraries that are simple enough that they just work fine without constant updates. I have numerous libraries that I use that haven't had commits pushed for 2+ years. This is the other aspect: burnout is so rampant because it feels like it never stops and you can come up for air.
- 5y ago

indigochill 5y ago

> I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project I kind of use forking that way (although more when I like a project, it's not necessarily a promise that I'm using it anywhere). This ensures that I have a copy of the project in the state that I originally liked. Then if the project is either (a) taken in a disagreeable direction or (b) deleted, I still have my local copy. I can also always update from upstream if future development occurs that I want to benefit from. That said, I don't fork all the open source packages I use, although maybe I should.

bachmeier 5y ago

> I've been close to burnout and letting it go at least twice Why don't you? That's how you get people to step up.

umvi 5y ago

> I think GitHub should really have a way for users of your repository to somehow illustrate that they're using your project. Well "stars" are kind of like that. Also the insights page tells you how many times your repo is being cloned per day, so that's one metric you can use to see how "used" your project is. You can also search GitHub for the name of your project and see how many other projects are cross referencing it.

gkilmain 5y ago
"stars", at least from my perspective, doesn't map to usage. I've stared plenty of projects I don't use. I like the latter two metrics - thank you for sharing!
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  Devil's advocate: no action short of landing your own project will prove that you use a library. I've donated to stuff like Godot (which I have yet to open myself) and Blender (which I only know the bare basics of; I haven't even tried the new UI overhaul) years back because they are projects I appreciate an open source alternative for these very complex problems. of course, giving cash is a much bigger gesture than just pressing a star button, but it sounds like the star button is closer in vein to the kinds of acknowledgement people are asking for here.
jeffasinger 5y ago
One thing you may encounter is that a large company may be using it for many things internally, and that still shows up as just a handful of clones, because they have some central artifact caching service in place.
scrps 5y ago
It would be nice to have a similar system to the language metric at the bottom of a repo, have something like a library metric that list what external libraries a project uses and feed those metrics back to the maintainers.
- 5y ago

andrenatalbr 5y ago

Github allows any repo owner to adda donation button. That should be a more widespread practice.