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> Accordingly, this paper explores the effect of having heroes in project, from a code quality perspective by analyzing 1000+ open source GitHub projects. Oh g

> Accordingly, this paper explores the effect of having heroes in project, from a code quality perspective by analyzing 1000+ open source GitHub projects. Oh gross. Open source projects? And the paper's sanity checks are: - one pull request. - more than 20 commits. – at least 50 weeks of activity. – more than 10 issues. – at least 8 contributors. Secondly, the majority of the projects they looked at have the majority of their code as shell: Language Projects Shell 416 JavaScript 396 HTML 344 CSS 314 Python 291 Makefile 229 Ruby 216 C 167 Java 150 PHP 146 C++ 126 Batchfile 81 Perl 67 Objective-C 67 Dockerfile 54 CMake 48 M4 43 CoffeeScript 38 Roff 35 Roff 35 C-Sharp 34 Emacs Lisp 30 Gherkin 26 Perl 6 21 And yes, they list Roff twice. This paper is really saying "In open source rando libraries on github, usually there is one person who does the majority of the work". The hero problem most people are talking about in software engineering are heroes at paid jobs, working on codebases with 2000+ commits, in teams of 10s to 10000s. I'm not sure this paper provides any reasonable insights to how we work together.

ipaddr 5y ago
The type of project most often found is Shell. The majority of code is something else. The heros can be the one or two people on the project who make it happen. It doesn't need to be 10,000 developers, I would expect different silos to emerge with a group that large.
- perl4ever 5y ago
  >The type of project most often found is Shell. The majority of code is something else. The majority of projects is also something else, by my estimation.
- codemac 5y ago
  Yes, thank you for correcting my error - I should have said the mode rather than the median. Right, but the "hero" as discussed by most folks is only a problem if the team expects hiring more software engineers should speed up execution, even sub-linearly. With a "hero" this is extremely difficult to manage. I see this as an interesting problem in software development, and there are many more interesting discussions about this. However - this paper presents a pile of open source repositories (not even necessarily projects/products) that accepted commits/patches from others. Open source must operate differently as all contributions are voluntary. If someone wants to be a hero, great, move the project forward. Thus all of these BDFLs, as the projects can't even imagine themselves without their initial hero. Projects that don't look like this tend to have paid developers (rust, go, fuschia, chromium, firefox) as opposed to the projects with heroes. This paper starts with "I found a data set, lemme try to fit it to my question" rather than "is this data set relevant for my question?"
ogma 5y ago
Pompous Facebook clown.
OneTimePetes 5y ago
The heroes you mentioned, then go home and develop a "clean" implementation in open source, just to have that moment were there own management suggest switching to a open source library. Nothing more satisfying then seeing some smuggle own himself and not realizing it.

ipaddr 5y ago

The type of project most often found is Shell. The majority of code is something else. The heros can be the one or two people on the project who make it happen. It doesn't need to be 10,000 developers, I would expect different silos to emerge with a group that large.

perl4ever 5y ago
>The type of project most often found is Shell. The majority of code is something else. The majority of projects is also something else, by my estimation.
codemac 5y ago
Yes, thank you for correcting my error - I should have said the mode rather than the median. Right, but the "hero" as discussed by most folks is only a problem if the team expects hiring more software engineers should speed up execution, even sub-linearly. With a "hero" this is extremely difficult to manage. I see this as an interesting problem in software development, and there are many more interesting discussions about this. However - this paper presents a pile of open source repositories (not even necessarily projects/products) that accepted commits/patches from others. Open source must operate differently as all contributions are voluntary. If someone wants to be a hero, great, move the project forward. Thus all of these BDFLs, as the projects can't even imagine themselves without their initial hero. Projects that don't look like this tend to have paid developers (rust, go, fuschia, chromium, firefox) as opposed to the projects with heroes. This paper starts with "I found a data set, lemme try to fit it to my question" rather than "is this data set relevant for my question?"

ogma 5y ago

Pompous Facebook clown.

OneTimePetes 5y ago

The heroes you mentioned, then go home and develop a "clean" implementation in open source, just to have that moment were there own management suggest switching to a open source library. Nothing more satisfying then seeing some smuggle own himself and not realizing it.