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If all people did that, nothing new would get done ever. It's a risk. Developers who embark on wheel-creation know it's a risk. Nevertheless, rejection still hu

by Udo 14y ago

If all people did that, nothing new would get done ever. It's a risk. Developers who embark on wheel-creation know it's a risk. Nevertheless, rejection still hurts. Being ignored doesn't just mean you invested all those hours for nothing, it also means the audience rejects your take on the subject, and by extension your value system. But telling people to just stick to established open source projects and be content with small contributions is not the solution either: first this would probably not be an interesting activity for those people and second participating in a successful OS project is by no means a protection from this kind of rejection or other kinds of grief. The "solution" here is clearly to "suck it up and move on", but I see how that can be difficult. I'm afraid the only real advice to give here would be for developers not to get too invested in their pet projects because, like startups, most of them will never be of any interest to anyone. To all the people who are currently doing such projects, I'd say: keep doing it as long as it's fun, but not a second longer. Learn to let go. This person clearly went on beyond that point.

notacoward 14y ago
Agreed that "contribute to existing projects" is not a real solution. If you want to solve a particular problem, or set of problems, there will be a finite set of solutions close to what you need. It's entirely possible that all of them suck at some level from architecture to implementation. Additionally, the current maintainers might resist the change of direction that you need, and maintaining your own fork of a large alien codebase might truly be more work than maintaining your own smaller and more familiar codebase. Many would argue that this was the case with distributed filesystems (my own specialty) from approximately 1995-2005, and perhaps even today. Saying that everybody should work on somebody else's project is like saying that everybody should work for somebody else's company. Nope. Somebody has to start the new thing before others can join. The trick, as you say, is learning to let go. Accept that you'll have other ideas, and maybe one of them will gain more traction. In the course of a long career, maybe even one of those old projects will come back to life because of a shifting context or because working on other things inspired that one extra twist that makes it ten times more valuable. Setting something aside is not the same as throwing it away, and every good developer I know has dozens of ideas that they've set aside. You never know which one will be useful again some day.

by Udo 14y ago

notacoward 14y ago

Agreed that "contribute to existing projects" is not a real solution. If you want to solve a particular problem, or set of problems, there will be a finite set of solutions close to what you need. It's entirely possible that all of them suck at some level from architecture to implementation. Additionally, the current maintainers might resist the change of direction that you need, and maintaining your own fork of a large alien codebase might truly be more work than maintaining your own smaller and more familiar codebase. Many would argue that this was the case with distributed filesystems (my own specialty) from approximately 1995-2005, and perhaps even today. Saying that everybody should work on somebody else's project is like saying that everybody should work for somebody else's company. Nope. Somebody has to start the new thing before others can join. The trick, as you say, is learning to let go. Accept that you'll have other ideas, and maybe one of them will gain more traction. In the course of a long career, maybe even one of those old projects will come back to life because of a shifting context or because working on other things inspired that one extra twist that makes it ten times more valuable. Setting something aside is not the same as throwing it away, and every good developer I know has dozens of ideas that they've set aside. You never know which one will be useful again some day.