The struggles of an open source maintainer

by ngaut • 7 years ago

719 213 7 years ago

IRS could help out Open Source projects and make it way easier for them to apply for grant money. But they make it very tough to get 5013c status.

I’m for quite strict tax enforcement but that should be changed.

Also of course private companies need to start stepping up and providing the often only small sums of money needed to fix these projects via bug bounties and fees to the maintainers.

sergiotapia2• 7 years ago

I own a 2.3K star Github repository (https://github.com/sergiotapia/magnetissimo), that while trivial in it's implementation, it's pretty useful to a ton of people.

There are a few core contributors to the project now and a Discord server as well and everything in this article rings true to me.

It becomes an obligation of sorts and you definitely feel like you're letting people down, especially when it comes to people who have taken the time to contribute and share feedback, let alone people who actually open PRs.

What I think can help is having more core contributors with write permissions, share the load. Or be up front in your readme and say, "I only check this once a quarter".

simonebrunozzi• 7 years ago

FYI, it seems that your https://sergio.dev/ is down.

sergiotapia2• 7 years ago

Thanks - it's not set up yet, I'm trying to figure out a free blogging solution that requires zero code (like Hugo and such), more like hosted Wordpress for free.

peterwwillis3• 7 years ago

I think people are getting way too upset over GitHub features like issues & PRs, and the desire to please others. If you work on an open source project and you're not getting paid for it, you really need to divorce yourself from the demands of users. You have to assume that literally no one will use the software and just make it for yourself. If it becomes popular and you get feedback and contributions, great! Hopefully you can develop relationships that will lead to co-maintainers and such. But if it starts to feel like a struggle, just re-focus on what you want to get done, on your timeline.

thrower1232• 7 years ago

Too many people aren't aware that you can say no, and not do something if you don't want to or if it is a bad idea. Especially if nobody is paying you.

Even for people that are paying you for a product, sometimes you really need to say no, that is how it works, and no, we are not going to customize it for your particular workflow.

Matumio• 7 years ago

Just saying "no" already can cost too much effort, because it involves making a decision that you'll want to justify. It takes effort to report an issue and even more to make a pull-request, so you don't want to reject them without a good reason, without really understanding it. Except for some obviously sloppy reports that would be just rude.

The easier option is to simply not respond. Even this leaves some level of stress, because we've all had our own bug report or pull request ignored. We don't want to this uncaring person on the other side. But sadly, ignoring other people's requests is the best option for involuntary maintainers to protect themselves.

The final option is to just hand out the keys to whoever is the most active contributor, and stop trying to control the direction of the project. This will get the stress-level down. You may not like this option, but it's much better than burning out.

mholt• 7 years ago

Man. I can relate. Open source projects are roller coasters. It's great when loads of people start using it... and terrible at the same time. It's validating to see people using your work, but sometimes you just want to submit your paper to NIPS rather than deal with what you think in the moment (and, frankly, in hindsight too) is a dumb issue: https://github.com/mholt/caddy/issues/1680#issuecomment-3027...

I wrote up my experience from one wave of negativity a couple years ago: https://caddy.community/t/the-realities-of-being-a-foss-main...

It still haunts me to this day, but my attitudes are finally trending more positive about the whole thing.

kbenson3• 7 years ago

One of the major benefits of Open Source is that the user doesn't need to get a hold of the developer. It's always possible (or should be, if they're leveraging open source well) to patch a problem locally and build a fixed version their self. If they don't have the ability to do so, they really should at least have someone they can contact and pay (probably an exorbitant amount if it's an emergency) to do that for them. It's the open source equivalent of an application support contract or warranty.

voltagex_2• 7 years ago

How would you go about finding someone to contract and pay for say, Firefox?

nerdbaggy2• 7 years ago

I feel for you guys. People lobe to get upset when open source projects try to make money.

Crinus10• 7 years ago

That is because users are increasingly getting used to not paying for the work of others, be it because of open source software (do not be deluded, for the vast vast majority of users free software=free shit), because of freemium software, because of adware or because of we-mine-you-to-death-and-you-like-it software.

smitty1e3• 7 years ago

1. I've never upped my game enough to contribute to a project, much less put something on github. So, to the vast swath of people who are cooler than I: thank you.

2. TFA really gets at the classic issue of working vs. managing. Technical people tend toward being better at the former. Context switching between doing the work and managing the work is hard. Punting the management and diving into the work almost seems an escape.

3. The code itself makes this point to us. We can define an integer, and there it is. But when we need a list of integers? Look at how the management required just exploded.

4. Management sucks, but a management vacuum is a void, indeed. Let us be thankful for managers who don't suck.

DannyBee4• 7 years ago

(I've been in the situation he describes, unfortunately)

I agree a lot of that article feels like two things (but i'm not going to remove all nuance - there are clearly other issues):

1. The issue of being forced to be a manager when you want to be an individual contributor, and even worse, feels like being forced to be a TLM when you want to be an individual contributor.

2. Even if you take away the aspects of #1, it feels like a lack of notion that individuals don't build software past a certain point. I mean that in the sense that, IMHO, past a certain point, all software becomes team built (or fails), whether you are the manager or not. High level software engineering is a team sport, not an individual one. That is true even outside of management - it's also about technically mentoring and growing the team that builds your software so you can rely on them instead of you (which is not just a manager task).

Every person you mentor into someone capable of doing the kind of work you want done is going to increase productivity on the software a lot more than you trying to do it yourself. Over time, they will also be able to build your team.

Over time and scale, if you don't have a team to rely on, and actually start relying on them, you will just feel crushed. Utterly utterly crushed.

There is no path out of it that involves getting better yourself. You simply cannot scale past a certain point and there is no way out of it.

smitty1e3• 7 years ago

High level software engineering is a team sport, not an individual one.

#Truth

Floating out there in the cloud, you have to be a DBA, a network engineer, a browser jockey, a middleware dev, a sysadmin, a security specialist, an architect. . .

. . .and that's without being handed someone else's effort that is probably not in the desirable state for reasons you'll never know.

It's blatantly obvious to even the most casual observer that anybody claiming to know "all that stuff" is having you on.

That the internet works AT ALL is somewhat amazing when you ponder it.

rectang3• 7 years ago

It's not for everyone, but there's a way out: accept existential "futility", as Antirez puts it.

Let your project be less than it could be.

scarejunba• 7 years ago

I've never upped my game enough to contribute to a project, much less put something on github.

Well, if you want to, just find a project you like and search their bug tracker. Usually there's a lot of shit that's trivial which no one could find time for.

You know, the stuff that people will be like "OpenOffice's About Page hasn't been disableable for over fifteen years. This bug report is untouched!" Or whatever. You can fix it in five and be happy.

aeorgnoieang3• 7 years ago

'Just' read the source of something you like:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/learn-to-read-the-source-luke/

Or not – you're not obligated to contribute!

smitty1e3• 7 years ago

I'm hoping that finishing the excellent https://shop.jcoglan.com/building-git/ will give me enough git-fu to start making some modest contributions.

Sir_Cmpwn3• 7 years ago

I don't maintain anything as big as Redis, but I've faced many similar problems all the same and I think I have an approach which makes it palatable. I wrote about my approach at length here:

https://drewdevault.com/2018/06/01/How-I-maintain-FOSS-proje...

But the main thing is that almost all bug reports, feature requests, and so on, get sent to /dev/null. Users who care about a problem are expected to work on that problem themselves. In the case of software like Redis, pretty much everyone reporting a bug is also qualified to fix that bug, so it works particularly well.

Then I focus only on helping new contributors get their bearings and making regular contributors happy and comfortable with their work on the project. So far this approach has been very successful for me - I don't get burned out, and neither do my contributors, and we have happy, healthy communities where people work at a pace which suits them best and aren't stressed or overwhelmed.

Sure, lots of feature requests and bug reports get neglected, but I think the net result is still a very positive impact on the project. The occasional drive-by bug submitter provides far less value to the project as someone who writes even one patch. Focusing on keeping the people who create the most value happy makes for a more productive project and a better end result. Some people are put out by the fact that their bug report, feature request, etc goes unanswered, but I can quickly put the guilt out of my mind by reminding myself that ignoring them is doing a benefit to the project. And in practice, I generally have time to give people some words of encouragement and a nudge in the right direction towards writing a patch without burning myself out.

tda• 7 years ago

I found the writings of Peter Hintjens (creator of ZeroMQ) very inspiring, where he describes the merits of Optimistic merging (OM). Quoting at length from http://hintjens.com/blog:106:

Standard practice (Pessimistic Merging, or PM) is to wait until CI is done, then do a code review, then test the patch on a branch, and then provide feedback to the author. The author can then fix the patch and the test/review cycle starts again. At this stage the maintainer can (and often does) make value judgments such as "I don't like how you do this" or "this doesn't fit with our project vision."

In the worst case, patches can wait for weeks, or months, to be accepted. Or they are never accepted. Or, they are rejected with various excuses and argumentation.

PM is how most projects work, and I believe most projects get it wrong. Let me start by listing the problems PM creates:

    It tells new contributors, "guilty until proven innocent," which is a negative message that creates negative emotions. Contributors who feel unwelcome will always look for alternatives. Driving away contributors is bad. Making slow, quiet enemies is worse.

    It gives maintainers power over new contributors, which many maintainers abuse. This abuse can be subconscious. Yet it is widespread. Maintainers inherently strive to remain important in their project. If they can keep out potential competitors by delaying and blocking their patches, they will.

    It opens the door to discrimination. One can argue, a project belongs to its maintainers, so they can choose who they want to work with. My response is: projects that are not aggressively inclusive will die, and deserve to die.

    It slows down the learning cycle. Innovation demands rapid experiment-failure-success cycles. Someone identifies a problem or inefficiency in a product. Someone proposes a fix. The fix is tested and works or fails. We have learned something new. The faster this cycle happens, the faster and more accurately the project can move.

    It gives outsiders the chance to troll the project. It is a simple as raising an objection to a new patch. "I don't like this code." Discussions over details can use up much more effort than writing code. It is far cheaper to attack a patch than to make one. These economics favor the trolls and punish the honest contributors.

    It puts the burden of work on individual contributors, which is ironic and sad for open source. We want to work together yet we're told to fix our work alone.

Now let's see how this works when we use Optimistic Merge. To start with, understand that not all patches nor all contributors are the same. We see at least four main cases in our open source projects:

    Good contributors who know the rules and write excellent, perfect patches.
    Good contributors who make mistakes, and who write useful yet broken patches.
    Mediocre contributors who make patches that no-one notices or cares about.
    Trollish contributors who ignore the rules, and who write toxic patches.

PM assumes all patches are toxic until proven good (4). Whereas in reality most patches tend to be useful, and worth improving (2).

Let's see how each scenario works, with PM and OM:

    PM: depending on unspecified, arbitrary criteria, patch may be merged rapidly or slowly. At least sometimes, a good contributor will be left with bad feelings. OM: good contributors feel happy and appreciated, and continue to provide excellent patches until they are done using the project.
    PM: contributor retreats, fixes patch, comes back somewhat humiliated. OM: second contributor joins in to help first fix their patch. We get a short, happy patch party. New contributor now has a coach and friend in the project.
    PM: we get a flamewar and everyone wonders why the community is so hostile. OM: the mediocre contributor is largely ignored. If patch needs fixing, it'll happen rapidly. Contributor loses interest and eventually the patch is reverted.
    PM: we get a flamewar which troll wins by sheer force of argument. Community explodes in fight-or-flee emotions. Bad patches get pushed through. OM: existing contributor immediately reverts the patch. There is no discussion. Troll may try again, and eventually may be banned. Toxic patches remain in git history forever.

In each case, OM has a better outcome than PM.

In the majority case (patches that need further work), Optimistic Merge creates the conditions for mentoring and coaching. And indeed this is what we see in ZeroMQ projects, and is one of the reasons they are such fun to work on.

majewsky3• 7 years ago

Broken quotes reformatted for readability:

----

It tells new contributors, "guilty until proven innocent," which is a negative message that creates negative emotions. Contributors who feel unwelcome will always look for alternatives. Driving away contributors is bad. Making slow, quiet enemies is worse.
It gives maintainers power over new contributors, which many maintainers abuse. This abuse can be subconscious. Yet it is widespread. Maintainers inherently strive to remain important in their project. If they can keep out potential competitors by delaying and blocking their patches, they will.
It opens the door to discrimination. One can argue, a project belongs to its maintainers, so they can choose who they want to work with. My response is: projects that are not aggressively inclusive will die, and deserve to die.
It slows down the learning cycle. Innovation demands rapid experiment-failure-success cycles. Someone identifies a problem or inefficiency in a product. Someone proposes a fix. The fix is tested and works or fails. We have learned something new. The faster this cycle happens, the faster and more accurately the project can move.
It gives outsiders the chance to troll the project. It is a simple as raising an objection to a new patch. "I don't like this code." Discussions over details can use up much more effort than writing code. It is far cheaper to attack a patch than to make one. These economics favor the trolls and punish the honest contributors.
It puts the burden of work on individual contributors, which is ironic and sad for open source. We want to work together yet we're told to fix our work alone.

----

Good contributors who know the rules and write excellent, perfect patches.
Good contributors who make mistakes, and who write useful yet broken patches.
Mediocre contributors who make patches that no-one notices or cares about.
Trollish contributors who ignore the rules, and who write toxic patches.

----

PM: depending on unspecified, arbitrary criteria, patch may be merged rapidly or slowly. At least sometimes, a good contributor will be left with bad feelings. OM: good contributors feel happy and appreciated, and continue to provide excellent patches until they are done using the project.
PM: contributor retreats, fixes patch, comes back somewhat humiliated. OM: second contributor joins in to help first fix their patch. We get a short, happy patch party. New contributor now has a coach and friend in the project.
PM: we get a flamewar and everyone wonders why the community is so hostile. OM: the mediocre contributor is largely ignored. If patch needs fixing, it'll happen rapidly. Contributor loses interest and eventually the patch is reverted.
PM: we get a flamewar which troll wins by sheer force of argument. Community explodes in fight-or-flee emotions. Bad patches get pushed through. OM: existing contributor immediately reverts the patch. There is no discussion. Troll may try again, and eventually may be banned. Toxic patches remain in git history forever.

yorwba• 7 years ago

The purported benefits of Optimistic Merge appear entirely unrelated to the merging strategy used. The scenarios could easily unfold completely differently:

PM: depending on unspecified, arbitrary criteria, patch may be merged rapidly or slowly. At least sometimes, a good contributor will be left with bad feelings.
OM: good contributors feel happy and appreciated, and continue to provide excellent patches until they are done using the project.

alternatively:

PM: The patch is merged as soon as CI passes, unless code review uncovers any serious issues. Good contributors feel happy and appreciated.

OM: depending on unspecified, arbitrary criteria, patch may be reverted or modified to suit the tastes of the project maintainer. At least sometimes, a good contributor will be left with bad feelings.

PM: contributor retreats, fixes patch, comes back somewhat humiliated.
OM: second contributor joins in to help first fix their patch. We get a short, happy patch party. New contributor now has a coach and friend in the project.

alternatively:

PM: second contributor notices the CI failure, joins in to help first fix their patch. We get a short, happy patch party. New contributor now has a coach and friend in the project.

OM: the patch breaks master, someone posts an angry rant, contributor retreats, fixes patch, comes back somewhat humiliated.

PM: we get a flamewar and everyone wonders why the community is so hostile.
OM: the mediocre contributor is largely ignored. If patch needs fixing, it'll happen rapidly. Contributor loses interest and eventually the patch is reverted.

alternatively:

PM: the mediocre contributor is largely ignored. Contributor loses interest and eventually the PR is closed.

OM: the patch breaks master, someone posts an angry rant, we get a flamewar and everyone wonders why the community is so hostile.

PM: we get a flamewar which troll wins by sheer force of argument. Community explodes in fight-or-flee emotions. Bad patches get pushed through.
OM: existing contributor immediately reverts the patch. There is no discussion. Troll may try again, and eventually may be banned. Toxic patches remain in git history forever.

alternatively:

PM: existing contributor immediately closes the PR. There is no discussion, because comments are disabled. Troll may try again, and eventually may be banned. Toxic patches don't ever make it into git.

OM: we get a flamewar which troll wins by sheer force of argument. Community explodes in fight-or-flee emotions. Bad patches get pushed through and remain in git history forever.

My takeaway is that you need to have a great community and everything will work out in the end.

outime• 7 years ago

In the case of software like Redis, pretty much everyone reporting a bug is also qualified to fix that bug, so it works particularly well.

There are a good bunch of people who have never written any C and even more people who have no idea about the internals of Redis, yet they are Redis users and they do find bugs. I wouldn't expect those users to write a patch for every bug they find to be honest.

Crinus10• 7 years ago

I think the idea is that given enough users, the bugs who will be encountered by non-fixers will also be encountered by fixers so they'll be fixed, otherwise they are so rare as to not be worth the effort of wasting time with useless non-fixer reports to find the useful non-fixer ones.

I'm not sure how i feel about that TBH, personally i'd like to know about bugs even if they do not come with patches but at the same time i understand not wanting to be bothered by wading through useless reports.

Perhaps there should be end user oriented bugtrackers that look more similar to something like a hybrid between a forum and a reddit/HN post with voting (no downvotes though, kinda like GOG's wishlists) so that developers will have a rough idea where to focus next and "locked" (but perhaps visible, at least for FOSS projects) traditional bugtrackers where end user entries migrate (and linked to) once developers decide that this will be worked on.

It wont solve all issues, especially with people potentially going "why aren't you fixing that bug-but-really-a-feature-that-requires-rearchitecting-the-entire-thing that has 897482959204 votes and instead work on whatever-else that Nobody Asked For(tm)?", but i guess you can't fix entitlement with technical means.

Sir_Cmpwn3• 7 years ago

Anyone who can write code can learn C, and be proficient enough to fix their bug in a few hours - or at least proficient enough to ask the right questions. The biggest barrier is unwillingness to try.

I've seen this played out a dozen times. My projects are often many people's first exposure to C, ever.

alias_neo• 7 years ago

I'm interested in your approach here because I generally disagree with ignoring bug submissions from "drive-by"s.

As a developer, I might have the time to investigate and submit a bug for your code, but at the end of the day, is probably just one more bug in 100 other pieces of code preventing me from writing the code I need to.

Getting familiar with the code of a project you're using, to the extent that your can submit a reasonable PR is a not-insignificant time dedication.

I've found a variety of attitudes from upstream code I've reported to, ranging from "you're wrong" to the bug being fixed and pushed to master within an hour.

I've formed an opinion, amongst the projects I work with, about whom I should give more of my (professional) time to, that usually begins with how receptive they are to a perfectly good bug report which I don't have the (professional) time to fix.

The ones that have proven "pleasant" to work with have made it much easier for me to convince my bosses that their money is well spent giving back.

MakeUsersWant2• 7 years ago

So that is why so many OSS projects are full of bugs and horrible usability. In the past, I have tried to help with clear, reproducible bug reports. Quite often I spent an hour tracking down a bug, writing up why it matters, and then got ignored or dismissed.

Those OSS projects that deliver a quality product, also took my bug reports seriously (and sometimes disagreed).

Crinus10• 7 years ago

So that is why so many OSS projects are full of bugs and horrible usability.

Possibly, but not necessarily. What is certain is that no developer who gives you free stuff has any obligation to fix bugs nor to submit themselves to any low-key bullying from users of said free stuff about how to spend their time and develop the software they decide to share with others.

Sir_Cmpwn3• 7 years ago

If you do write a clear bug report, with a stack trace (with symbols) and reproduction steps and such, then a developer is much more likely to give your bug the time of day. In the end, though, a patch is worth a thousand tickets.

souprock5• 7 years ago

He missed a big one: you have no way to stop Linux distributions from hacking up your software, and you'll suffer the consequences of whatever they do.

I hit this with procps. (a package with ps, top, vmstat, free, kill...) It was horrifically demotivating, helping to end my involvement as the maintainer from roughly 1997 to 2007. (the other big issue was real life intruding, with me joining a start-up and having 5 kids)

I had plans for command line option letters, carefully paying attention to compatibility with other UNIX-like systems, and then Red Hat would come along and patch their package to block my plans. They were changing the interface without even asking for a letter allocation. I was then sort of stuck. I could ignore them, but then my users would have all sorts of compatibility problems and Red Hat would likely keep patching in their own allocation. I could accept the allocation, letting Red Hat have control over my interface.

Red Hat sometimes added major bugs. I'd get lots of complaints in my email. These would be a mystery until I figured out that the user had a buggy Red Hat change.

Patches would often be hoarded by Linux distributions. I used to regularly download packages and open them up to look for new crazy patches. Sometimes I took the patches, sometimes I ignored the patches, and sometimes a wrote my own versions. What I could never do was reject patches. The upstream software maintainer has no ability to do that.

The backlog of unresolved troubles of this sort kept growing, making me really miserable. Eventually I just gave up on trying to put out a new release. That was painful, since I'd written ps itself and being the maintainer had become part of my identity. Letting go was not easy.

Maybe it had to happen at some point, since I now have more than twice as many kids, but I will be forever bitter about how Red Hat didn't give a damn about the maintainer relationship.

cyphar11• 7 years ago

That sounds really awful, and it's really disheartening to see the (ex)maintainer of such a core piece of Linux distributions being treated that way.

I work for a Linux distribution (SUSE) and I assure you that we don't all act this way. I've had to carry my fair share of downstream patches in openSUSE/SUSE packages, but I always make sure to submit the patches upstream in parallel. Quite a few people I know from Red Hat (and other distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, etc) do the same. It's possible that times have changed since then, or that it depends which package maintainers you are dealing with, but I hope it hasn't soured your opinion of all Linux distribution maintainers.

One thing that is a constant problem is that users of distributions keep submitting bugs to upstream bug-trackers. If there was one thing I wish I could change about user behaviour, it would be this. Aside from the fact that the bug might be in a downstream patch (resulting in needless spam of upstream), package maintainers are also usually better bug reporters than users because they are more familiar with the project and probably are already upstream contributors.

arendtio• 7 years ago

If there was one thing I wish I could change about user behaviour, it would be this.

Speaking from a user perspective, I don't think that would be wise. If distributions would just stop feature patching, things would be a lot simpler.

I mean, if a feature is good, everyone should have it, not just the users of one distribution. So please submit the patch upstream, discuss it and wait for the next release. That way, there is no real problem when users submit to upstream bug-trackers. The only exception is (time-critical) security patching. But those patches should be removed again as soon as upstream solves the issue.

The scenario you are wishing for looks like an obvious solution to the issues you are having but will just make everything worse in the long run (slow and fragmented).

bscphil• 7 years ago

One of the things I really like about Arch Linux is their policy of not making unrequired changes to upstream software. The only changes usually made are those necessary to keep the software compatible with the other software on a rolling release system, and these changes are usually temporary.

paco3346• 7 years ago

I love this about Arch. It gives everything a very vanilla, organic feel and you never get caught off guard by some distro specific change.

nvarsj• 7 years ago

Ditto. Arch has the right attitude. I still have a bitter taste from a 0 day hack of one of my Debian servers, due to what I believed was a Debian only patch. I wish more distros followed the Arch approach. Redhat is particularly bad I think - I have had problems with the centos frankenkernel that I could never reproduce on other systems.

kingosticks• 7 years ago

So, maybe this is not quite the same thing, but wasn't it Arch (and only Arch?) that made python point to python3? And in doing so went against what the upstream Python project explicitly specified to do? I remember dealing with a few users who ran into this.

ddebernardy• 7 years ago

Similar story here. And it's not just distributions. There are web dev shops out there that edit OSS to add some functionality without even bothering to change the version or the user facing information. It makes for plenty of head scratchers when their customers report a bug in a piece of software you wrote.

stickfigure• 7 years ago

As the parent of a startup and one singular demanding child, I have to ask... 10?! Wow! Nevermind why, I want to know how do you get anything done? Do you have staff? Do you have personal time to yourself, or with your wife? How many soccer games do you attend in a given week? How many bedrooms does your house have? How many of your kids are turning out to be programmers?

Forget maintaining software, I want to know how you maintain your existence. I don't think I could survive.

krageon• 7 years ago

I know... A lot of people who come from huge families, and from what their parents tell me, when you have more kids they are a bit easier to handle because they sort of take care of themselves. And of course you don't drive them to 10 football games every weekend, because you're not made of time :)

pgeorgi• 7 years ago

I have to ask... 10?!
How many soccer games do you attend in a given week?

One: souprock's kids + one friend vs. some other team.

olau• 7 years ago

I only have four small kids, but you're approaching this from the single kid direction.

Once you have two, you stop caring as much about the first precious one - because you have two precious ones. So sometimes one has to wait.

Repeat that a few times, and you'll arrive at your answer.

With more kids, it becomes clear that there are things you simply cannot do, e.g. own a 11-bedroom house or drive each single kid to soccer. So the kids will have to do something else. Like playing with each other.

That's just the way it is.

There's virtually no free time, though. :)

rjsw• 7 years ago

He/she posted to another thread yesterday that they had 12.

croo2• 7 years ago

After they learn to walk and talk you don't have less time with two kids especially if the time diffecene is small enough to play with each other. A single kid has only his parents to interact with.

At ten kids I guess you have a - somewhat misbehaving - staff. Half of the kids are capable to help out with the other half or other chores at the house. All they need is a manager :)

I cannot say much about the personal time though - I'm still in the 'learn to walk and talk' phase and with 3 toddler in a small house there is virtually none. However I read on reddit that after 20 years every kid be at some kind of university and I finally will have free time for playing games and talking to my wife. That sounds nice:)

flurdy• 7 years ago

I also want to know how he manages to do any work with 5 or even 10 kids.

I realised I no longer had any spare time anymore once I had my first daughter. Then we had another and I realised I must have had so much spare time with just the one kid...

How lots of my family and friends manage time with 3 or more kids I don't know as you are then outnumbered.

5 or more seems impossible. You must either be a drill sergeant super efficient or the opposite, super relaxed and let the kids sort themselves out. Or rich and delegate it to nannies/au-pair etc.

I do appreciate now that by having two kids that they mostly spend their time at home playing with each other, as opposed to when we had just the one when we had to always play with them. I guess that scales well with more kids.

But I still do feel guilty that I am not always joining in. And have to be more selective of which school performance etc either one of us can attend. I am not sure my conscience could handle missing out on lots of these with more kids by allocating much less of my full time to each kid.

bregma• 7 years ago

It's true. It's not possible to completely structure the time of so many kids, to helicopter over them all, to lawnmower for everyone.

They just have to grow up the time-tested traditional way through play, discovery, and experience. Shame really, brings a tiny tear to my eye.

souprock5• 7 years ago

It's 10 to 13 kids, depending on how you count. (adult dependent, unborn, miscarriage)

It's just my wife and I, her staying home, without staff or personal time. We homeschool them until they can get a 3 or better for AP Chemistry or AP Biology. My kids get funny looks going in for those tests at age 10 to 12. After that, as early as 6th grade, they can start dual-enrollment at the local college. It's free until high school graduation, which is sometimes enough time to get an AA degree. We don't do organized sports, but they all have unicycles. There are some organized activities to attend: scouting (BSA and AHG), a homeschooling group that does history/gym/art/writing together, a free band day camp in summer, and a big road trip every few years.

I only have 4 bedrooms. I ended up putting the kids all in a much bigger room, leaving the bedrooms for other purposes. More interesting is the "car", with 5 rows of seats. It is 3 tons empty, 5 tons full. We go through 2 gallons of milk per day. I can spend $1000 on 3 or 4 carts of groceries. We can finish a pair of chickens or a mid-size turkey in one sitting.

I haven't had much luck turning kids into programmers. At one point I got several to enjoy Scratch, but then I found that the computers were severely abused to waste time on junk like the "Tanki Online" video game and the "Annoying Orange" videos. I had to take away the computers. Recently kid #2, age 17, decided to choose the career. I've mostly taught him C now. He does that on Ubuntu and for his TI-84 Plus CE. I think this has created a programming aversion in some other kids, because they saw how excited I got to be finally teaching C and didn't want to spend all their time with me. For the oldest 5 the career choices are unknown (hurry up...), programmer, lawyer (physics undergrad), unknown, and midwife. BTW, programming the TI-84 Plus CE in C is pretty wild. You get a 24-bit int.

It helps to be close to work. I'm less than a mile away, 3 minutes by car or maybe 16 if walking. It helps to work only 40 hours per week, with an extremely flexible schedule.

Right now the main source of stress is kids wandering away from homework and chores. I don't want to have to stand over them in one room, waiting and watching as they work. I want to go do other things.

kashyapc3• 7 years ago

[Disclosure: I'm a long-term Red Hatter.]

Hmm. That's painful indeed. Sorry that you had such a dispiriting experience with the 'procps' package.

For what it's worth, allow me to share my experience (I joined after 2008; so I can only speak about that period onwards) of being at Red Hat. One of the reasons that keep me at Red Hat is the iron-clad (with some sensible exceptions, e.g. security embargoes) principle of Upstream First.

I see every day (and the community can verify -- the source out it there) maintainers upholding that value. And I've seen several times over the years maintainers, including yours truly, vigorously reject requests of 'downstream-only' patches or other deviations from upstream. When there are occasional exceptions, they need extraordinary justifications; either that, or those downstream patches are irrelevant in context of upstream.

I've learnt enormously from observing inspiring maintainers at Red Hat (many are also upstream maintainers) on how to do the delicate Tango of balancing the upstream vs. downstream hats.

So if it's any consolation, please know that for every aberration, there are thousands of other packages that cooperate peacefully with relevant upstreams.

kashyapc3• 7 years ago

the source out it there

[Typo: "out it there --> "is out there"]

loqd• 7 years ago

Some of RedHat's dual upstream/downstream maintainers are possessively trying to take over the upstream projects while not doing very important changes.

Others are great human beings.

But on the whole, RedHat skepticism is healthy (this also applies to the NIH software that they push onto most Linux distributions).

souprock5• 7 years ago

A bit more detail on some Red Hat experiences:

I had reserved -M for security labels, to be compatible with Trusted Irix, and I think this was clear in the source code at the time. I intended to avoid any additional library dependency if possible, because ps is a critical tool that must not break. If I couldn't manage without a weird SELinux library, then I'd dlopen() it only if needed.

Red Hat swiped both -Z and Z, giving them the same meaning. For at least one of those, probably -Z but this was a long time ago, my plans were to use it for being compatible with a different feature of another OS. There are only 52 possible command option letters, not counting weirdness like non-ASCII and punctuation, and most are already taken. Now 3 of them, almost 6% of the possible space, are redundantly dedicated to an obscure feature. An added annoyance was that -Z got wrongly thrown into ps's list of POSIX-standard options, which can affect parsing in subtle ways.

One day I discovered this as it was being shipped in RHEL.

A more recent and amusing issue is with the recent storm of security bugs that hit procps. They actually predate my involvement with procps, likely going all the way back to the early 1990s. I ended up getting notice. I responded on the Bugzilla, correcting some misunderstandings and pointing out better ways to fix the problems. I even do software security work these days, professionally, so I would be the ultimate expert on security bug fixes for procps. My helpfulness got me blocked from looking at the Bugzilla and then Red Hat proceeded to ship slightly bone-headed patches for the security problems. BTW, last I checked there were still DoS vulnerabilities because Red Hat ignored my advice. Turning the 32-bit value into a 64-bit value may prevent an integer wrap-around exploit, but that just means the system will swap until the OOM killer strikes. The value should have stayed 32-bit, with protection added to avoid even approaching such a large value. You probably don't even need more than 17-bit. The stuff with escape expansion is also bad, differently. Instead of papering over the problem, the math should have been corrected.

vertis• 7 years ago

Without trying to minimize this experience, I can't help but wonder if newer tools and techniques have mitigated some of this problem. For example GitHub pull requests make it much easier to collaborate on one version rather than an upstream, downstream relationship.

h91wka4• 7 years ago

He missed a big one: you have no way to stop Linux distributions from hacking up your software, and you'll suffer the consequences of whatever they do.

I remember the frustration when I found that NixOS maintainers downright crippled certain build systems to force people to use Nix...

gmfawcett3• 7 years ago

Who's forcing you to use Nix?

Their goal was probably to get the thing building within the constraints of their own time, and the constraints of the Nix ecosystem.

You can choose whether you want to invest the time to fix those build scripts and re-enable the other build systems, or not -- totally up to you. But it's uncharitable to suggest that the Nix maintainers have some kind of secret agenda.

rurban• 7 years ago

I'm very happy with downstream patches. They come 90% from Redhat, rarely from Debian or Suse. The Redhat patches are usually 100x better than other contributors patches. Debian is usually the worst.

When I maintained ~250 cygwin packages I acted as downstream also, and had to deal with upstream maintainers also. Usually a horror, maybe because I came from cygwin which was a crazy hack. Only postgresql said "such a nice port". For perl, gcc, python,... you were just a crazy one to be ignored.

anarazel• 7 years ago

Only postgresql said "such a nice port".

It is a crazy port ;). But the native windows port is much crazier :)

/me wishes for a fountain of time to change postgres' threading model.

lamby• 7 years ago

Debian is usually the worst.

Can you elaborate?

debiandev• 7 years ago

I've been packaging for Debian for a decade and I ran into a lot of unfriendly upstreams that would refuse to make any change to allow packaging and I've never seen other Debian Developers treating upstream developers poorly.

LameRubberDucky• 7 years ago

Wow. Are you Albert mentioned in the man page? Seems like some unneeded snark after your entry. I think I would have left too.

"Albert rewrote ps for full Unix98 and BSD support, along with some ugly hacks for obsolete and foreign syntax."

souprock5• 7 years ago

I am, but I wrote that.

Something like "ps -axu" will fail the UNIX/POSIX/SysV parsing, then restart in a pure BSD mode with the "-" ignored. Something like "ps -aux" will too, unless there is a user named "x". There is also a PS_PERSONALITY environment variable to force the parser to act in a particular way.

It was needed to transition people over to a standards-compliant syntax. I couldn't support all the old syntax. Prior to 1997, something like "ps -ef" would parse as "ps ef" does today, which is not standards-compliant. People were unwilling to just switch over without the compatibility hacks. There were instances of things like "ps -aux" all over the place, including in people's private shell scripts. People couldn't resist typing it.

I got pushback just for including the warning on stderr when somebody caused the parser to kick in to compatibility mode.

contingencies• 7 years ago

Haha! What are the odds? Maintainer of ps spawns too many subprocesses, runs up against parallelism... I think it's the Unix story in a nutshell.

aaron-santos• 7 years ago

More of a general question: is there any license or addendum clause which could have remedied this? Linux distribution creators love adhering to specific license requirements. Would a choice between distributing vanilla software vs not distributing have been more appealing?

bonzini• 7 years ago

That would make the program not free/open source (e g. CC-BY-ND is not considered free), so free-only distros such as Fedora would have simply not considered it.

wmf• 7 years ago

Trademarks can control this while remaining open source. If you ship an official package it's Firefox™ but if you ship a hacked-up version it's Iceweasel. Of course everyone will tell you you're evil if you try to do this.

agumonkey• 7 years ago

Crazy how social relationship leaks back into the open source concept.

Sorry you had to endure all this.. not fun.

burtonator• 7 years ago

I'm threading the needle in a project I've been working on which is both Open Source and has premium features around cloud sync:

https://getpolarized.io/

... it's been interesting. I'm trying to give everyone the best of both worlds but since I'm catering to a large user base I have to make sure to keep everyone happy.

Some people DO NOT want to do anything cloud. Some want their own cloud. Others want cloud and they want it easy.

I think part of what I'm learning is that in order to get the trust from users I'm going to either have to be around for a long time or get the thumbs up from other organizations that can vouch for my positive intentions.

For example, I want to write up a document about our commitment to Open Source but of course that takes work and I don't have a ton of time.

jakeogh• 7 years ago

Hey nice! I was not expecting to click that and get a working page without JS!

analognoise• 7 years ago

There was a pop-up that asked for money. The language of the bar at the top gives the impression the program will go away soon unless money comes in, plus the fact that someone was willing to inject pop-ups made it very difficult to trust - what if it goes commercial and someone is willing to inject ads or malware?

sheetjs• 7 years ago

We (https://sheetjs.com) maintain some reasonably popular projects (our most popular, https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx/, has over 15K stars and sees millions of downloads per month).

It's important to remember why you are involved in open source. If those circumstances change, you should ask why you continue to remain involved. As soon as you lack a satisfactory answer, it's your cue to stop.

Many large open source projects start out as a passion project or a solution to a specific problem that the original developers faced. Over time, other people face similar issues and rally around your solution and it is really easy to fall into the trap of bearing their burdens. This is a bad response. Other people using your open source offerings do not create any sort of obligation on your part to care or respond to their concerns.

If someone really cares enough, they will incentivize your continued effort (like money or other considerations). It is unfortunately cultural taboo to ask some of the more vocal critics to pay, but setting up that dialogue at least shuts down most of the comments.

IMHO the origin of most of these issues comes from the very thing that drives many people to open source in the first place: personal branding. If you remove your personal identity from the equation, it's a lot easier to "turn off notifications". Rants and criticisms are directed at this mystery character, not you personally. Since you are not personally tied to the project, working on open source feels like a distinct activity and is judged on its merits. You don't feel the same sense of obligations since you don't personally feel like you are disappointing the user base.

Sean-Der3• 7 years ago

The sunk cost (maybe wrong term) is really tough. It is hard to walk away because you have put so much effort in. Especially if you don't have a company behind a project it will probably falter.

I really enjoy Open Source 99.99% of the time. But that 0.01% I just remember how much work I put in.

chii• 7 years ago

trap of bearing their burdens

yep, don't bear other people's burdens without asking for money, or contributions (of labour - such as code)

ralphstodomingo• 7 years ago

Off-topic: I've used js-xlsx before, and didn't have any problems with it. Thank you for your efforts.

skrebbel• 7 years ago

Same! Js-xlsx is lovely, thanks for your efforts.

Sean-Der3• 7 years ago

I have only been doing Pion WebRTC(https://github.com/pion/webrtc) for a year, but the hardest ones for me have been

* Relationships tied to the project

It sort of burned me out when the first contributors moved on. I have always been on the other side though, interests change or you change jobs.

* Every user issue is urgent.

It is hard figuring out what the most important thing to work on is. If a user takes time to file an issue it is causing them issues. I just have been on the other side and it doesn't feel great to be ignored.

* Community members with different communication styles

People aren't so much assholes, but just communicate differently. It is really hard to mediate, no one is at fault but I just hate seeing people leave/get burned out from it.

cerberusss2• 7 years ago

As to hard figuring out what the most important thing to work on is:

I have some code on Github and got a change request. I just replied that I can do it for my currently hourly rate. That makes priorities clear.

Sean-Der3• 7 years ago

I don't want to bring money into it though. It personally makes me happy that is free of any financial pursuit.

It is nice to suspend disbelief and just all work together on making things that make people happy :)

imetatroll• 7 years ago

This is really nice. I wrote my own (probably bad) webrtc implementation for a personal project using gopherjs months ago. If I ever switch that project to webassembly, I will take a look at pion. Thanks for your efforts!

nerdbaggy2• 7 years ago

I don’t know why so many open source users feel so entitled when they have done nothing for the project. I believe that anybody can help a project from code, documentation, financial, graphic design, etc.

MakeUsersWant2• 7 years ago

Most projects don't actually want help. Go and try it: report a few bugs or point out usabilty issues. See what happens.

thethirdone• 7 years ago

Most of my bug reports have been very well accepted. The worst response I can remember is just not responding for like 3 months.

And on the other side as a maintainer, any bug report that demonstrates a clear issue (crash, hang, etc) with a reproducible setup is appreciated.

What can be really frustrating are bug reports that aren't bugs and a better understanding of the software would allow them to solve the problem. For example, there was one issue on Slic3r that was asking for a PDF output of config files. There is really no reason to do that.

PeterisP• 7 years ago

That's not really help that contributes to the project, that's communication or (often in the case of usability issues) opinion that might be useful, and even if it is, it just piles on more work on the project instead of helping with that work.

Every project has accepted everything whenever I've actually tried to help with the actual work they're doing, i.e. solving a bug or submitting a pull request fixing some documentation, something that reduces their todo-list instead of adding to it.

tlrobinson• 7 years ago

Sometimes I believe that software, while great, will never be huge like writing a book that will survive for centuries. Note because it is not as great per-se, but because as a side effect it is also useful… and will be replaced when something more useful is around.

That's an interesting point and thought experiment: what piece of software currently exists that will still be widely used in a century? And what's the oldest software that's still being used currently?

jonathanberger• 7 years ago

Unix. Email. TCP/IP. Just taking an initial stab.

kbwt• 7 years ago

All of those will be around not because they are good, but because so many other things are built against their interfaces.

gloflo• 7 years ago

Those are standards and protocols, not software.

BillGates432• 7 years ago

Spider Solitaire

sanxiyn• 7 years ago

And what's the oldest software that's still being used currently?

I am very interested in this question, but much of software is proprietary and you don't have much visibility into their history.

For software in the public, trivial lower bound is GCC 1.0 in 1987. Another case I know is Community Climate System Model, in continued development since 1983.

jcelerier• 7 years ago

`ed`, of course

thrower1232• 7 years ago

I would place money on people still using Vim and Emacs in a hundred years.

trystero• 7 years ago

Git.

peterwwillis3• 7 years ago

The oldest software still used is operated by banks, government agencies, schools and businesses. A large number of them are black boxes, and very expensive, so nobody will replace them. Their hardware just gets maintained ad infinitum, and the software doesn't care how old it is, so it just keeps running.

So basically, the age of software is limited by its hardware. (It's similar with animals: if nobody bumps them off and the hardware keeps ticking, the software probably will too... fish and mammals can live for hundreds of years)

nickpsecurity2• 7 years ago

My favorite examples:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if-it-aint-broke-dont...

eeZah7Ux• 7 years ago

This is way more than a thought experiment. Stable, mature software runs the world.

E.g. the CIP project aims to maintain released kernels for 25 years. https://www.cip-project.org/

jondubois• 7 years ago

I've been maintaining my OSS project for almost 6 years. It's well used in the industry but nowhere near as popular as Redis. But I can relate to pretty much everything in the article even the thinking approach. It makes me think that it takes a certain personality to be an OSS developer.

austincheney• 7 years ago

I encountered most of the issues described so I set out to solve this problem. I did the horrible bad thing: I rewrote my projects from scratch. It took me about a year, pretty much all of 2018. I could afford to do this because I was separated from both work and family by military education and a military deployment immediately following.

Now I have software that is stupid fast to extend and maintain. My software now executes faster than comparable applications coming out of Facebook with more options and at a very tiny size after accounting for dependcies. Now I finally have time to watch all the shows I have missed and play games since my software has fewer defects compared to similar applications and is faster to patch.

I did get tired of the asshole factor though and even deleted my Reddit account as a result. Now it’s harder to promote my software online but deleting my reddit account again opened up more personal time.

monksy• 7 years ago

It sounds like this is similar to the harassment that he received over redis using the terms "master"/"slave". (Even DHH jumped in and used his platform to harass)

http://antirez.com/news/122

For someone that is giving parts of their life to help others, the amount of entitlement that people expect is unbelievable.

stupidcar• 7 years ago

It's ironic that Git was intentionally designed to decentralise the process of software development, so that there was no single "blessed" repository, but instead of a network of peers, each of which could evolve at a different rate and in a different way, with the community deciding which would "win" in terms of popularity.

And yet, via Github, the community has reinvented the centralised model of software development. For any project, there is a single instance that is the "blessed" version, by virtue of having the most stars or collaborators, or owning the associated package name. 99% of forks are nothing more than a place where you create a feature branch that you intend to PR to the blessed project.

I hope that, one day, somebody invents a git-based project ecosystem that solves the problem of decentralised project management. I don't know exactly what this would look like, but I think it would need to embed the idea of community and contributor consensus and democracy at a fundamental level, separating the concept of the project and project ownership from any individual fork.

djangovm• 7 years ago

i am wondering this probably because of two factors:

1. accountability: where do I go looking if something is broken? 2. and discoverability: where to search, and whom to believe as being the correct owner of the copy of the codebase.

this is similar to block-chain currency (based on my limited understanding.. correct me if i am wrong). While it is meant to be decentralised, entities like coinbase effectively create a central entry/exit point somewhere in the ecosystem.

dzmien• 7 years ago

I immediately thought of Bitcoin when reading the OP. It can, and has been "hard" forked via miner consensus. That is, of course, one level removed from git, but I guess git"hub" could be more like gittorrent or something where instead of hosting a repo on one central server, the repo is hosted by a swarm and the version with the most seeds is the winner.

albertzeyer• 7 years ago

But it does help for decentralized development, or not? And you have this single instance of authority in almost all cases? E.g. for Linux itself, you also have that, and Git was developed for Linux.

I think the issue is more about how to structure pull requests, issues, etc., in a better way (maybe hierarchical), such that this matches the exponential number of more communication. GitHub does not help too much with this, but it also does not really fight against this. This is basically a problem every big project has to manage in some way. For comparison, I would look at other big projects like TensorFlow, Firefox, Chromium, Linux, CPython, etc.

AmericanChopper• 7 years ago

I think if your idea about decentralizing can accurately be described as fragmenting, then it’s probably not a good thing. I don’t know anybody that wants to have multiple separately maintained versions of the same project. When I use a piece of software, I want to have a good idea about how it will behave. I want to pick a project that I can be somewhat assured is fit for purpose, and that will provide stability. That’s why people investing in maintaining and using the most widely used and adequately maintained projects. If I don’t like the direction maintainers are taking a project in, then I can fork it. If enough people feel the same way as I do, then that fork might also become widely used and adequately maintained. There’s plenty of examples of exactly that happening, and I can’t see anything that’s undemocratic about it.

Regarding having a centralised service like github, I can’t see how that impacts the democraticness of anything at all. I can pull from it, I can push to it, I can fork on it. The centralizedness of it doesn’t seem to have any impact on participation to me. It just seems to be a matter of convenience. The less places I have to look for the thing I want, the better my experience is.

sudhirj• 7 years ago

Git was designed to decentralise work, not power - they’re very different.

Think about the author of Git himself - Linus. He didn’t write Git because he decided one day that he was tired of being the final decision maker for the Linux kernel, and that he now wanted a thousand decentralized kernels to bloom, each with their own management and maintainers and trust levels.

It was designed to give everyone a way to work with full featured version control on their own machines, and set up adhoc networks of version control between any consenting parties. But that did not imply that the power structures that make up an organization would automatically be demolished.

Github is the extension of Git as it was designed. Maintainers on Github follow similar organzational policies as the Linux kernel and some are even codified into Github itself. But none of this is counter to the purpose of Git or even its ethos.

dooglius• 7 years ago

Git was intentionally designed to decentralise the process of software development, so that there was no single "blessed" repository

I don't think this is true. It was developed by Torvalds to maintain the Linux kernel, which has always had a "blessed" repository at kernel.org.

cyphar11• 7 years ago

Yes and no. The main idea of a dvcs is that you could send patches and pull requests to other people's forks. So in principle there is technically no blessed repository, but that doesn't mean there isn't a blessed repository from a social perspective.

(Also, there is more than one "blessed" Linux repo that a lot of people use. There's linux-rt, linux-stable, etc.)

bluehatbrit• 7 years ago

For those struggling to access the site: https://archive.fo/10IpE

bmh• 7 years ago

It seems like there's an opportunity for a tool to help solve this (ie something other than GitHub issues).

aeorgnoieang3• 7 years ago

I'm sure different tools could help somewhat but ultimately anything replacing GitHub issues would still involve some kind of social, i.e. communication, structure and that's just a hard thing to build and maintain.

marknadal• 7 years ago

So very true!

I also maintain 10,000+ GitHub starred OSS database (https://github.com/amark/gun), and can relate to a lot of these points.

Worse than the jerks, though, are the bike-shedders. It is emotionally much easier to confront jerks, even though it is hurtful.

But the people who "Why isn't this written in X language?" or "Here's a PR to turn tabs into spaces" are honestly well-intended but naive and short-sighted.

Explaining to those people why you have to reject their PR because it provides no additional value and is purely an arbitrary distraction takes quite a bit of time trying to be delicate, but is nearly as much waste of time.

dbnotabb• 7 years ago

We're working to address some of the issues raised in this piece, by creating a new way of working on Open Source.

Companies post their issues on our platform and contributors are incentivised by getting to know a company, a monetary reward and the potential of raising their profile with the company to get hired.

We're looking for feedback so if anyone has any thoughts - https://works-hub.com/issues

Crinus10• 7 years ago

Others have tried what you seem to be trying and didn't work, how are you going to convince people who decide to use tech because it is free, to pay for it and pay for more than insultingly low scraps? And once someone does accept and the work is done, what happens if they are not the main developer of the software that was worked on and the developers decide they do not want to accept the work? Where does that leave your customers who most likely (especially if their initial major motivation was free stuff) wont want to pay someone fix/update the patches every time a new version is released nor be willing to have their own fork?

I might be missing something of course since your site doesn't work. Every time i tried to click on a link nothing happened. Firefox's dev console had this warning:

Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://api.segment.io/v1/p.

Looks like your tracking is broken.

BTW, i'm kinda curious, how come you have "25,000+ software engineers on WorksHub" but only 8 issues, all of them from your own company?

dullgiulio• 7 years ago

Salvatore's feeling that he should be thinking about big ideas makes me think of Fabrice Bellard. He drops amazing things, let's the community manage them and concentrates on starting the next amazing thing. Maybe that's something good for Salvatore too.

makecheck• 7 years ago

People seem to have a serious lack of understanding when making requests of others.

- When you send an E-mail, at least imagine that the recipient may have literally hundreds of other messages to dredge through and the time required to respond (and detail of response) may reflect that. Not personal, don’t get mad at them.

- When you send an “instant message”, it may be instant for you but for all you know the recipient is deep in the middle of something and won’t respond for awhile. Not personal, don’t get mad at them.

- The recipient may be on the other side of the planet. Err on the side of extra information so you don’t wait days for a response that just has to ask you for more.

- When you file a bug, “thank you but do some homework”. A person dealing with 1000 other things will not have time to hand-hold you through all the things you’re not telling them yet. Be precise and complete. Be reasonable about when/if to expect a fix.

- And for that matter, in retail, or traffic, or 100 other things in life, you don’t know as much as you think you do about what other people are dealing with. Stop for a second. Imagine their situation. That person not instantly serving you and only you has a dozen other things going on.

gppk• 7 years ago

I agree with a lot of these.

One thing i've noticed in life is that our use of aschynchronous communication methods is much more in a "respond now" fashion.

Also as a contributor to StackOverflow your point about asking questions with the right amount of information is really spot on.

senorjazz• 7 years ago

- When you send an “instant message”, it may be instant for you but for all you know the recipient is deep in the middle of something and won’t respond for awhile. Not personal, don’t get mad at them.

People don't get it. If they said a DM / IM or any program which is considered a "chat" app they expect instant replies.

I run a single person software company. I used to allow people to contact me for support any and all chat programs. So for paying customers you can magnify that "expect an instant reply" factor. People would get quite annoyed, regardless of whether it was Sunday, or 3am in the morning for me.

For that reason, only email and forum support is no offered. Never had a complaint since about wait times. People expect to wait after sending an email. They expect to wait for a forum post. They do not expect to wait for a chat / IM / DM response.

BeetleB• 7 years ago

When you send an E-mail, at least imagine that the recipient may have literally hundreds of other messages to dredge through and the time required to respond (and detail of response) may reflect that. Not personal, don’t get mad at them.

It's refreshing to see someone on HN say this. If you look at my comment history, you'll find a number of people who've replied to my comment who say it is incredibly rude not to answer someone's email promptly. My stance over the last few years has become: If anyone (including automated services) can put an email in my inbox, I am not obligated to read it. Until I can get a reliable heuristic that distinguishes well thought out emails from the crud, I don't feel obligated to spend my limited time on tending to my inbox. The only realistic solution is to have sending emails incur a cost, in order to curb the quantity of emails. Your sending me an email doesn't obligate me to read or respond to it.

I'm not an open source maintainer who gets a ton of support emails. Yet if I feel my stance is necessary for my sanity, imagine how much worse it is for those folks.

For IM's, at work, my status says something like: "If you're physically in the building, come talk to me in person if urgent or send me an email if not. If you are remote, email me if not urgent, or let's set up a voice chat if urgent."

The only useful thing about IM at the work place is in things like active debugging, or a coworker in an adjacent cubicle needing to send me a link related to a live conversation we're having. Other than those, it becomes a conversation that drags out and never ends. They'll often wait multiple minutes before responding to me (they are the ones who initiated the IM). Having IM windows open and randomly flashing takes up my mental space and distracts.

(Note: We do not use Slack).

(Note 2: My saying "send email" contradicts with my first paragraph, which I wrote with my personal email in mind. The SNR is much higher for my work email).

sdegutis• 7 years ago

Moreover I’m sure I’m doing less than I could because of that, but this is how things work.

It doesn't have to be. What if all the people who "pay" for Redis, their money want into a collection bucket, and nobody got the money until they earned it. Then you work on your own schedule and "earn" that money at a fixed dollar rate per hour, and claim the money at the end. Other trusted contributors can join this effort and claim the money after working the hours. This way, hours are up to the contributors, and money is more like the "pledge" in Kickstarter for example, or a check that's not yet cashed.

jancsika• 7 years ago

This is a vicious cycle of a mentoring problem.

If the maintainer never learned and practiced "role shifting" as a part of the developer process, they are going to have a bad time if the project gains any traction whatsoever.

Worse, there's no easy way for a mentor to swoop in and teach them basic role shifting tactics. Because such an attempt would likely be interpreted as just a user giving yet another uninformed opinion. Edit: And such a maintainer is unlikely to be able to delegate to newcomers since mentoring isn't part of their skillset. (Thus the vicious cycle.)

adam1210• 7 years ago

I have a small (2k+ stars) niche game-related project. The hardest part for me is saying "no". If someone proposes a change that I think is out of scope, or is not something I want to maintain (maybe the introduced complexity is greater than the benefit of the feature) I find it difficult to explain that in a way people understand. Often times people get offended by it and then become angry at me, and over time it becomes very draining.

nicpottier• 7 years ago

Sometimes I believe that software, while great, will never be huge like writing a book that will survive for centuries. Note because it is not as great per-se, but because as a side effect it is also useful… and will be replaced when something more useful is around.

I once saw a sig somewhere that was something along the lines of the author's goal being of writing some piece of software that would outlive them. That seemed like a neat, but incredibly ambitious goal, very very few pieces of software will meet it.

That said, Redis is probably one of them. It isn't too hard to imagine that there will be Redis instances running somewhere in 40 years, and though I wish antirez a long life, I think it is likely there will still be Redis instances chugging along after he passes.

So be proud antirez! You've most certainly made a dent in the universe.

redisman• 7 years ago

Data migration is difficult. I'm sure there are a lot of very old databases still chugging along in some dusty office corner because no one wants to touch them since they've worked adequately for the last 30 years.

mamcx• 7 years ago

I don't remember if I get the idea elsewhere or what, but:

"Worse than a failed project/business, is a successfully one"

I part of "small scale" projects and one thing that some fear, very much, if that the project GET traction. This have killed some business before.

ilaksh• 7 years ago

I guess I will be the one to complain about something that makes me look bad. Since no one else complains about this, it makes me think I might be the only one. However I doubt that.

The problem I have had with my open source projects so far is that most of them seem to not be very popular and they receive very little if any feedback at all.

It's gotten to the point where I feel like popularity and merit are not even directly related. It seems like maybe part of it is tied to some kind of social networking popularity contest. Certainly I have to think that way otherwise I would never try to contribute anything again.

narnianal• 7 years ago

The best thing creators should do in my eyes, and I always do it myself, is trying to make yourself jobless. Solve that problem, find people who are good at maintaining stuff, move on to the next problem. You don't need to sit there looking through bugs 12 hours a day. In fact there are people who love this continuous struggle more than you, and who therefore also have developed skills at handling these situations without having sleepless nights.

Find these people once your project reaches a stable point from a creative POV. Then help these people get started, not the users. Then you will see that you need to do less and less. And when you are at about 30% load start using your time to find the next problem that you can solve.

No reason to be ashamed of either. There are loads of people who really love this continous lifestyle and there are few people who actually love finding a new solution to a problem that nobody can solve. Everybody will be more happy in the end, even the users.

PS: You can also see it in a different way. There's not just jenkins and github and AWS to setup as a system to get your project running. People are also part of the system. People who move the issues along these pipelines. There is no system if people aren't part of it. And there are not just devs and users, there are also maintainers, communicators etc.

2easy• 7 years ago

Really great article bows down

The struggles of an open source maintainer

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