Developers donât contribute to open source for lack of technical ability, but rather due to fear of committing a faux pas.
âFacebook is a flat landscape, so managing 38 [subgroups-subject, regional, and admin-on Facebook was a bear, and they gave us no support whatsoeverâ â Nina Lorez Collins
Using a âghostâ admin account that he has purposely forgotten the password to, he transfers his unwanted projects to that account, then removes his main account as administrator.
⊠a projectâs test infrastructure can become unwieldy. Itâs easy to writing a quick, imperfect test in the moment, but these small choices add up, eventually affecting everybody elseâs ability to work on the codebase.
⊠security vulnerabilities can be time-consuming to manage, with little upside for the developer, coupled with the fear of an extremely bad situation if they miss something important.
To identify problems of organized complexity, Timothy Patitsas , a theologian who builds upon Jane Jacobs âs work, paraphrases a heuristic from urban ministry practitioner Douglas Hall:
âThe question is, are you dealing with a toaster or a cat? ⊠Can you take it apart and put it back together?
Itâs a toaster. If you take it apart, do you belong in jail?
Thatâs a cat.â
In the case of cities, Jacobs argues that the âperfectâ city cannot be designed once and for all, because how people use their environment changes over time.
Although we can objectively appraise the value of a home
(Whatâs the square footage? How many bedrooms does it have?),
its value is also affected by its surrounding area (How safe is the neighborhood? Are there good schools nearby?).
When we talk about the desire to âexpress ourselves,â itâs not just about externalizing something trapped inside us, but also about having that part of us understood by others.
^^Maintenance costs are anathema to software developers. Every developer tries to reduce the amount of maintenance work they need to do over time. But software is never done, and also never dies: the cost of maintaining a project can be near-zero, but it is asymptotic.^^
lâve heard from a few engineers from large companies who confess that theyâve âlaunderedâ their pull requests through non-work email addresses, because being associated with their employers can make it harder to get their contributions accepted.
⊠reliable, error-free transitive dependencies are invisible. Therefore, the maintainers are invisible, too.
⊠^^better these maintainers do their job, the more invisible they are^^. âŠ
> The highest good is like water, which nourishes and benefits all things without seeking credit or recognition.
Maybe ads arenât the answer - fine. But telling maintainers to bury their appeals where no one bothers to look is not the answer, either.
But who provides the content is a form of differentiation in itself.
Dan Abramov is an example of a success story, the idea that the best possible outcome for open source developers is a corporate âacqui-hireâ (a term used among startups when the employees, but not the startup itself, are acquired by another company) strikes me as a suboptimal approach, âŠ
As media companies shift toward âatomizedâ creators, journalists will find it easier to independently monetize their own reputations, much like any other content creator.
The Athletic built its subscription platform, focused on sports, by recruiting high-reputation sports writers from local newspapers,368 Even reporting on the local news is a form of âniche journalism,â
Instead of maximizing for likes, these creators maximize for meaning.