[HN Gopher] It Doesn't Work
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It Doesn't Work
Author : jedisct1
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-03-26 11:52 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (00f.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (00f.net)
| h2odragon wrote:
| 20 years ago, when I shared some code with the world, because it
| worked for me and i hoped others might benefit from it; that was
| all i was doing. Today, it seems, there's implied
| responsibilities to your users in that situation.
|
| Not only must the code be well organized, run perfectly, and
| handle all users needs; I myself must be of proper moral
| character, never have publicly uttered words that could be
| considered objectionable, and fully willing to endorse the
| fashionable fascism of the day.
|
| ... I don't buy it. I think that "hey this solves my problem" is
| viable and code doesn't carry the stain of its creators. We don't
| need to know or care who wrote our favorite text editor, they
| might be wonderful people or they might be gnarly gnomes dripping
| ichor; "here's the tool, it works" is sufficient knowledge to
| judge the tool.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| About six months ago, I stumbled across a Github repository
| called Chromium Legacy (https://github.com/blueboxd/chromium-
| legacy). A seemingly unknown Github account had singlehandledly
| backported Chromium to work on very old versions of OS X. Due to
| my interests, I was _delighted!_
|
| The port had some major bugs, but I opened Github issues, and
| they've been fixed by the developer, one by one. In a couple of
| cases, I helped track down the offending code, but he's done the
| vast majority of the work.
|
| At this point, I have definitely opened more issues on Chromium
| Legacy than anyone else. I opened two more just hours ago, and I
| was going to open a third... but then I didn't, because I was
| feeling guilty. He's always thankful for the reports, but then he
| usually _apologizes_ to me (!), which makes me feel like I 'm
| creating all this work for him...
| bombcar wrote:
| Be polite and unexpecting of any fix and do all you can in the
| report to make it easy to fix and you'll be appreciated (even
| if just by others who find your report).
|
| People underestimate how valuable a good bug report is - with
| details, minimum examples, and workarounds. Especially
| workarounds - as you may be the only useful response people
| find.
| akavel wrote:
| Hm; and yes, and no... in my case at least, I personally remember
| having more of those others - and for which I'm super grateful,
| they mean _A LOT_ to me - i.e. the likes of, literally:
|
| - The unforgeable _" WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE"_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18295453 - my all time
| favourite comment that I don't stop mentioning when telling the
| story of my project, and that always makes my heart go warm.
|
| - The pure _" Just wanted to give you a thumbs up!"_ 'issue' - no
| strings attached, no "but [could you do this or this for me]"...
| https://github.com/akavel/up/issues/14 - plus, for some bonus
| love, a few follow-ups from other wonderful people... not even
| counting the people expressing their appreciation via the
| emoticons...
|
| - A person came back a couple years later and said, they use and
| like my tool so much, they decided in act of gratitude to give me
| not one but three logo sketches that I could choose from; then
| they had enough patience to bear my pickiness until I fortunately
| finally came back to senses and took the first one of the
| sketches, which was IMO the best one from the beginning.
| https://github.com/akavel/up/issues/48
|
| I still would say "yes, and no..." by which I mean, I'm still
| tired of this project enough that I can't muster strength to get
| back to it... sure, there were bug reports, and honestly, I
| understand and appreciate... I would open them too, and I treat
| them with respect... as I feel treated too (though also I have
| the fortune to be able to ignore or shut down occasional
| stupidity or demands). Yet _I am still tired and drained of
| energy for now for this project_. I sometimes muster a bit of it
| and improve some small parts. Sometimes. Maybe some day I 'll get
| enough energy to again put more work in it. To finish some
| neglected PRs in need of love. So, as much as random demands can
| be part of the stress, and certainly don't make things easier,
| especially for some creators; as much as this, I think there must
| be also other psychological factors at play.
| gwilikers wrote:
| "It doesn't work" issues are bad for all the reasons described in
| the article, but the ones that really boggle the mind are the
| _demands_ people think they can make of maintainers they have
| zero leverage over.
|
| My favorite in recent history was a developer (who had never made
| any contributions to the repo, nor even filed the original issue)
| saying something to the effect of "if this issue is not resolved
| shortly, we will move our company to use a different software."
| Talk about threatening the maintainers with a good time.
| duxup wrote:
| It shouldn't, but it amazes me that developers will do this to
| other developers.
|
| I was talking generally about JavaScript and another dev who
| likes to surf the web without JS enabled (more power to him)
| mentioned how in a given case there's no reason to use JS. I
| mentioned a side project that I felt kinda fit that use case
| (in a way). This is an entirely a casual project that has no
| intent to do much other than explore something myself and uses
| JavaScript, if folks like it, that's cool, it's free.
|
| I got litany of reasons that person would NEVER use my product
| that sounded a lot like an angry customer rant.
|
| Entirely free service, and I got a rant for it ;)
| bombcar wrote:
| Many people use the same methods for commercial software and
| open source -- and think threatening to move their non-existent
| purchases elsewhere will light a fire under someone.
|
| (It often doesn't work for either.)
| nibsfive wrote:
| I have generally always liked letting customers leave.
| Ultimatums can easily be two way. If they threaten to quit, I
| can always fire them :)
| H8crilA wrote:
| Very real, also within corporations in proprietary code.
|
| One thing helps a lot: you don't owe "them" anything, also when
| working on proprietary code inside corporations. Don't feel like
| looking at it? Just ignore the bug report. Literally - don't even
| read the report.
|
| (If you haven't shuffled through hundreds of poorly formulated
| issues you may not realize just how much effort that is).
| yaml-ops-guy wrote:
| _Don 't feel like looking at it? Just ignore the bug report.
| Literally - don't even read the report._
|
| Presumably this is what product management is supposed to
| function and give attention to, isn't it-at least to an extent?
| Or have I misunderstood what those staffers do?
|
| Seems lately I've seen developers frustrated about this because
| they want to be developers, but the company wants them to be
| everything and anything more (sometimes, maybe often-times
| because of poor resource allocation/chronic understaffing on
| the part of the business) from triaging feature builds to
| project managing entire releases.
|
| Maybe I've worked at shitty companies.
|
| In fact...now that I think about it.......
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| More broadly: always set boundaries for yourself. You may not
| have a choice to ignore the bug in a corporate setting, but you
| need to be willing to kick issues back to the originator for
| lack of information and /or lack of willingness on their part
| to help isolate a way to reproduce the problem.
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _Very real, also within corporations in proprietary code._
|
| Yeah, I've fielded quite a few internal bug reports that amount
| to "it doesn't work". My stock response is becoming "what is
| the symptom you're actually experiencing when you say 'it
| doesn't work'?"; that _usually_ gets more information.
|
| (The internal ones are perhaps worse, as you are beholden to
| respond to them, since it's from a coworker.)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| We lost something when we centralized collaborative development
| and made it look like a social network (with even gamified
| activities).
|
| People used to glance over codes of conduct (as in RTFM first,
| post on such channel, and other practical stuff like that, not
| like the ones projects are creating today) before contributing,
| and did so with the intention of interacting for a while.
|
| Projects always tried to remove barriers for casual
| collaboration, but nobody managed to remove the long-term nature
| of it before. Now, well, too much of a good thing stops being
| good. Github finally fully succeeded, and this may be the main
| reason to abandon the platform.
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(page generated 2021-03-28 23:00 UTC)