[HN Gopher] Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
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Ask HN: How do you get over the fear of sharing code?
I'm a junior. Truth be told, I don't really care if
professionals/adults see my code or pick it apart/mock it/fork it
or whatever. All my repos are private just because I worry about
other students being lazy and just ripping my hard work and
claiming it as their own. That really pisses me off when I hear
some horror stories like that. Is this unfounded? Or do I have a
right for some concern? It's obviously easier for viewers to just
see public code repos and browse without ever requesting access so
I know I'm losing some traffic (from my portfolio site) I was
thinking the alternative would be just linking my demo on my
portfolio site as a proof of concept that yes I made it, yes it
works, and if you're curious , here's a link to the code u can
request independently of github. Thank you in advance.
Author : sodokuwizard
Score : 47 points
Date : 2025-11-09 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
| noir_lord wrote:
| One of the things you learn as you get older is other people
| don't think about you (or at all) as much you think they do/will.
|
| We are often our own worst critics - put your stuff out there,
| there is little to lose and some upside, if someone likes your
| demo and clicks through to see the code and can see it then
| that's a low friction path, by having to request access most
| people won't or will - but forget all about it etc.
| sodokuwizard wrote:
| thank you , yeah I think im overthinking this
| lelandbatey wrote:
| Echoing what others have said: just post your stuff. If
| you're not intentionally publicizing yourself or your work, I
| can nearly guarantee that no one will ever even look at your
| work. I've been putting up my little personal projects up on
| my GitHub for over ten years, and yet no one's ever come
| around to look at them except when I intentionally posted
| links to those projects on places like HN.
|
| No one's going to look unless you ask them to look. If you
| already have a big audience (over 100+ people daily using
| things you've built) no one is going to "get curious" about
| your projects. So just post them so folks can see them.
| MrDarcy wrote:
| Even if you ask people to look they won't look. You really
| gotta sell yourself and have an influencer mindset to
| motivate someone to go look at code you've published.
|
| This is it should be. It takes time and effort to try
| someone's idea.
|
| Regarding the fear someone does take it and claim it as
| their own. Who cares? You're in no worse of a position than
| the code being private and then not doing it. It's not
| relevant.
| tchalla wrote:
| It's a well studied psychological phenomena too.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_effect
| benoau wrote:
| Reminds of the thought experiment, "if a tree falls in a forest
| and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"...
|
| People you never heard of are open-sourcing projects you'll never
| find every day, there are hundreds of millions of repositories on
| GitHub and very few of them will ever be seen by humans who
| didn't write them, let alone humans looking to pretend they did.
|
| Presumably someone looking at your portfolio will be reviewing
| CVs to hire? I think throwing up a barrier on them evaluating
| your code will hurt you much more than the rest of the world
| being able to see it.
| sodokuwizard wrote:
| thats very true , and a good way of looking at it from a
| practical perspective
|
| thank you
| latexr wrote:
| I've had several people steal my open-source code for different
| projects before. I'm talking copying (not cloning) the whole
| thing, changing the credit to their name, making no other
| modifications, and then republishing on their account.
|
| Fortunately they never gained much traction. The ones I know
| about I blocked on GitHub with a note. No idea if they ever found
| out or if they tried workarounds, but I figured there's not a lot
| more I could do about it and it's not worth the headache.
|
| I continue to share openly.
| sodokuwizard wrote:
| do u find it typically only happened on projects that gained
| traction in the first place?
| latexr wrote:
| They all had some traction, probably a few thousand users but
| nothing crazy.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| What license did you use? Most licenses require that forks
| change the name, few require credit except for original
| copyright headers, and no licenses require modification
| teddyh wrote:
| > _Most licenses require that forks change the name_
|
| I was under the impression that the opposite was the case;
| that requiring a name change was extremely rare, but some
| historically important free software packages had it (one
| such being LaTeX, IIRC), so it was, somewhat grudgingly,
| considered acceptable. But no normal licenses (like BSD, GPL,
| Apache, etc.) requires name changes today, AFAIK.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I was mistaken. GPLv3 only offers a provision to require
| it. Firefox also requires that the name be treated as a
| protected trademark. I don't know how clearly one gains
| rights to names of open sourced projects with typical
| trademark policy though. I've tended to change the name on
| my own forks if I am not forking just to contribute
| upstream, out of caution for trademark (even if
| unregistered) and general reputational hazards of becoming
| a public face for someone else's project under their chosen
| name.
|
| edit: Looks like the reality is quite complex:
| https://google.github.io/opencasebook/trademarks/#license-
| te... this goes into detail on each popular license
| delaminator wrote:
| Truth: no-one really cares about your code
|
| We publish code _so others can see it_ , the lazy and the
| productive.
|
| Lazy people do not prosper, so don't waste your energy thinking
| about them.
|
| Why do you want to publish yours, just as a portfolio? Then make
| a portfolio.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Do you see no value in publishing the code behind items in your
| portfolio?
| hinkley wrote:
| See I see this a different way.
|
| People only read your code when something is wrong, which means
| they're already annoyed before they get to your bit and if your
| bit is also annoying you're going to either hear about it or
| get frozen out because if it.
|
| This is at least 4x more true of tests. I've witnessed too many
| PRs where obvious problems in the tests get missed and are then
| found during the RCA that covers the outage the shitty tests
| didn't prevent. Trying to fix a bug in someone else's code and
| discovering just how terrible they are at writing tests is salt
| in the wounds.
| drbojingle wrote:
| If it's not open source then don't make it public but if you want
| to lose your fear, just do it. It's not like it matters that
| much.
| bluedino wrote:
| Wait until every line you write has to be code reviewed when you
| get a job.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| > I worry about other students being lazy and just ripping my
| hard work and claiming it as their own. That really pisses me off
| when I hear some horror stories like that.
|
| Make the code part of your professional marketing. It's not code
| for code sake but to enable you to blog, speak, etc about
| something interesting. Then there's little chance some
| theoretical thief is also communicating those ideas. And if
| you're good at evangelizing yourself it SHOULD happen that
| someone steals your code. If anyone looks up the ideas, they'll
| be inundated by content you created. The code is secondary.
| snayan wrote:
| People have already given you practical reasons why you're better
| off keeping it public. To answer your question as to how to get
| over your fear, you need to ask yourself what you're afraid of.
| You've mentioned you're worried about someone ripping off your
| hard work and claiming it as their own. If you can understand the
| root of why the idea of that pisses you off, you will probably
| find it's an artificial construct of ego. Understand the root and
| the fear will loosen it's grip.
| siva7 wrote:
| You're severely overthinking. The Code isn't important. It's what
| you build with it that people care about.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| Scott Hanselman have a good blog post about this suggesting you
| should detach yourself from your code:
| https://www.hanselman.com/blog/you-are-not-your-code
|
| Especially true when working as an employee where you don't own
| your code.
| neilv wrote:
| I think the thieves you worry about are actually going steal your
| code through LLM laundering, without even knowing who it was
| stolen from.
|
| If you're not going to do a startup with your code, you probably
| need to focus on a mix of learning and self-promotion. With the
| market prioritizing self-promotion. Which probably means just
| trying to make sure that code that reflects well on you, does so.
|
| Which probably means making it it open source, even if AI
| training data companies will steal it and give it away.
| alyxya wrote:
| > I worry about other students being lazy and just ripping my
| hard work and claiming it as their own.
|
| Is the main concern that you have a class project you don't want
| other people taking credit for as their own? I wouldn't bother
| sharing standardized class projects that future classes may give
| again, and those projects don't mean much anyways. Your portfolio
| should ideally be projects that are something more uniquely
| created by you.
|
| Also, what's specifically the issue with other students taking
| credit for your work as their own? In a school setting, it should
| be pretty clear who committed their code first. If it's for
| future employers, the most important thing is demonstrating full
| understanding of the project while being able to discuss it.
| reactordev wrote:
| With LLM's now, odds are, they'll just copy pasta that code.
| Yours may be similar but if you slap a license on it, most people
| respect that and will adhere to it.
|
| That said, fear of someone stealing your code is completely
| unfounded as there isn't really anything novel we produce
| anymore. If you are on the bleeding edge, you welcome input and
| PR's from others to make it better. Only wise men know they know
| nothing. Collectively, we can build some amazing software.
|
| Now, if you're trying to build a business off of your software,
| you may want to keep that to yourself and not share it. If your
| business isn't the software but your _service_ , there's no harm.
| fsmv wrote:
| People can fork my code all they want but to anyone actually
| paying attention it's obvious mine is the real one. If theirs is
| actually better and they actually put in more work then so be it.
|
| But in reality the original is often the best updated and the
| forks will fall behind because they have to merge your changes
| and you don't have to do that.
| munificent wrote:
| As someone how has spent several years in therapy in part related
| to anxiety, the answer to "how do you get over the fear of X" is
| "do things that incrementally approach X".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_therapy
|
| There's really no other successful approach I've seen for curing
| anxiety. You have to just steel yourself and do the thing you're
| afraid of. It gets easier every time.
| lanstin wrote:
| An inconvenient truth. It can even become fun, but no
| guarantee. (I just gave an hour long presentation to a couple
| dozen people, and was looking forward to it, which was what
| would have happened ten years ago).
| exox wrote:
| "What It Means To Be Open" by Lu Wilson is well worth watching:
|
| https://youtu.be/MJzV0CX0q8o?si=aVmlJNuSlSyjomQa
| deafpolygon wrote:
| same way you get over a fear of anything: exposure
| hirako2000 wrote:
| You would be surprised how code you've published is in fact not
| read by anyone. You would equally surprised that many do read the
| README.
| epolanski wrote:
| You should be happy that anybody at all bothers looking at your
| code.
| nmilo wrote:
| I mean this in the best possible way but your code is not
| special. Plagiarizers are gonna plagiarize and if not from you
| then from the other 1000 open-source student-friendly portfolio
| projects. Career wise you should be building up your GitHub ASAP,
| anyone can make a fancy looking frontend or whatever you do but I
| can't know if someone is good without looking at the code (and I
| would probably never care enough to go out of my way to request
| it).
| sholladay wrote:
| If someone else steals your work, you should be proud. They found
| it to be valuable. If they managed to sell it or build something
| with it, they've demonstrated that you can do the same. Use it as
| a learning experience.
|
| Keep in mind that you are in control of what people are allowed
| to do with your software. By default, your code is unlicensed
| even if it is public, which means no one else can distribute it
| or change it or do much of anything with it. Thus, if someone
| uses it and claims it to be theirs, you can sue them if you want
| to.
|
| However, instead of leaving your code unlicensed, I would
| recommend choosing an open source license and applying it to your
| code when you make it public. There are many to choose from!
|
| By applying a license to your code, you are establishing a clear
| framework for what other people are and aren't allowed to do with
| it. And it's legally enforceable. In fact, there are
| organizations that may step in to help you if someone violates
| your license or challenges it in court. For example, my preferred
| license is the Mozilla Public License. If someone tried to
| challenge me on any part of that license, Mozilla would have a
| vested interest in defending it, since it's their license and
| they use it, too. Their lawyer is even available to chat with
| over email. I once reached out to ask if I could make a small
| tweak to the license without causing headaches. They got back to
| me within a few days and said it would be fine. That gave me a
| lot of confidence to continue using it.
|
| Some licenses are very permissive, such as MIT. Others are much
| more restrictive, such as GPL. The MPL, which I use, is somewhere
| in between.
|
| What's right for you really just depends on what you consider to
| be fair. And every project can be different. Maybe you build some
| small tools that you release under MIT, essentially donating them
| to all of humanity. Meanwhile, you create a startup and build a
| product where you keep some of it private and release parts of it
| publicly, licensed under the GPL, because you don't want huge
| corporations stealing the work for your day job without
| reciprocating. That's a relatively common approach.
|
| Whatever you decide, just make some of your code public. The
| feedback and experience will be well worth it. Good luck!
| coherentpony wrote:
| What a wonderful comment. It was educational and friendly
| without holding my hand too much.
|
| Thank you.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| > If someone else steals your work, you should be proud
|
| "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity
| can pay to greatness." -- Oscar Wilde
| lolc wrote:
| Haha I've had instructors noting with a smile that my code was
| "good enough for others to copy". In the end I learned a bunch,
| also about people. More than if I hadn't shared.
| cpursley wrote:
| By sharing it.
| INTPenis wrote:
| How do you get over your fear of anything really? Build up your
| confidence.
|
| If you know who you are, what you're capable of, you won't let
| other people's opinions hurt you.
|
| It comes with age and experience. I don't mean programming
| experience either, life experience.
|
| One can also focus on the end goal and drop that foolish pride.
| The goal is to have a working product, all help is welcome.
| beej71 wrote:
| As an instructor, I think you should have your stuff private
| while you're a student in a particular class. Just share the repo
| with the instructor. The reasoning is that if someone steals your
| stuff, it's often hard for an instructor to tell who stole from
| whom. And that's just trouble you don't need. Yes, you can argue
| commit histories and all that, but why bother?
|
| Once you're out of the class, there's no reason to keep it
| private in my humble opinion. The answers to everything every
| instructor gives in school is out there somewhere. And AI can
| solve most of them.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| In the age of AI it will at the very least be laundered through
| various commercial interests into commercial for profit tools.
| Depending on the license you intended to release the code under
| (and you should read into the various licenses and what they
| intend to achieve and protect and what they don't) that may or
| may not matter to you, but it is happening.
|
| Fundamentally most code goes no where, no one shows much interest
| unless you release a hit project. It can however be really
| impactful in interviews and recruitment, if your code is readable
| and well tested and such then it can be quite a positive for the
| right types of organisations. So at some point you may very well
| want to make it public for this purpose.
| MikeNotThePope wrote:
| My recommendation is don't internalize negative feedback from
| people who won't make the time to work with you to improve.
| Absorb knowledge on people who invest in you.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Older programmer: Nobody gives a shit about your code and nobody
| thinks about you as much you think they do :)
|
| Practically it may be worth keeping code for a particular class
| private for the duration of the term, semester whatever so you
| dont get into a sticky situation where a classmate copies it and
| now youre defending against plagiarism and have to prove to the
| professor you wrote it first.
|
| But really beyond that, nobody cares.
| incomingpain wrote:
| What do you fear?
|
| > worry about other students being lazy and just ripping my hard
| work and claiming it as their own.
|
| First of all, the cheaters will never read you, they'll just use
| AI.
|
| Good news, your code is likely to never be read by anyone but
| you.
|
| "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about,
| and that is not being talked about." -- Oscar Wilde
|
| By being private, you're just not being talked about.
|
| >I was thinking the alternative would be just linking my demo on
| my portfolio site as a proof of concept that yes I made it, yes
| it works, and if you're curious , here's a link to the code u can
| request independently of github.
|
| I'll give you an even better path. Use AI to make something of
| size. Build in public. Who cares, if someone steals it, they are
| only stealing from AI and could have just gone to AI to begin
| with. If you get criticized, they arent criticizing you, they are
| criticizing some version of an AI model.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| I recall in a college programming course in the late 80s where
| the professor would humiliate those who wrote terrible code
| riddled with mistakes. The other students didn't appreciate that
| but it didn't make them work harder. They just tried copying each
| other and everybody else eventually realizing I could program
| better than most. So they'd sit next to me and try to get me to
| help them in class. Needless to say I gave them incorrect advice
| and they got screamed at by the woman Prof. Made me realize
| people will take the easy way out.
| stephenlf wrote:
| Don't worry about others. Just share your stuff. Here is who will
| look at your code:
|
| 1) unusually good interviewers. These will glance through your
| repo for 30-120 seconds, checking for a) clear code style, b)
| clear ideas, and c) good documentation. Nobody but influencers
| will do a DEEP code review of code they're not being paid to
| review.
|
| 2) people on HN or Reddit if you write an interesting blog post
| and link the underlying code.
|
| It's usually true that we are our own worst critics. This is an
| order of magnitude truer for developer portfolios.
| bradly wrote:
| You can open source your code without explicitly sharing it. I
| started putting out the source code to my side projects and no
| one cares about it really. Is someone ripping it off and not
| respecting the license? Who knows... it's a big internet and
| probably won't negatively affect my life.
| al_borland wrote:
| I wouldn't worry about students. They won't be hurting you, only
| themselves. If the goal is to learn, they aren't learning. This
| will either mean programming is a random class they're taking,
| not their career, so who cares... or they'll have a really hard
| time later in life when they will need to sink or swim in a real
| job, having not first developed the skills. That's not a problem
| for you.
|
| It's also much more likely they will go to AI these days; the
| odds of them searching and landing on your repo to use are almost
| 0. If they do, I imagine most schools would scan for direct
| copies of existing code.
| jjmarr wrote:
| It's considered _my_ responsibility to protect my labwork at my
| school, and I could get in trouble if someone else plagiarized
| it from GitHub.
| al_borland wrote:
| If that's the school policy, then there is no fear to get
| over. Keep the repos private to comply with policy. That
| makes it easy.
| evilduck wrote:
| Your school lab work is only valuable to yourself and other
| students who wish to plagiarize, there's not really a
| compelling reason to share that code.
|
| If you're writing other software beyond classwork that you
| wish to share, the school has no say over it, no more than
| they would if you chose to write a book while in school.
| jjmarr wrote:
| This incentivizes me to minimum effort school projects so I
| can focus on personal projects.
|
| But most professors want students to be creative and
| inventive on classwork.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| The others students will get code from chatgpt way faster than
| from your code.
|
| If you are afraid that people will think this code is not yours,
| sign your commits, it's unlikely they will take the time to clone
| your repo and remake it with new signatures.
|
| But honestly, if it's such a source of stress for you, don't
| share it. It's ok to not share code. There is no rules that say
| you have to.
|
| Just because most of us are into FOSS and open source doesn't
| mean we will less of you if you are not.
| malux85 wrote:
| When you're a junior it's natural to overvalue your code, because
| you're still learning this incredibly complex thing called
| programming, and that code took a lot of effort to produce!
|
| But the actual truth is that the code itself is nearly worthless.
| The important thing is who you became when you wrote it. You
| learned interface abstraction, api design, how to debug, how to
| execute it in your head, the tooling, and most importantly you
| got that spark of pure joy when it finally worked.
|
| If others copy your code they get none of that, they only get the
| little worthless bit, they might win a battle (cheat on an
| assignment) but they will loose the war (they don't grow or
| experience joy) so don't worry about it, they will flake out,
| while you grow and reach for even greater things!
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Unfounded I don't know.
|
| But if you're taking the time to build out side projects I'd open
| them so you can put them on your resume. Doesn't make sense to me
| to hamstring your resume so some kid you don't know gets a
| slighter better score in some cs class.
| tlarkworthy wrote:
| U put something out on the internet, likely no-one cares,
| sometimes people will point out a better way of doing it. You
| gain in that knowledge. I learnt a lot from public critique... it
| makes you better and more knowledgeable. Harness the crowd, let
| it out.
| stevedsimkins wrote:
| I definitely think it's worth sharing, especially if it's version
| controlled. By making small precise commits you're proving your
| steps of how you got to the end result. Even if someone copied it
| you still have the receipts of how you got there.
|
| In math, half the work is proving how you got the answer. When it
| comes to proving your worth as a programmer, I'm a firm believer
| the same principle applies.
| dusted wrote:
| Think about it for a moment, what do you lose from someone
| copying your stuff ? What do they lose ?
|
| If people insist on staying ignorant, let them, it won't hurt
| you, but it will them.
|
| Just put your stuff out there if you think someone might find it
| interesting or useful.
| numpy-thagoras wrote:
| Most code is throwaway, even to you.
|
| Most code will quickly be obsolete anyways, even for you.
|
| Most code you write will be torn apart by often the harshest
| critic: yourself.
|
| People who chase others' code just to copy it and not to
| understand it will not get anywhere, especially today.
|
| Share for your benefit first, and share often. That's how I have
| found my gems, even for code I've written.
| groue wrote:
| You are not your code.
| hokumguru wrote:
| I just got off of a few years at a FAANG and perhaps my greatest
| learning is that code is just table stakes. That is, it hardly
| matters and for a well functioning business it is best for it to
| be malleable and to not get too attached. It's just code, the
| product is what actually matters.
|
| Really just a long winded way of saying no one cares. Anybody who
| is looking at your portfolio is going to care more about what you
| built than how you built it. Anyone trying to rip you off it's
| just hurting themselves more than anything
| hamasho wrote:
| I fear sharing code for a different reason. I'm a perfectionist
| with tendency toward procrastination and anxiety, and sometimes I
| overestimate my abilities. So when I submit a PR, I want to make
| sure the code is clean, well organized, and covers all corner
| cases and hidden feature details. This works well most of the
| time. I put effort to think about design, structure, and
| implementation more than coworkers. And after a decade of
| experience I can code quickly for tedious tasks.
|
| But sometimes, when implementing non-trivial features, I struggle
| to come up with good implementation. This prevents submitting
| working code early. And when I feel I'm delayed, my anxiety kicks
| in, and I have this urge to implement cleaner code and more
| features than expected even though all of my coworkers just want
| working code. And I feel more pressure, more urge to implement
| well, more anxiety, but it makes me procrastinate (I'm working
| from home so I can just lie down on the bed when I'm depressed).
| Sometimes I manage to implement, sometimes I give up and the
| feature is not implemented or assigned to a coworker. But in few
| cases I end up with severe depression, stop functioning, and
| finally quit the job.
|
| I can handle this better than before after making same mistakes
| again and again, but still happens sometimes.
| johnfn wrote:
| Literally no one reads your code. No one! Not other engineers,
| not annoyed people on HN, not even people for whom it would
| probably be a pretty good idea. There is a common misconception
| that published code can build your portfolio; this is basically
| entirely false. I've had conversations like this:
|
| Recruiter: "We want you to do a take home so we can get a sense
| of how well you can code."
|
| Me: "I have a repo on Github with 10M downloads, 10k stars, and
| about 50k lines of my own code. Would that be useful to make an
| assessment?"
|
| Recruiter: "Haha, no. Please do this take home that has you
| render a few divs in a tedious way."
|
| So if people who are even financially incentivized to read your
| code don't do it, I'd say that the chances of anyone reading your
| code is virtually nil.
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