Publishing your work increases your luck
github.com147 points by magoghm 12 hours ago
147 points by magoghm 12 hours ago
> Having your OSS library take off
All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world.
I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years.
Even on these small projects, I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight.
Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level.
In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users).
OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.
> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about.
Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?
What's surprising to me is that TFA is from GH who are uniquely placed to have a real impact in terms of OSS maintainer quality of life.
If they're so keen on helping people publish more stuff and showing how awesome AI is, perhaps they can pre-screen the entitled comments and just not let them get posted? Perhaps they could see that you've not touched a repo in 5 years and when that PR comes in, they could help bootstrap you back in with a code review summary? Perhaps they could stop the idiots pressuring you by explaining to them all the reasons why their PR might not get looked at any time soon?
Perhaps, just perhaps, Github could take some ownership of the problems they have created, and do some work to fix them?
I recently unpublished a couple libraries because I was so fed up with maintaining them.
Lot's of entitled "I want to speak to the manager" types ruined it for me.
Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing.
Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)?
An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.
I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it.
However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?
I think srchut is one solution. Its email workflow does successfully deter less experienced/curious people, for better or worse, and it still has some project discovery bit not social signals like stars.
A counterpart to TFA which somewhat chimes with your position:https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...
It's an article about how some of the best people do work that engages with public view and discussion either very trivially or not at all (or both).
Hard to describe more clearly but it has been a huge influence on me.
Exactly this. Word by word. Some of my OSS projects got popular accidentally and oh boy… pain in the butt for real.
And for little benefits to myself. Hitting HN front page or r/programming was nice for my ego. But that’s about it.
I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else.
Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money.
This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me.
Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all.
There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.
Was looking for a comment to articulate this better than I could. I have the same feeling about 'release something bad early' advice given by investors, it's so obviously a shady comment in that position because they have the resources to build a clone if they can't talk to you.
I strongly relate to this in many ways.
Because of OSS, I’ve never actually applied for a job or done a Leetcode interview. I’ve gotten multiple direct offers through Twitter DMs (I don’t post) and multiple referrals through random encounters that I never used.
E.g. Debugging an interesting issue with GitHub customer support eventually led to a referral for Microsoft by an MD. Similar stories with Cloudflare and more.
It’s not limited to OSS, but just having any sort of backing credibility to your name without going through the whole CV/CL process unlocks a whole slew of opportunities since people can “pre-screen” you from the start.
translated from marketing-droid-ese:
> greetings peasants! er, sorry, valued open source contributors!
> remember, without you feeding us training data, we won't be able to train our AI to replace you at your dayjob!
> now, get back to work
99% of open source authors quit right before they go viral!! Would you please upload your training data ... I mean lovely open source code??
I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?
When we become ghost content producers for LLMs, you are not supposed to hear something in reply to your post, book, or other work. Most of the time, your work will be ingested by a handful of companies as training data; the readers benefitting from your work will pay these companies, and in return these companies will thoroughly shield and insulate you from being thanked by the people you helped. These companies will do their best to ensure you are motivated to continue producing honest content that can keep their LLMs from choking on their own output.
The exceptions to this are closed (or semi-closed) communities and forums where you directly interact with humans, either by inertia due to a large established human user base or (for newer, smaller communities) via personal vetting of participants.
I am going through interviews with founders on https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ and it is indeed what happens.
It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show.
And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas.
Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way.
And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.
The best is when a random throwaway post blows up for some unexpected and unknown reason and everything you think is good is met with silence!
You may want to be more goal oriented. If you're just publishing into a void and hoping for things to happen, I mean I'm not an influencer, but the successful ones I do know have specific goals that they're driving towards are not screaming into the void and hoping for the best.
Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?
This has definitely worked for me. Never got rich from putting stuff out there, but got a number of good jobs from it.
The article was written by „Aaron Francis, Marketing Engineer“.
I’m not a language purist, but are we really calling people who work in marketing „marketing _enginners_“ nowadays?
That seems like going a bit too far with the meaning of engineering…
Some fields of engineering have long had roles with names like that.
Want to do something with motors, but don’t know how to calculate the right combination of motor, gearbox, brake, encoder and controller? Maxon’s sales engineers will happily walk you through the calculations.
I feel it’s an evolution of the term “Devrel” which still feels tacky.
Nor would you want someone who built most of their career as an actual engineer to suddenly drop that term and become a generic someone in “marketing”. They’re more than that for sure.
I quite like the terminology the more I think about it.
Well the "software" folks started it, I met a full stack engineer the other day, that word used to have some meaning as well.
"Full stack" grinds my gears, too. Do they really work from sand to human factors?
I used to release some writing and publish code publicly but the mean comments got to me.
If it makes you feel better, on reddit, I shared my very first blog post about deprecating mysql_* functions in php. As a result, someone said something mean about my mother. I figured the web was full of trolls.
But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delete my blog. I was so embarrassed.
When I came back, there was a reply to that comment. It said something like "that's a good thing, 7th grade level writing means we can all understand it easily". And that was enough to keep me going. 13 years so far.
Reddit is now just AI slop, so I don't know if that's an improvement or not over this story. I'm just glad you were able to get over that BS and engage with it all again and kept going! I gave up and never went back in around 2010, but I'm going to try again in 2026.
The problem with environments designed to make interaction low-energy and gamified like Reddit, is that it gathers just the worst people. I've got ~63k karma there, and disengaged some years ago and I can't tell you how much ditching that, twitter and Facebook improved my mental health. There's some great fun to be had there, but it's often the same thing over and over again and increasingly drowned out by utter crap. They've taken multiple actions that have destroyed the sense of community and have become a poster child for ens*tification, unfortunately.
Thanks for sharing. After reading that comment, I realized we should encourage ourselves and others (who are more or less civilized human beings) to be the kind of person who wrote "that's a good thing..." - because fighting trolls is a game with unknown results, but encouraging people works much better. It doesn't always work, though, because sometimes the platform's nature prevents it. Like on Stack Overflow, where commenting on reactions will probably get you downvoted for being off-topic.
Turn off comments on platforms that allow you to do that.
One of my projects for the next few weeks is to get my blogging stuff up and running again but with a couple of tweaks:
1. I'll never allow on-blog comments again, ever. The signal/noise was always so poor. I'm sorry that you had a similar experience and the unpleasant odour of drive-by sniping got to you. For what it's worth, I'm always interested in finding new writing on tech topics, and I try to never be mean: I am not unique in this, so consider if there's another way.
2. If I ever publish code, it'll not be on a SaaS platform like GitHub, I'll manage the release through tar.gz/zip files, and if people don't like that, fine. I'm not after pull requests or starting a "real" OSS project. If somebody wants to take that OSS license code and host/manage it, godspeed to them.
3. I will write some code that looks for links back to my blogs, so if something I write is referenced by another blog, I'll learn about it at some point and I can go take a look, and that would be interesting. A long, long time ago there was some automation around this using web hooks that almost became a standard, so I'll look into whether that is a thing or not any more.
In my experience if somebody is writing a blog about something they are normally more constructive and thoughtful than if they are just writing something in a text box while "driving by". I'm OK with those articles normally even if they're critical or in disagreement with me about something.
I'd love to read a couple over the holidays and give you feedback if you'd like :)
This resonates, but it also feels like we’re entering a phase of content reality drift. Publishing still increases luck, but attention is fragmenting and integrity is harder to maintain.
The advantage now is being able to preserve semantic fidelity as everything else accelerates into noise. Work that stays legible and grounded seems to compound in ways raw visibility no longer does.
Writing I posted online lead to me meeting some cool dudes in SF, which lead to my current job. It’s hard to say if I just won the lottery or not, but it does seem true to need that you get more luck that way
Sounds like Fallout mechanics
A long time ago, I was having a discussion with my clan leader about luck in video games. He said that the better you are, the more lucky you are. Luck and skill go hand in hand. That's always resonated with me.
The message here is good. I've now spent over 5 years in the OSS world (https://github.com/neuml). I started by picking a problem I was interested in and checking the work into GitHub. I've been extremely fortunate to have gained a following over the years.
Even with a following, most of the time when you publish it goes into the abyss. Every once in a while something hits but most of the time it takes a lot of patience and resolve. I've had some good visibility over the years from Reddit and Hacker News (though any post I make now on HN is marked as [dead]). It's not always fair and others can "pay" to get the visibility.
I've seen some of the other comments talking about the burden of OSS but I haven't felt that. I set my own agenda and fix what I want to fix. If someone wants to change my priorities that becomes a paid effort.
Unfortunately, publishing work in my region requires me to dox myself through an imprint.
Usually this only applies to business related websites, but lawyers could even argue a personal blog is business related due to the possibility existing for me to advertise products.
So yea, while I would love to share my work publicly, its simply not feasible due to medieval laws in place.
That reads differently knowing that one single effect of that would be "it will be easier for AI content scraper to get high quality data for their overlords currently destroying the economy"
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