Comment by eviks
1 year ago
> So, why not have fun learning something new, writing most things myself? I definitely learned tons working on this, which I can now use in other projects as well.
Because presumably you should have been doing it mostly for the benefit of Windows users, and wasting time because it’s a fun personal learning exercise means those users would suffer getting an underpowered app
Fun-shaming a passionate developer who, beyond their job description, delivered an editor that checks all the required boxes (small binary, fast, ssh-support, etc.) in just 4 months, while working on weekends and even Christmas, and calling it "wasting time" is incredibly upsetting. I'm grateful to work with people who value that kind of initiative.
You're making it all up, he's a terminal product manager, so it is not beyond job description.
Of course the app doesn't check all boxes, plenty of features other editors have had years to add simply couldn't be added even if you work on Christmas (by the way, is also entirely driven by the NIH decision to write from scratch and not than that doing a 3 language mock)
And I'm not shaming the fun, I'm saying that that's not a good justification for shipping a worse app to the millions in a professional setting
Wow, what a disheartening comment. Did GP not explain why they did what they did? This is an open-source project, the author expressed joy in working on it, and you have the heart to tell him off. This is far below what I expect of HN.
Did the comment not explain what the issue with that explanation is?
But maybe if you didn't misrepresent the situation so much you wouldn't lose your heart. This is not some tiny personal open source project where fun can be the only valid reason, but "will ship as part of Windows 11!", so millions of devices in a professional OS. Are your expectations so poorly calibrated that you have none in both cases? Why are they higher re. a forum comment?
What led you to say that the author did not have users' interests at heart? What led you to imply that there's something wrong with reimplementing something or having fun or whatever it is you disliked you so much? What leads you think that a person working on something delivered with Windows 11 deserves less respect than a person working on a less used system? Or, do you consider what you said neutral, well argued criticism?
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At the same time I think some of the most brilliant things to come from Microsoft are products of individual initiative, and when the project ends up compromised for some reason I get the idea that it's some kind of institutional higher-ups that do the damage after the fact.
Maybe just some residual instinct left over from times past when more people like Ballmer were still prominent, and they were not as user-enabling as today in some ways?