Comment by delaminator

2 days ago

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.

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.

  • > 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.

    If you’re talking about angry issues in FOSS, then there’s another positive way to look at this.

    Not only did at least 1 person run your code somehow, they also cared enough to find the source and report it to you. Which means your code has value!!

    But generally people are pretty nice when reporting issues to small projects

    • OSS has its own set of problems but I was talking more of commercial projects. Ones where people are being paid to care and when they don’t we have a problem.

Do you see no value in publishing the code behind items in your portfolio?

  • I'm not the guy wary of publishing his code.

    Mine's out there. In Gitub, in plan9 contrib, on my website - the good, the broken and the cringe.