

Show HN: Thankadeveloper.org - patrickdavey
http://www.thankadeveloper.org/

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patrickdavey
Hi HN,

I made this site, and I'm in two minds at all whether to publicise it (further
than just telling a few friends).. anyway, decided to post it here to
hopefully get some feedback. It's just running on a single heroku dyno, so
hopefully you don't like it that much ;)

Anyway - the idea came to me after listening to a Changelog episode on the
burnout of Lee Hambley of Capistrano fame. I thought that maybe it'd be nice
to enable messages of thanks to be sent to contributors to projects.

Thing is, I'm really not sure it's a good idea at all! I like the idea of it
not being about money, but I wonder if people will feel obligated to respond
(they shouldn't, it's supposed to be a one-way put of happy messages!). Also,
the service works by pulling out commits, grabbing a committers email, and
sending them the message... and people may hate that. That said, all the
messages will be moderated, so nothing nasty will get through.

I dunno, what do you think? If you were a committer on a project and you got
this message - would you think: "hey, that was nice", or would you think
"Where the hell is this spam coming from?"

I was thinking of shutting it down before even posting this, but I thought,
what the hey, I should at least see what people think!

Best, Patrick

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I think it's a good idea. A lot of developers labor in obscurity for years,
and never really get much credit.

~~~
patrickdavey
Glad to hear it! I guess what's holding me back is that I'm not sure if I
would ever send a thank you message!! heh, I mean I do on twitter or whatever,
I'm just wondering if others think it's OK or if it's an invasion of privacy
(which is the last thing I'd want to be doing)

Anyway, feel free to thank your own side project - you can see what the
message comes out like and retweet if you still like the idea.

