
Open source is a life changer - spetz
http://piotrgankiewicz.com/2016/07/11/open-source-is-a-life-changer/
======
danso
OK, the name-dropping and too frequent bolding of text makes for a bit of a
grating style, but I enjoyed the enthusiasm of discovery that is at the core
of the essay. Getting discovered on Github will seem just superficially cool
to those who've been doing open-source development for awhile, but it's hard
to comprehend how fun it is until you've "made" it. Kudos to the author.

~~~
spetz
Thank you, sir. As for the bolding, I use it because many people (including
me) at first scan the text looking for important stuff and then decide if it's
worth to read the whole article. I'll see what can be improved in that matter
:).

~~~
danso
_Note: take the following with all the grains of salt you take when reading
any pedantry...just soapboxy but not meant to be too tone-policing._

I personally prefer headings for the purpose of signaling the main topics of
an essay...the main headline, of course, but then the "deck" (usually what
would go into the webpage's meta description), and then subsections. The
headings do double-duty -- emphasizing key points and visually separating
sections -- without adding too much gratuitous weight.

Keep in mind that you can use _physical priority_ to signal emphasis. The
first few words of any paragraph are likely to be noticed by a skimmer, so
adding extra weight to the type can be redundant. IMHO, this also applies to
the closing words of a paragraph.

Also, in-paragraph hyperlinks also serve as a kind of emphasis (while
providing useful outbound references). In your current style sheet, hyperlinks
are underlined. Again, everyone sees things differently, but I personally
notice hyperlinked text and mentally treat it as "kind of important",
particularly for proper nouns and keywords (e.g. "New Relic" and "Nagios")

Here's a sample graf of yours with how you emphasized it:

> __I’d say that the most difficult ones were the first few weeks. __After
> that period I’ve known pretty much everything in terms of the project
> structure that I will be following. Once I’ve established my design patterns
> it literally became a no-brainer to create new ____Watchers__ __or
> ____Integrations__ __. I’ve also made it quite easy to create your own
> extensions which is described ____here__ __and plug into the overall
> pipeline seamlessly. __The key was to design the very simple interfaces and
> let the other part of the framework do the heavy lifting. __

I don 't think anything in that graf needs to be emphasized (the hyperlinks
are fine). The first sentence speaks for itself. The last sentence, if you
feel it's important enough, could be its own standalone graf.

Again, treat these as the curmudgeony suggestions of someone who _still
subscribes to a print newspaper_. But I felt your otherwise great essay was
unfairly maligned by commenters...but I could sympathize with them. Your words
speak well enough on their own, no need to add the CSS equivalent of
exclamation marks so frequently :)

~~~
spetz
Thank you for such a detailed answer, I'll keep that in mind when I'll be
writing my next post!

------
dandelion_lover
>> what possibly could I create, so that other people would find it useful? It
seemed like everything was already there

I do not understand the problem. Just look at the high-priority projects by
FSF [0]. There is a plenty of work to do...

[0] [http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-
projects/](http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/)

~~~
scrollaway
There's a reason these projects have been on that page practically forever.
They are all highly specialized, require a lot of domain knowledge and a
significant effort.

~~~
martin_a
I think Gnash could be kicked from that list. Let Flash die.

~~~
scrollaway
Shumway is far more promising and it's backed by Mozilla, which does have the
domain knowledge.
[https://mozilla.github.io/shumway/](https://mozilla.github.io/shumway/)

------
hackaflocka
A serious two word request from someone who's a huge fan of open source
projects and uses a lot of them:

"Improve Descriptions"

A lot of tools have a similar generic description: e.g.: "This tool helps
programmers do more." Please compare and contrast your tool with others with
the same general idea. It'll help us decide whether to adopt it or not.

~~~
spetz
Do you refer to the phrase: "OPEN SOURCE & CROSS-PLATFORM TOOL FOR SIMPLIFIED
MONITORING" or something else?

~~~
hackaflocka
That phrase is not bad. But even this project can be better described via a
table that compares it with alternatives.

~~~
spetz
Good idea, I will think how to improve both, the landing page and the GitHub's
readme file.

------
em3rgent0rdr
Regarding issues: "just answer politely and let them know that you will at
least try to resolve the issue at some point in the future."

If you're too busy, maybe a better approach would be to encourage the poster
to submit a PR along with test cases.

------
jbrooksuk
I'd love to see Warden integrate with Cachet [0] as they'd go really well
together!

[0] [https://cachethq.io](https://cachethq.io)

~~~
spetz
Will take a look at it, would you be so kind to open a new issue
[https://github.com/warden-stack/Warden/issues](https://github.com/warden-
stack/Warden/issues)?

~~~
jbrooksuk
Done!

~~~
spetz
Thanks, currently I'm working on the MS SQL integration, so it will be my next
task!

------
mehh
Open Source is a life changer because I got some peer recognition and
attention...meh!

~~~
ke7ofi
Of course! GitHub stars are the only intrinsic good.

~~~
spetz
Indeed they are (ok I hope that you've realized I was partially joking about
this). Anyway, getting attention is important to make your OS project more
recognizable, so what's wrong with that? :)

------
JackPoach
Open source doesn't work everywhere - [https://medium.com/@did_78238/what-
happened-to-open-source-c...](https://medium.com/@did_78238/what-happened-to-
open-source-crm-anyway-8612f564c5f0#.cwe0v8axt)

~~~
cyphar
That article makes a gross misinterpretation of free software right off the
bat:

> It’s not about source code or idealistic world views or desire to customize
> software, it’s about not paying anything.

That's just patently false.

------
w0rd-driven
I feel like there's 2 completely different paradigms to open source, or at
least it felt that way for me. There's starting your own project and
contributing to someone else's.

I initially started with my own projects, a few very minimalistic plugins or
tools to scratch an itch. I put them on Github with no real advertising, save
mentioning to the json resume folks that I was at least willing to help with
LinkedIn importing since I was working rather extensively on converting my
linkedin data to json resume. That project is pure garbage in terms of how
brute force and un-developer-friendly it could be, but it still got a handful
of stars in spite of that not really being the purpose anyway.

Fast forward to consuming open source plugins for work purposes and seeing
projects almost there, needing a PR or two. In a couple of instances I'll fork
a project and merge PRs manually because I see business value in circumventing
waiting on the author. I may also need something they would otherwise reject.
I feel like this is stage 2. I'm getting value for my own needs, I'm using the
tools at my disposal not through direct PRs to my project but capturing the
work of others.

It wasn't until I got to what feels like stage 3, getting my first PR merged
into the core project I used. My very first PR was rejected and immediately
feels like a loss but I was trying to tackle the problem using an admittedly
'hacky' way that while it solved the problem, smelled terrible. Getting that
first accepted PR, even on the very low hanging fruit I've tackled up until
now, is its own kind of high. Having done it on a few other projects spanning
multiple languages and setups, I _feel_ stronger as a developer whether or not
that equates to actual quantifiable results. If I can clone your project and
contribute one of two things is happening, either it's drop-dead simple (in
most cases it certainly is) or I'm showing my competency for being able to do
what the maintainer says I can do. That said I have contributed to some
projects that were unintuitive and yet I was still able to solve the problem
at hand. While frustrating as hell in comparison, even those projects have a
tendency to teach me quite a bit.

It's because of stage 3 that I now actively try to evangelise my developer
friends to make the same plunge, many of whom don't feel they have the time to
contribute. I not only found that I have had the time, but it becomes a
worthwhile pursuit and it shows my competency to others. Having said all of
that I do feel I've gotten lucky. My first PR rejection was handled so
amazingly well and when asking for clarity, I wasn't made to feel inferior.
They clearly explained the problem, thanked me for spending the time on it at
all (which is probably the most crucial thing), and proposed the more elegant
solution of waiting for gulp 4. Getting something like "This is dumb. Why did
you even submit this?" would've probably turned me off of contributing for
another few years overall, much less to their project again. Even faced with
that, I would still push myself to contribute because the benefit of even one
accepted PR outweighs all the negatives.

~~~
spetz
That was an interesting read, thanks for posting this. I guess that the moral
of the story is to keep trying and don't give up with contributing whether
it's submitting PR, opening new issues or running your own project.

------
ensiferum
A bit of attention whoring.

~~~
muhuk

        This is not going to be one of these catchy titles, 
        so “what kind of bs am I going to read here” has 
        little use in this place. Actually, this is 100% 
        true that contributing to the open source community
        might greatly affect your life
    

How to say one thing and communicate the exact opposite.

~~~
spetz
Well, if you say that this post was all about bs then I won't disagree with
your opinion, as you have a right to say so :).

~~~
daveloyall
I presume you are the author. Listen...

Free software has changed my life for the better. A LOT of people have had
very similar experiences.

We dream and worry about and hope and fight for and code for and watch and
love the future history of humanity as it blossoms and twists and writhes into
everyone's lives.

Software is eating the world. Free software developers are influencing that
event (a little?).

Just seeing it and knowing it changed my life. It changed the eyes with which
I see the world. So I thought I knew what your post was going to be about.

Keep looking, spetz. :)

~~~
spetz
Thank you for this well-written answer :).

