How does that deal with the problem of the "social contract" of having to maintain a software project and engage with its users?
This seems more like a recipe for people who want to have an open source project but don't know what to do.
I'd wager most open source developers do not have that problem. The more common problem is that you want to scratch another itch, but your last itch based projects are still keeping you busy because they started to scratch other people's backs.
As someone who maintains a number of OSS projects, there is no social contract, it's a false dichotomy.
There are many people who ask you to do free work for them (implement feature, review PR, discuss tickets), and asking is fine, but there is no implicit expectation that it would be The Right Thing for you to do it for them.
If you find the work rewarding and have the time, great, you can do it if you so please. If not, the project is open source, they can pick it up and do it themselves.
You haven't wronged anyone by saying "no" when asked to do work for nothing.
I totally agree with you. The "social contract" was the premise the author started his article with. So not only did he not address his own premise, that premise is also wrong or a least worth discussing. shrug
Rather than release umpteen half-formed projects which will attract attention from a wide audience and be hard to support, release few well-defined projects which will both attract a narrower audience and be easier to support because they're in a better state.
Exactly, the entire article reads like it's aimed at someone who heard that it's easier to land a well-paying job when you have some opensource projects listed on your resume, and has decided that they need such project, without really being interested in opensource very much.
One of my favorite pieces of wisdom is that “The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas” from Linus Pauling. The 100 part is pretty important.
I think this article gives one more important advice: try a few things and see what fuels happy results / motivation and go deep with it. It avoids burning out on that one idea that you never make progress on.
Practicing with no repercussions(100) is the best way to level up. If you’ve written down 100 ideas that add value to someone else you’ll start getting better at finding ways to add value. I’m sure practicing chess moves intentionally with no repercussions makes you a great chess player pretty quickly.
> I’m sure practicing chess moves intentionally with no repercussions makes you a great chess player pretty quickly.
I have a related idea I call "10-100-10k", based on my loose interpretation of the "10 000 hours" meme. It goes like this: 10 hours is a lot of time. It's 20 pomodoros. At the same time, it's very little time, something you can easily fit in your schedule over a week or two. So if there's a skill you find yourself wishing you'd have, no matter how trivial, allocate 10 hours for deliberate practice of the basics. There's a good chance you'll quickly progress and reach a qualitatively higher level of performance in just those 10 hours. And at that point, you can decide whether the skill is worth developing further (leading to the "100" part, being "100 hours"), or whether what you have is good enough for you.
For anyone that hasn't heard, the "10 thousand hour" catch phrase was created be Malcom Gladwell in his book [Outliers], when Malcom misunderstood the research results of Anders Ericsson.
Ericsson has gone so far as to dedicate an entire six-page section in his 2017 book [Peak] to a discussion of [Outliers]'s popularization of the catch phrase "the ten thousand hour rule". In the section he lists three reasons why this phrase is misleading, and one way in which it is accurate.
The central theme of [Peak] is to review what things all experts have in common, irrespective of their varied fields: these being a habit of deliberate, purposeful practice and mental maps.
[Peak] Peak: Secrets from the new science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
> Practicing with no repercussions(100) is the best way to level up.
Is this claim based on formal research? Analysis of famous biographies? Long-term personal experience? (Care to share?) Or just a hunch?
What exactly do you mean by “no repercussions”? What does it mean to play chess without repercussions (it’s a game where you either win or lose...)?
In my experience the best way to improve at things is to throw tons of semi-structured data relating context and actions to tight feedback at your brain (personal pattern-matching neural net), and then wait a while for it to subconsciously integrate it.
To improve faster, figure out how to make the data more varied and relevant, by e.g. continually pushing the limits of what you can currently manage.
> What does it mean to play chess without repercussions
Play 100 games where you don't care about the result, where nobody else in the world will even know the result, and where you can freely try out ideas without any downside?
You can do it right now, and you can play anonymously without signing up: https://lichess.org/
But to take something I have recent experience with: to get a 5-month-old baby to learn to balance his torso using his core muscles, spend time holding him by the thighs and let him flop around (it doesn’t help to support the baby at the top, since that is a passively stable configuration). After a couple weeks he’ll be somewhat able to stabilize himself and compensate for small perturbations, so start tilting him in various directions so that he’ll have to learn to compensate for being more aggressively off-balance.
After a month of occasional practice (a few minutes at a time every once in a while) the now-6-month-old baby will be stable enough to sit up on Dad’s shoulders without falling off, if held by the legs. Then just walking around with the baby on your shoulders will be great balance practice, and requires no special effort at all (but occasionally rocking a bit will help him to keep improving his strength and balance). By 8 months old the baby will be very good at balancing sitting on shoulders.
[I mostly care about this because carrying a baby on my shoulders is much less tiring than carrying the baby in my arms; whatever benefit the baby gets out of it is somewhat incidental.]
This kind of process works pretty well for learning to cook a recipe, solder electronics, play an instrument, touch type, or the like.
If you want to learn to solve math problems or write poetry (i.e. something that is largely non-physical) then the context, actions, and feedback are rather different. But still, you want to get your brain as much data coming in as possible, strengthening connections between ideas and concepts, experimenting and doing more of what works, ...
One of the big problems with formal schooling for many students is that feedback comes much too slow to be usefully integrated. The expert advice from teachers (results of graded papers) is not interactive, but is low-bandwidth and very delayed. Regularly sitting down 1:1 with an expert is a much faster way to improve.
> Unfortunately there seems to be a tendency to view open sourcing as a moral statement as well.
This is not unfortunate. The idea of hiding the source code of software from people, or restricting the copying and adaptation () of literary or scientific works, had been, and should again be, an anathema. An artifact of an effectively-misanthropic social order. Indeed, publishing open source, or free, software, inherently helps de-legitimize such practices.
This seems more like a recipe for people who want to have an open source project but don't know what to do.
I'd wager most open source developers do not have that problem. The more common problem is that you want to scratch another itch, but your last itch based projects are still keeping you busy because they started to scratch other people's backs.