> the correct approach for me to have taken here, was to perhaps kickstart the "Continuing On" section
He's playing the victim and doesn’t understand that it’s still spam. I would have "closed as spam" the PR (if it’s possible) without a comment. Maybe I should be a Rust moderator…
Also Rust should be way more strict on what they accept in their repos because it does not show a good image of the organization, and ultimately the language itself.
IMHO this thing belongs in a blog post. Repos should be as neutral and independent as possible, especially for languages that want to be here for a long time.
Honestly I was really giving them the benefit of the doubt up until that point. The fact that they don't understand that this PR was essentially an unethical marketing stunt on their part (regardless of whether they believe in their own resources or not) is kind of sad.
Even if it was a free/non-profit source of information that users could reference, the fact that they did not disclose that they are the literal CEO of the company they are promoting shows a lack of ethics.
It's not apparent from the title alone, but, unsurprisingly, they've sent PRs to a bunch of language learning repos on github to add themselves, without disclosing the commercial interest. Ick. There's a bit of a list of them in the discussion on the linked PR.
I found that CodeCrafters is quite fun after watching an video on Youtube[0], and shared it with my friends who might also be interested. The feedback I got was quite similar to the community:
- really interesting idea, but
- pricing is absurd, not gonna pay 100$ for these, and
- their minimal paid plan at 40$/mo is a lie, with a fine print: Available as a one-time payment for 3 months or 1 year access.
- Lack of in depth implementation of the projects, i.e for the free HTTP server project, it stopped at "Post a file", lack of beefy & fun stuff like for example HTTP 1.1 Pipelining
I believe the value (the fun) it would provide me would be about the same level of Ace Combat 7 (I paid ~40$US), and the complexity is less than Bauder's Gate(69$SG). I would pay roughly US$40 for all of the content altogether at this moment.
The PR is in bad taste: positioning a paid offering as the logic next step for learning Rust does a tremendous disservice to new learners. It's clearly marketing for their company—what I would expect if CodeCrafters had underwritten producing the free tutorials, or at least put in the effort to gather a diverse mix of next steps, not what I would expect an OSS repo to provide to a company for free.
That being said, everyone claiming it was "shady" is off base. Sarup didn't make any effort to hide his affiliation (I personally would have assumed my affiliation is obvious if it's the first line on my GitHub page) and if that was the intent it would have been trivial to use a sock puppet account.
> That being said, everyone claiming it was "shady" is off base. Sarup didn't make any effort to hide his affiliation (I personally would have assumed my affiliation is obvious if it's the first line on my GitHub page) and if that was the intent it would have been trivial to use a sock puppet account.
I'd give them (codecrafters) the benefit of the doubt if they hadn't opened half a dozen similar PRs to similar repos using the account of someone employed by them but without any clear affiliation in their github profile.
> the correct approach for me to have taken here, was to perhaps kickstart the "Continuing On" section
He's playing the victim and doesn’t understand that it’s still spam. I would have "closed as spam" the PR (if it’s possible) without a comment. Maybe I should be a Rust moderator…
Also Rust should be way more strict on what they accept in their repos because it does not show a good image of the organization, and ultimately the language itself.
IMHO this thing belongs in a blog post. Repos should be as neutral and independent as possible, especially for languages that want to be here for a long time.