If you wondered why I’m mostly boosting humorous takes on xz drama it’s because I find almost all serious takes absolutely nauseating. So much serious thinking by people who have never maintained anything of substance in their whole life.
@hynek there's a bit in my stand-up comedy about how one way you can tell the difference between someone who's been responsible for a complicated system lots of strangers depend on, and someone who hasn't, is whether they ever say "why don't they just....?"
@hynek@brainwane "just" used in that manner nearly always indicates a lack of understanding on the part of the speaker, or a disregard of the reasoning or concerns of the subject. To me, it indicates naive thought up to callous disregard. I've virtually eliminated "just" as a preposition from my vocabulary.
@brainwane OK since I’ve gone semi-viral while on a plane and Delta has semi-decent wifi, I’ll give you one tepid take: the key problem is, once again, that ppl can’t hold more than one thought at once.
I’m maintaining Python packages that cumulatively rake in 230+M downloads per month. That’s almost quarter of a billion. Not sure how to count my GitHub Actions. (1/8)
My output both in code & blog posts & videos would be A FRACTION of it, if it weren’t for @tidelift & the amazing folks on https://github.com/sponsors/hynek. Heck, I wouldn’t be on a plane to #PyCascades right now!
So, if you like my work, don’t listen to OSSF smartasses that money doesn’t solve anything. They paid me for a year and I’m confident they got their money’s worth. (2/8)
But it’s just that: harm reduction, if you will. It’s necessary but it doesn’t mean that there’s not a ton of other problems that need to be tackled or pondered or acknowledged. Not even in the interest of the maintainers, but rather in the interest of users! Lasse clearly would’ve been fine if no PR ever landed in xz again. As far as I’m concerned, attrs and structlog are feature-complete! (3/8)
People talk about helping maintainers, but turns out, most people don’t care enough about the projects—or simply don’t have the skills nothing wrong with that—like the maintainers do because we have to keep sheparding the code when the contributor has long switched to the management track. It’s almost always easier to do it myself than help someone land a PR. But it feels good to help people landing PRs! (4/8)
I’ve seen the pressure of justifying one’s presence floated around. Hi, I’m the guy everyone @‘s whenever they switch to dataclasses or Pydantic or Ctuhulu knows what. Whenever someone mentions structlog, someone else asks why anyone should use it over $SOMETHING_ELSE.
How does one balance people telling you how much they learned from you with your latest article suddenly being buried from HN rank 10 to 98 with the top comment calling it “that fucking article”? (5/8)
Again! None of this are really complaints from my side. I’m taking care of my body, I meditate, and I have enough peers to bitch to. In fact, some amazing friendships and aquintances have flourished this way. The crash in sponsorships everyone got was painful, but still I FEEL the support. Many things are frustrating, but I’m making my choices because of the impact I can have and the support I’m enjoying. I could and would stop any day. (6/8)
The question is what do YOU want? What do you want me (and my peers) think of on a Saturday morning when my partner is still asleep and I’m feeling my first jolt of caffeine? I can do freelance work for a friend for ~100 € / h or I can create something for YOU and everyone else. This is not a purely monetary decision! But I do feel I owe my supporters something and that’s fine, I shouldn’t take sponsorships if that bothered me. (7/8)
Now, do you see how complicated this shit is and how there is no “just do X” solution? Nobody is in FOSS for the money and yet it plays such a huge role. We want to create and yet having a world-writable TODO list in the shape of an issue tracker is anxiety-inducing.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Again: for hot takes get me drunk in Seattle. This was the tepid one. (8/8)
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