This is a weekly roundup of awesome DEV comments that you may have missed. You are welcome and encouraged to boost posts and comments yourself using the #bestofdev tag.
Adding on to the I'm a senior developer and I regularly google "html image tag" post, @midblue talks about their frequently-searched resource:
I think I'm 90% of the traffic to that CSSTricks complete guide to Flexbox article.
One especially important attribute of this global and diverse community is the ability to benefit from perspective and feedback from such a wide group of developers. In the Forty and still a dev? thread, @anortef talked about their experience working with a developer in their 50s:
I worked with a developer well over his 50s and it was an amazing and mindblowing experience. That extremely mature and seasoned point of view and the overall "we can weather any storm" feeling that he provided was something wonderful to work with.
If you ignore the opinion of someone just because that person is "too old to code" then you will miss out a lot of learning opportunities.
In What was your worst new job experience?, @vcarl talks about a spiraling work situation with awful management and constantly-shifting expectations:
I once got a new job where they talked about their grand v2 rewrite project they were staffing up, which I was going to help lead due to my experience with React. A month in, they revised the project from a total rewrite to a new feature in a separate codebase. Two months in, they revised down to kludging the new codebase into the old app. Three months in, they called it good and required that I start doing database admin and Rails tickets—neither of which I had ever done before, and my title was "senior frontend developer."
Four months in, I realized that I was more stressed than at any other point in my life. I had physical stress reactions in the morning before going into work. I was being micromanaged, I felt out of my depth with no time to learn, and I was getting such intensely negative feedback during 1:1s that I was beginning to doubt my abilities.
I gave notice before my fifth month at the company. After telling them that I was leaving in 2 weeks, I was told to go home and not come back. My access to email and Slack was cut off before I had a chance to say goodbye to my remote teammates.
One of the most gratifying moments in my career was when one of my coworkers there reached out 6 months later to tell me, "you were smart to get out when you did."
Replying to Explain The Pros & Cons of OSS Like I'm Five, @stereobooster provides a wonderful overview. This is helpful reading even if you are a veteran in the industry, much less a 5 year old:
This is an awesome question. The answer depends on which point of view to take.
Developer
If you work at your job on the open-source
- it means that your contributions will be visible better than any CV would be able to tell.
- It means that you don't have to leave your beloved project behind when you switch jobs
- it means it won't die if the company decides to discontinue to work on it
Open-source is great because you can use it for free (most of the time)
- which means you don't need management approval to use it at work
- which means that you can learn it online for free (compared to proprietary software and PaaS)
You can read source code and learn from the author - see real-life code, not educational examples.
Company
Open-source is great because it is free (most of the time). Sometimes it may cost to pay developers to support solution based on open-source, but I would say in general it is economically good anyway.
Open-source can be a safe bet because when you use propriety soft, you depend on other company
- which can stop supporting product
- can be slow on delivering new features, bugfixes
- can be forced to stop working with you because of law (for example, US sanctions)
With open-source on the other hand, you are safe, because if you really depend on some soft you can fork it and use it.
You can sell open-source as PaaS, which will give you immediate profit almost without any effort. This is what AWS doing for hosted MySQL, Redis, PostgreSQL, etc.
If a company produces open-source it is more attractive for developers, because they will have a chance to work with open-source.
Open-sourcing something may give you free testers and sometimes free labor. Some companies use open-source as a hiring process, instead of the home task they ask to contribute to their open-source projects.
Humanity
Open-source has a great impact on economics. Open-source and free software enabled a lot of growth, a lot of IT business exist because there exists an open-source solution, they wouldn't be able to sustain without it. For example, Linux and nginx which serving 80% of whole internet traffic. Git is the part of Github success. Etc.
Open-source enables scientific research. No need to pay for soft makes research cheaper.
Companies have no need to produce the same propriety product, no need to waste time and resource. Instead, they can work one product - big corporations contribute to Linux and other big open-source. Imagine that instead, each company would support its own crappy OS.
Maintainers
The most interesting bit. Often maintainers get nothing for their work (unless this is their day job).
There are very famous open-source maintainers, for example, Linus Torvalds, Yukihiro Matsumoto, etc., which get a lot of fame praise (probably a bit more money, because of status), but most of the open-source maintainers get nothing. No fame. No money.
There is a strange idea that open-source will make you famous or respectable. It can happen, but only if you make a very popular project.
There is a long-standing problem of how to make open-source sustainable, for example, we should make special licenses which will force big companies donate-back.
Or maybe we can pay open-source maintainers from tax money, and add tax for tech companies (the same way as we pay for roads - if you have a car, you should pay road tax).
There is this donate button on the Github, but I don't think of it as a solution. If you are a social person, you can get money with it, but otherwise...
PS
I have so many ideas on the subject, maybe miss something
I normally refrain from including DEV core team on this list, but @jess shared such an awesome community win in the What was your win this week? that I had to include her achievement:
This week, I....went through 350+ issues in the DEV repo and updated (most) of them with appropriate labels!
Be sure to check out the issues in the DEV Repo to see all the wonderfully-labeled issues!
See you next week for more great comments ✌
Top comments (3)
Congrats to @midblue , @anortef , @vcarl , @stereobooster , and @jess for making the list this week!
Thanks 🙈
woo!