Some time ago our team has released our first open source library to the wild. We finished our first production ready version, posted it on Reddit and waited for the open source community to welcome us with open arms. After all, we are investing our own free time to create a great product to help others, and it's all for FREE.
Oh how naive we were... Of course some truly appreciated our contribution, yet others didn't understand what we are doing, and the crème de la crème just wanted to hate.
I think that in today's world it's hard to put your work out there. When you post your code you feel very vulnerable, a bit naked. It's like your soul is out there for everyone to see and criticize. And don't get me wrong, I think criticism is very important and it's one of the best ways to learn and grow.
On the other hand, it's very easy to completely dismiss someone else's work. It takes almost no time and costs nothing. Also I'm pretty sure some people enjoy it very much.
So when you meet someone like that, how should you react? The first instinct is to ignore or "yell" back, dismiss all criticism completely and move forward. I decided to do otherwise, breathe and count from 1 to 10, slowly, like my mom used to say, read it again, and think where it is coming from.
For example, in one of these scenarios a comment ended with "I would stay away from it" because of a disagreement with the project's coding style. Spoiler: after a few back and forths the conversation ended with "Good luck though!". How about that?
What is crazy and beautiful about programming. We think it is objective, that it is exact science and there is right and wrong. But the truth is, it is also art, and there is a huge subjective component to it.
What I realized is just that my coding philosophy is different. Even though we are still in a disagreement, it was fascinating to learn that there are completely different points of view for doing the exact same thing, and I learned a thing or two in the process.
What is the point of all of this? I think open source is amazing. For some reason we have crazy drive to develop stuff for free just to share it with the world and help others. Nonetheless, I think there is a lot of room for improvement in our discussions and critique. Maybe I'm naive again, however I still believe the community, our community can do better and hope for better communication between us all (and hopefully over a beer).
If you would like to check out our open source library and leave feedback we would appreciate it greatly.
Top comments (5)
You should consider writing a post about your library here on DEV. You'll likely get a friendlier response, with any criticism conveyed in a more constructive (usually) manner than it sounds like you experienced elsewhere.
You'll also likely get more traffic to your GitHub repository if DEV community members know what your library is. I did take a look and even starred as a reminder to go back and take a closer look. But you might find more doing that if they had an idea what it was all about first.
Hey Vincent,
Thank you for taking the time to read and comment. I already posted one article related to the library but I agree with you and I'll write another one introducing and explaining it.
We worked hard on the documentation and tried to make it as clear as possible but I'll check it again and see how we can improve it.
Thank you for your support! We are definitely not stopping. It's part of the open source journey and we try to learn from it and extract the good feedback from the nonsense.
Most of us even the developers, so not only people in general, are approaching technology not in the best we could, sadly.
All these are debatable, these are not topologies, nor the best thing to do or to believe in. To get the real picture people need to get down the streets sometimes.
In the case of our random word combiner generator, a random word is a word that is randomly chosen from the database of words we have in our generator. It's a word that you have no idea or control over appearing, so you aren't able to influence the resulting word in any way.