All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world.
I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years.
Even on these small projects, I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight.
Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level.
In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users).
OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.
> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about.
Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?
> Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you if you fork it”.
The refrain with open source is always that if you don’t like something, you’re welcome to fork it. But my experience with forking projects has, in a couple cases, drawn anger and attacks from maintainers. In a corporate setting when we ran up against maintainers who were unable or uninterested in even merging PRs, we had to fork the project and continue work in the fork. For some maintainers, this turns into “<corporation> is trying to steal my work!” even when the name and README were maintained. Or the maintainer gets angry that the name is kept on the fork because it is no longer under their control, we changed the name, which prompted more anger because we were “stealing their project” and so on.
To be completely clear, this isn’t all maintainers. Some have been so happy that they marked their original as maintained and referred users to the new fork in the README. But I’ve had enough cases where forking triggered anger or even calls to mobilize their Discord against the fork across social media (HN, Reddit, Mastodon) that when I run up against a slowly-maintained OSS project I try to look for alternatives or evaluate the effort to just build it in house to avoid drama.
I wonder how effective it is for an OSS maintainer to try to prevent someone from 'stealing their project' when <corporation> doing the fork is huge with plenty of resources (engineering, marketing, and legal) vs just some startup that is trying to gain some traction.
In my experience with exactly what parent comment discussed... it's not effective. In fact, the company may even (which I have witnessed personally multiple times) blatantly violate your OSS license to incorporate it into their proprietary money-making product, because they know they can get away with it... most lone devs do not have the money or willpower to attack a corporation, even if they could win.
Usually I see those lone devs either ignoring them entirely, or ragequitting open-source altogether.
I have a lot of experience with the latter kind of maintainer... some have even quit their own projects after realizing a fork existed that they don't like (especially if it's good enough to take users away from the original), but those forks were always born out of necessity when the original maintainer was toxic to work with or just kept ignoring or outright refusing PRs/issues over personal/ideological reasons.
I really don't understand why so many people will choose a specific license, and then get upset when people do exactly what it allows them to do.
"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?"
"I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history."
Makes you wonder if the reason why some trivial bug in a closed source project goes unfixed for years; is because all the engineers are afraid to touch the code in some obscure library and instantly become its new 'owner'.
Mostly it is that you don’t go around fixing random stuff.
You might actually get in trouble picking up stuff that is not a priority.
Company I work for is less strict so we do “fix anything Friday”.
But for some other companies you might get a slap on the wrist for not following the plan and product owners pick what gets fixed and what not based on business plan. If there are big customers nagging - bug will be fixed asap.
Yeah at work I’m paid to own some components that I didn’t write and don’t entirely understand, so I figure my job is to help discover answers for the questions that arise.
I would not want to be a public maintainer though. I don’t have the patience or motivation to use my spare time for that.
Jia Tan has entered the chat. (Jia Tan was the alias used by the group that backdoored XZ utils by becoming a maintainer)
My other comment in this thread has more details, but in my experience it’s more common to encounter projects that don’t want new maintainers or forks. They’re happy with the status quo with their name at the top but also don’t want to let go of control or see competing forks created.
Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing.
Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)?
An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.
I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it.
However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?
I think srchut is one solution. Its email workflow does successfully deter less experienced/curious people, for better or worse, and it still has some project discovery bit not social signals like stars.
It’s not a neutral service though. The owner is very opinionated and likes to get involved in what projects are and are not allowed to be hosted there, and changes these rules on a whim.
In my eyes, this disqualifies Sourcehut for anything serious. You could get booted off any second, if Drew decides that he does not like you.
(I like Drew, and I like opinionated and outspoken people. But Service Providers should be neutral, and only involve themselves as far as required by law.)
I think Sourcehut is the more portable of Git forges. Everything is stored in standard formats, its workflow isn't anything bespoke but just a good automation for git send-email, and I believe the source code should be all published.
In my eyes, if this ever does become a problem, migrating elsewhere wouldn't be that much trouble. When the "cryptocurrency purge" happened, maintainers were given 2 months of advance notice, which is a little short but reasonable.
What's surprising to me is that TFA is from GH who are uniquely placed to have a real impact in terms of OSS maintainer quality of life.
If they're so keen on helping people publish more stuff and showing how awesome AI is, perhaps they can pre-screen the entitled comments and just not let them get posted? Perhaps they could see that you've not touched a repo in 5 years and when that PR comes in, they could help bootstrap you back in with a code review summary? Perhaps they could stop the idiots pressuring you by explaining to them all the reasons why their PR might not get looked at any time soon?
Perhaps, just perhaps, Github could take some ownership of the problems they have created, and do some work to fix them?
I have started a new OSS project and intend to provide optional enterprise offerings on top. I really don't care if someone steals the ideas presented in code because they're actually fairly pedestrian. The much bigger concern for me is the fact that if I do not make my source open by default, I will have a very hard time developing trust in the community and prospective customers. I know I nearly instantly walk away from the "provide your info to download our white paper PDF" sales experiences in 2025.
It is also helpful to remember that 100% of $0 is still $0. And that .001% of a trillion dollar TAM is still a pretty big deal.
This is pretty much the only way open source doesnt lead to burnout and continues to be maintained, and a lot of projects are doing this already successfully.
Get “street cred” in the dev space by being open source, and let the enterprise customers “pay” for it.
Exactly - best case scenario is Reddit/HN front page with a cool project you enjoyed working on, have some nice conversations there, reach a few 100s stars which look good on your CV, and that’s it.
If you expect more long term support you better be paying me for my time.
Maybe that is the answer. Put a note in your readme setting out your terms.
1) If you want to send a PR we charge $1000 to review them. This is no guarantee that we will merge. We will quote any further costs needed after a review.
2) Feature requests should be accompanied by a $250 quotation fee. Then we will scope and quote what is required to do your feature. If your feature would compromise the project, or is impractical a started we retain the right to refuse to quote or suggest more work is required. The $250 fee is non returnable.
I maintain Navigator, a development tool I started over twenty years ago; I am the only contributor to the open source repository [1]. I have rewritten drag and drop in that thing four times (because drag and drop in Livecode [2] is a bit of a hack). It's a pain every time. I'm not rewriting it again.
I have a side project that I have worked on for years, mainly because I enjoy writing software. I get an adrenaline rush when I can make my data management system do things better and/or faster than other things on the market.
I have written articles about it and made the binaries freely available on my website under an 'open beta'. People keep telling me that if I really want it to take off, I should open source it.
So far, I have resisted doing that, for many of the reasons that you cited.
Absolutely. I say that being an OSS maintainer is a job, which can easily become a full time job, where the pay is often non-existent. If you have a separate full time job, you now have to choose:
1. Work two jobs until you burn out.
2. Quit your paying job and hope you have you don't go broke.
3. Scale back or quit maintaining OSS projects.
I think companies, governments, and societies could do a better job funding this work. But since this is a "tragedy of the commons" problem, I'm not holding my breath that this will happen before the public experiences a lot more pain from failures.
I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else.
Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money.
This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me.
Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all.
There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.
Was looking for a comment to articulate this better than I could. I have the same feeling about 'release something bad early' advice given by investors, it's so obviously a shady comment in that position because they have the resources to build a clone if they can't talk to you.
I keep waiting for this younger generation to wake up to why we invented the GPL in the first place. Entities that are happy to use your brains for a while, and then eagerly dispose of you when they can.
They love your free labour. "Thanks for your OSS project! No, no, we're not hiring... and you'd never make it through out interview process!"
One should make free software for other free software developers and grateful end users. Not for parasites. Recognition doesn't pay the mortgage. And now you won't even get that because your work will just end distilled into weights in a large language model.
I have no doubt your intentions were good and I am a fan of open-source myself.
Unfortunately, since this was written, it’s become more widely known and commonplace for large corporations to disproportionally benefit from open source.
And that wouldn’t bother so many as much if it weren’t for the fact that large corporations often do not give back. It’s become so much of an issue that OSS maintainers have switched licenses, some have shifted closed-source, and others have simply abandoned their projects.
Just last week I began rethinking usage of MIT/Apache licenses for future work.
For the longest time I was hesitant about GPLv3 and almost scared to use in my personal projects, but it turns out my hesitations were fueled by...large corporations.
Unfortunately we have to play the game according to the rules on the field. You can decide to opt out entirely (which is fine) or you can play the game and try to win. Personally, I will play and try to win.
That means I will make things, talk about them, and accrue social and/or actual capital for me and my family. I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try. I CAN build cool things, talk about them, and get cool jobs or friends or a following or whatever. I understand not everyone is comfortable with this tradeoff.
> I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try.
I do not like this take and I do hope you reconsider repeating such.
This very much reads as accepting a lack of any claim to reasonable privacy and ownership, borderline on accepting what I would consider theft.
I understand. I am, however, impotent against OpenAI. If I publish code to GitHub, I understand it will be used for training. I'd rather get the win for my family than try to fight a megacorp. I'm sorry.
Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit?
I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.
> any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit
I would say that now, more than ever, this means you should be collecting and sharing what you create.
Not on large social media platforms either, on websites that you own and (ideally) host yourself.
Start a blog, host your own instance of Gitea, build a platform for your videos. Spread what you create and activity participate in the community but maintain ownership and an audit trail over what you've created.
People ripping off others works has always been a thing, of course it's much easier and pervasive now. It's still (IMO) beneficial to say "Look! I did this thing first!", with the added benefit of accruing the kind of "social capital" Aaron talked about.
How do you contend with the fact that AI summaries are now halving traffic to people's websites and redirecting it to Google properties? Publishing in 2025 feels like merely feeding two or three megacorps.
No easy answers, I'm afraid. But I would still say you can get lots of social capital from creating things and talking about it. And these days, that can get you past the LLM-inundated HR front door if you want a job. If you hang out on twitter long enough you'll see people go from "hey I made this cool thing" to "hey cloudflare/vercel/etc hired me to come work on cool-thing-adjacent thing!"
It's a pretty repeatable pipeline. And having proof that you can DO something makes you stand out. Maybe moreso than ever!
If you throw my nickname into a search engine, you will see that that is the case for me as well. Doesn't change anything about what I said though.
If anything, the fact that it worked for me, yet I found it necessary to add the full context, probably strengthens the statement even more.
But anyway.
Standard damage control statement that latches onto nothing because there is nothing to latch on to as I made sure to structure the comment that way.
I hate corporate so much man.
Just because you can predict what happens doesn't mean that the happening would be any less frustrating.
___
I understand that your role requires you to do this.
That is clear to anyone moving through these systems.
What I do not understand though is why you even tried to deflect this with such a low-quality "oh it worked for me it might not have worked for you. YMMV" thing, when you could've also just said nothing at all, not forcing my hand and making me call you out on that.
That is, above all else, strategically unwise.
Fortunately, however, this all doesn't matter. It's not like anyone cares about anything on this platform anyway. So even a strategically unwise move might as well not exist at all.
Yeah, sorry about that. I agree it indeed worked out for you and that is great.
The point that I'm getting at is that it is necessary for the system to occasionally produce a winner, because otherwise, people would stop trying.
Think for example about a casino with zero wins. No one would come to play.
If they however occasionally select a winner, that winner will then be the best marketing they can get, encouraging all his friends to also start gambling.
Please do not mistake this analogy as me questioning your merits.
I am confident in your abilities at your craft.
What I am however saying is that the system does not select its winners based on that merit. Instead, the criteria for selection are usually based on what benefits the system most.
This, in some situations, might line up with general merits to some degree, but it also might not, and that is one of the core deceptions, the corporate world runs on.
I do believe you that the idea of the article was to encourage people so that they can also have these great wins and experiences you had.
But, as said, that is just one side of the coin, and it would be unethical to not mention all the outcomes in which a person does not win.
> But the good news is that we can increase our chances of encountering good luck.
Every phrase in the article was carefully selected to make it clear that we're trying to increase the odds. Nothing is sure. But if you play the game right, the odds of winning go up
I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?
It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show.
And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas.
Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way.
And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.
"Becoming known" (the definition of which I leave as an exercise for the reader) isn't an automatic meal ticket but it does, as I allude to in another comment, lead to connections that you can sometimes take advantage of in various ways.
Whether that's open source code, writing, various consulting, speaking at conferences, etc. will vary with the person. And the more you can do on a company's dime the better.
When we become ghost content producers for LLMs, you are not supposed to hear something in reply to your post, book, or other work. Most of the time, your work will be ingested by a handful of companies as training data; the readers benefitting from your work will pay these companies, and in return these companies will thoroughly shield and insulate you from being thanked by the people you helped. These companies will do their best to ensure you are motivated to continue producing honest content that can keep their LLMs from choking on their own output.
The exceptions to this are closed (or semi-closed) communities and forums where you directly interact with humans, either by inertia due to a large established human user base or (for newer, smaller communities) via personal vetting of participants.
Obviously the solution here is to have the LLMs post thank you notes, and offer a complex network of job offers for all of these people contributing to open source. Of course the jobs don’t actually exist, but these acts of kindness will keep the producers thinking that they are both in demand and appreciated.
Current LLMs seem to have an opposing goal baked in; don't reveal the exact source. They may ignore copyright when training, but revealing actual lists of sources with quotes would be too much of a giveaway.
You may want to be more goal oriented. If you're just publishing into a void and hoping for things to happen, I mean I'm not an influencer, but the successful ones I do know have specific goals that they're driving towards are not screaming into the void and hoping for the best.
Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?
Because of OSS, I’ve never actually applied for a job or done a Leetcode interview. I’ve gotten multiple direct offers through Twitter DMs (I don’t post) and multiple referrals through random encounters that I never used.
E.g. Debugging an interesting issue with GitHub customer support eventually led to a referral for Microsoft by an MD. Similar stories with Cloudflare and more.
It’s not limited to OSS, but just having any sort of backing credibility to your name without going through the whole CV/CL process unlocks a whole slew of opportunities since people can “pre-screen” you from the start.
You're sort of describing networks more broadly whether you initiate a connection or someone at a company does. Latterly, I didn't apply in the usual sense for 25 years or so.
Don't code a lot but have written books which led to book signings at conferences that probably led to other opportunities if I had the need to exploit them.
This resonates with how I’ve been thinking about open source. I see the steps as:
1. Personally identify a pain in your own work, and it most likely will be a pain for many others.
2. Build a solution to solve for it.
3. Organically talk about it in forums — for me this is Reddit, HN lately and to some extent Bluesky.
When people ask why I build open source, I say it’s about signaling. As other comments have mentioned, if you’re fortunate enough that it gains traction, it becomes your calling card and can lead to consulting and jobs. It’s analogous to academic publishing (used to do more of that) but with different dynamics.
My personal examples of solving for a pain are:
[A] I started building the Langroid LLM agent framework after having a look at LangChain in Apr 2023, at a time when there was hardly any talk of LLM-agents. The aim was to create a principled, hackable, lightweight library for building LLM applications, and agents happened to be a good abstraction:
https://github.com/langroid/langroid
[B] With the explosion of Claude Code and similar CLI coding agents, there were several interesting problems to solve for myself, and I started collecting them here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools
One such tool is a lossless alternative to compaction, and a Tmux-CLI tool/skill for CLI agents to interact with others.
I wrote a few math books. Does it increase my luck? A little bit, here or there. Will I recoup the 1200+ hours working on the project and be paid at least minimum wage for that? No chance.
Some fields of engineering have long had roles with names like that.
Want to do something with motors, but don’t know how to calculate the right combination of motor, gearbox, brake, encoder and controller? Maxon’s sales engineers will happily walk you through the calculations.
I feel it’s an evolution of the term “Devrel” which still feels tacky.
Nor would you want someone who built most of their career as an actual engineer to suddenly drop that term and become a generic someone in “marketing”. They’re more than that for sure.
I quite like the terminology the more I think about it.
Lots of comments talking about how this is just some sort of ploy to feed the machine. I don't know what to tell you. I can only tell you it changed my life and the lives of many others. Hope it can help you too!
If it makes you feel better, on reddit, I shared my very first blog post about deprecating mysql_* functions in php. As a result, someone said something mean about my mother. I figured the web was full of trolls.
But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delete my blog. I was so embarrassed.
When I came back, there was a reply to that comment. It said something like "that's a good thing, 7th grade level writing means we can all understand it easily". And that was enough to keep me going. 13 years so far.
Reddit is now just AI slop, so I don't know if that's an improvement or not over this story. I'm just glad you were able to get over that BS and engage with it all again and kept going! I gave up and never went back in around 2010, but I'm going to try again in 2026.
The problem with environments designed to make interaction low-energy and gamified like Reddit, is that it gathers just the worst people. I've got ~63k karma there, and disengaged some years ago and I can't tell you how much ditching that, twitter and Facebook improved my mental health. There's some great fun to be had there, but it's often the same thing over and over again and increasingly drowned out by utter crap. They've taken multiple actions that have destroyed the sense of community and have become a poster child for ens*tification, unfortunately.
Thanks for sharing. After reading that comment, I realized we should encourage ourselves and others (who are more or less civilized human beings) to be the kind of person who wrote "that's a good thing..." - because fighting trolls is a game with unknown results, but encouraging people works much better. It doesn't always work, though, because sometimes the platform's nature prevents it. Like on Stack Overflow, where commenting on reactions will probably get you downvoted for being off-topic.
I once spoke in favor of remote work (around 2020) and someone here on HN told me to get cancer and die, before it was flagged enough times to get out of the way.
On YouTube, I also sometimes get mean comments, though at least there the automatic moderation catches them so they don't show up publicly and I can shadowban the offenders off the channel easily. None of the content is even controversial, YouTube just attracts a lot of angry people that feel entitled to speak what's on their mind.
I wouldn't publish in an environment where blocking or banning people is difficult. They're not entitled for me to engage with their hateful drivel. My blog also doesn't have comments. At the end of the day, I will say what I want to say.
Turn off comments on platforms that allow you to do that.
One of my projects for the next few weeks is to get my blogging stuff up and running again but with a couple of tweaks:
1. I'll never allow on-blog comments again, ever. The signal/noise was always so poor. I'm sorry that you had a similar experience and the unpleasant odour of drive-by sniping got to you. For what it's worth, I'm always interested in finding new writing on tech topics, and I try to never be mean: I am not unique in this, so consider if there's another way.
2. If I ever publish code, it'll not be on a SaaS platform like GitHub, I'll manage the release through tar.gz/zip files, and if people don't like that, fine. I'm not after pull requests or starting a "real" OSS project. If somebody wants to take that OSS license code and host/manage it, godspeed to them.
3. I will write some code that looks for links back to my blogs, so if something I write is referenced by another blog, I'll learn about it at some point and I can go take a look, and that would be interesting. A long, long time ago there was some automation around this using web hooks that almost became a standard, so I'll look into whether that is a thing or not any more.
In my experience if somebody is writing a blog about something they are normally more constructive and thoughtful than if they are just writing something in a text box while "driving by". I'm OK with those articles normally even if they're critical or in disagreement with me about something.
One of the many wonderful things about being a software developer is that you can build tools that fit you perfectly, and I think I might enjoy this specific rabbit hole, but thanks for the tip, I’ll check some of them out.
The message here is good. I've now spent over 5 years in the OSS world (https://github.com/neuml). I started by picking a problem I was interested in and checking the work into GitHub. I've been extremely fortunate to have gained a following over the years.
Even with a following, most of the time when you publish it goes into the abyss. Every once in a while something hits but most of the time it takes a lot of patience and resolve. I've had some good visibility over the years from Reddit and Hacker News (though any post I make now on HN is marked as [dead]). It's not always fair and others can "pay" to get the visibility.
I've seen some of the other comments talking about the burden of OSS but I haven't felt that. I set my own agenda and fix what I want to fix. If someone wants to change my priorities that becomes a paid effort.
My blogging and publishing almost never comes up during an interview. Afterwards, I am openly told it's why they either asked for me, or why they chose me over another candidate. This has happened at almost every job I've accepted.
My writing style or content is not all that special. As the saying goes, 90% of success is simply showing up.
Just being explain complex topics in simple ways can go a long way, even if you're not an amazing author.
---
Addition: This is especially true with topics so expansive that even great LLM often conflates subtopics in weird ways. While this gap is rapidly closing, being able to clearly explain complex interconnected topics in simple ways is absolutely an advantage.
As an author, I dig what this is saying since it resonates so well with my journey as an author. Everything I publish is one more chance to connect with people who are drawn to other people in motion. I'm still learhing how to bring people along and inspiring others to create.
This resonates, but it also feels like we’re entering a phase of content reality drift. Publishing still increases luck, but attention is fragmenting and integrity is harder to maintain.
The advantage now is being able to preserve semantic fidelity as everything else accelerates into noise. Work that stays legible and grounded seems to compound in ways raw visibility no longer does.
Unfortunately, publishing work in my region requires me to dox myself through an imprint.
Usually this only applies to business related websites, but lawyers could even argue a personal blog is business related due to the possibility existing for me to advertise products.
So yea, while I would love to share my work publicly, its simply not feasible due to medieval laws in place.
My problem is I have non-competes and clauses in my contract which makes it difficult to talk about and publish stuff that I might want to turn into a product. So I'm sort of in a catch 22. I want to talk about what I'm building but I can't, not until I can convince myself that I can turn it into something real and I can quit and focus on it, and that's difficult to do without ever putting it out there to see if people want it enough.
Writing I posted online lead to me meeting some cool dudes in SF, which lead to my current job. It’s hard to say if I just won the lottery or not, but it does seem true to need that you get more luck that way
This worked for me, but I just coded my own personal project in the open and would post its progress. I don't think it "took off" in the sense of people using it, but a lot of people became aware of it. It's still just a hobby project and I do it for fun.
it's the same logic lotto uses: "you can't win if you don't play".
while i agree it is irrefutable logic, the chance of being seen is quite small because there are literally millions of other people doing the same thing. gauging probability is what human brains have trouble with.
but it does improve your odds a minuscule amount. but it is always always always better to have friends in high(er) places who can amplify your work. that counts for x1000 more. one mention from someone with 1M followers is worth more than publishing 1000 articles.
I don't know enough about different industries to know if this is true in general. But I do know in tech it is all about networking (aka soft nepotism): spending your career making friends ("swiping right on every work relationship"), and the fraction of those who go on to massively succeed you can then call in favors. At least that's how I made three huge jumps in my 35+ year career, and how the majority of my peers got the big step-functions in pay.
Perhaps in my original post I'm just confusing academia with industry, since I know so few academics.
A long time ago, I was having a discussion with my clan leader about luck in video games. He said that the better you are, the more lucky you are. Luck and skill go hand in hand. That's always resonated with me.
That reads differently knowing that one single effect of that would be "it will be easier for AI content scraper to get high quality data for their overlords currently destroying the economy"
> Having your OSS library take off
All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world.
I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years.
Even on these small projects, I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight.
Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level.
In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users).
OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.
> I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about.
Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?
> Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".
The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you if you fork it”.
The refrain with open source is always that if you don’t like something, you’re welcome to fork it. But my experience with forking projects has, in a couple cases, drawn anger and attacks from maintainers. In a corporate setting when we ran up against maintainers who were unable or uninterested in even merging PRs, we had to fork the project and continue work in the fork. For some maintainers, this turns into “<corporation> is trying to steal my work!” even when the name and README were maintained. Or the maintainer gets angry that the name is kept on the fork because it is no longer under their control, we changed the name, which prompted more anger because we were “stealing their project” and so on.
To be completely clear, this isn’t all maintainers. Some have been so happy that they marked their original as maintained and referred users to the new fork in the README. But I’ve had enough cases where forking triggered anger or even calls to mobilize their Discord against the fork across social media (HN, Reddit, Mastodon) that when I run up against a slowly-maintained OSS project I try to look for alternatives or evaluate the effort to just build it in house to avoid drama.
I wonder how effective it is for an OSS maintainer to try to prevent someone from 'stealing their project' when <corporation> doing the fork is huge with plenty of resources (engineering, marketing, and legal) vs just some startup that is trying to gain some traction.
In my experience with exactly what parent comment discussed... it's not effective. In fact, the company may even (which I have witnessed personally multiple times) blatantly violate your OSS license to incorporate it into their proprietary money-making product, because they know they can get away with it... most lone devs do not have the money or willpower to attack a corporation, even if they could win.
Usually I see those lone devs either ignoring them entirely, or ragequitting open-source altogether.
I have a lot of experience with the latter kind of maintainer... some have even quit their own projects after realizing a fork existed that they don't like (especially if it's good enough to take users away from the original), but those forks were always born out of necessity when the original maintainer was toxic to work with or just kept ignoring or outright refusing PRs/issues over personal/ideological reasons.
I really don't understand why so many people will choose a specific license, and then get upset when people do exactly what it allows them to do.
"when your fix is accepted you are the new maintainer"
That's what we do in closed source corporate code.
"Hi, I see you're the owner of this 6000-line mess of a component, could you answer some questions for me?"
"I don't own it, I didn't write it, and I don't understand it even slightly. I just made a one-line bug fix for one function in it a year ago and nobody has touched it since, so my name is on top of the git history."
"Cool, so as the owner could you tell me..."
I'd be tempted to try to trick them into merging a small change so then they're the new owner and have to figure it out themselves.
The Passing of the Curse
Makes you wonder if the reason why some trivial bug in a closed source project goes unfixed for years; is because all the engineers are afraid to touch the code in some obscure library and instantly become its new 'owner'.
Mostly it is that you don’t go around fixing random stuff.
You might actually get in trouble picking up stuff that is not a priority.
Company I work for is less strict so we do “fix anything Friday”.
But for some other companies you might get a slap on the wrist for not following the plan and product owners pick what gets fixed and what not based on business plan. If there are big customers nagging - bug will be fixed asap.
Yeah at work I’m paid to own some components that I didn’t write and don’t entirely understand, so I figure my job is to help discover answers for the questions that arise.
I would not want to be a public maintainer though. I don’t have the patience or motivation to use my spare time for that.
I like this, turning software maintenance into a long-running game of tag.
I like to refer to it as the cooties ownership model. I.e. once you touch it you have cooties.
we call it stinky egg.
Jia Tan has entered the chat. (Jia Tan was the alias used by the group that backdoored XZ utils by becoming a maintainer)
My other comment in this thread has more details, but in my experience it’s more common to encounter projects that don’t want new maintainers or forks. They’re happy with the status quo with their name at the top but also don’t want to let go of control or see competing forks created.
That's how I ended up with FlaskBB I guess.
"Pikaboo maintainer is who last touched it. Patch is wellcome!"
Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing.
Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)?
An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.
I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it.
However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?
I think srchut is one solution. Its email workflow does successfully deter less experienced/curious people, for better or worse, and it still has some project discovery bit not social signals like stars.
It’s not a neutral service though. The owner is very opinionated and likes to get involved in what projects are and are not allowed to be hosted there, and changes these rules on a whim.
In my eyes, this disqualifies Sourcehut for anything serious. You could get booted off any second, if Drew decides that he does not like you.
(I like Drew, and I like opinionated and outspoken people. But Service Providers should be neutral, and only involve themselves as far as required by law.)
I think Sourcehut is the more portable of Git forges. Everything is stored in standard formats, its workflow isn't anything bespoke but just a good automation for git send-email, and I believe the source code should be all published.
In my eyes, if this ever does become a problem, migrating elsewhere wouldn't be that much trouble. When the "cryptocurrency purge" happened, maintainers were given 2 months of advance notice, which is a little short but reasonable.
[0] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
Any recent/recognizable examples of this?
They’re on my radar as an alternative.
Thanks!
See my sibling comment. (TL;DR: they banned most cryptocurrency projects with 2 months advance notice)
That’s inconvenient - but balanced.
We had scale with friction before GitHub was a thing.
It wasn't perfect, but you were required to do things like subscribing to mail lists if you wanted to interact with a project.
What's surprising to me is that TFA is from GH who are uniquely placed to have a real impact in terms of OSS maintainer quality of life.
If they're so keen on helping people publish more stuff and showing how awesome AI is, perhaps they can pre-screen the entitled comments and just not let them get posted? Perhaps they could see that you've not touched a repo in 5 years and when that PR comes in, they could help bootstrap you back in with a code review summary? Perhaps they could stop the idiots pressuring you by explaining to them all the reasons why their PR might not get looked at any time soon?
Perhaps, just perhaps, Github could take some ownership of the problems they have created, and do some work to fix them?
I recently unpublished a couple libraries because I was so fed up with maintaining them.
Lot's of entitled "I want to speak to the manager" types ruined it for me.
I have started a new OSS project and intend to provide optional enterprise offerings on top. I really don't care if someone steals the ideas presented in code because they're actually fairly pedestrian. The much bigger concern for me is the fact that if I do not make my source open by default, I will have a very hard time developing trust in the community and prospective customers. I know I nearly instantly walk away from the "provide your info to download our white paper PDF" sales experiences in 2025.
It is also helpful to remember that 100% of $0 is still $0. And that .001% of a trillion dollar TAM is still a pretty big deal.
This is pretty much the only way open source doesnt lead to burnout and continues to be maintained, and a lot of projects are doing this already successfully.
Get “street cred” in the dev space by being open source, and let the enterprise customers “pay” for it.
Exactly this. Word by word. Some of my OSS projects got popular accidentally and oh boy… pain in the butt for real.
And for little benefits to myself. Hitting HN front page or r/programming was nice for my ego. But that’s about it.
Exactly - best case scenario is Reddit/HN front page with a cool project you enjoyed working on, have some nice conversations there, reach a few 100s stars which look good on your CV, and that’s it.
If you expect more long term support you better be paying me for my time.
Maybe that is the answer. Put a note in your readme setting out your terms.
1) If you want to send a PR we charge $1000 to review them. This is no guarantee that we will merge. We will quote any further costs needed after a review.
2) Feature requests should be accompanied by a $250 quotation fee. Then we will scope and quote what is required to do your feature. If your feature would compromise the project, or is impractical a started we retain the right to refuse to quote or suggest more work is required. The $250 fee is non returnable.
Something like that?
I maintain Navigator, a development tool I started over twenty years ago; I am the only contributor to the open source repository [1]. I have rewritten drag and drop in that thing four times (because drag and drop in Livecode [2] is a bit of a hack). It's a pain every time. I'm not rewriting it again.
1. https://github.com/gcanyon/navigator
2. https://livecode.com
I have a side project that I have worked on for years, mainly because I enjoy writing software. I get an adrenaline rush when I can make my data management system do things better and/or faster than other things on the market.
I have written articles about it and made the binaries freely available on my website under an 'open beta'. People keep telling me that if I really want it to take off, I should open source it.
So far, I have resisted doing that, for many of the reasons that you cited.
A counterpart to TFA which somewhat chimes with your position:https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...
It's an article about how some of the best people do work that engages with public view and discussion either very trivially or not at all (or both).
Hard to describe more clearly but it has been a huge influence on me.
Absolutely. I say that being an OSS maintainer is a job, which can easily become a full time job, where the pay is often non-existent. If you have a separate full time job, you now have to choose:
1. Work two jobs until you burn out.
2. Quit your paying job and hope you have you don't go broke.
3. Scale back or quit maintaining OSS projects.
I think companies, governments, and societies could do a better job funding this work. But since this is a "tragedy of the commons" problem, I'm not holding my breath that this will happen before the public experiences a lot more pain from failures.
You can always sell it out for exploits? The price for oss wage is (incident -1 $)
I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else.
Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money.
This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me.
Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all.
There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.
Was looking for a comment to articulate this better than I could. I have the same feeling about 'release something bad early' advice given by investors, it's so obviously a shady comment in that position because they have the resources to build a clone if they can't talk to you.
I keep waiting for this younger generation to wake up to why we invented the GPL in the first place. Entities that are happy to use your brains for a while, and then eagerly dispose of you when they can.
They love your free labour. "Thanks for your OSS project! No, no, we're not hiring... and you'd never make it through out interview process!"
One should make free software for other free software developers and grateful end users. Not for parasites. Recognition doesn't pay the mortgage. And now you won't even get that because your work will just end distilled into weights in a large language model.
Hey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV
I have no doubt your intentions were good and I am a fan of open-source myself. Unfortunately, since this was written, it’s become more widely known and commonplace for large corporations to disproportionally benefit from open source.
And that wouldn’t bother so many as much if it weren’t for the fact that large corporations often do not give back. It’s become so much of an issue that OSS maintainers have switched licenses, some have shifted closed-source, and others have simply abandoned their projects.
Just last week I began rethinking usage of MIT/Apache licenses for future work. For the longest time I was hesitant about GPLv3 and almost scared to use in my personal projects, but it turns out my hesitations were fueled by...large corporations.
Unfortunately we have to play the game according to the rules on the field. You can decide to opt out entirely (which is fine) or you can play the game and try to win. Personally, I will play and try to win.
That means I will make things, talk about them, and accrue social and/or actual capital for me and my family. I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try. I CAN build cool things, talk about them, and get cool jobs or friends or a following or whatever. I understand not everyone is comfortable with this tradeoff.
> I can't stop any megacorp from training on my code, and it's futile to try.
I do not like this take and I do hope you reconsider repeating such. This very much reads as accepting a lack of any claim to reasonable privacy and ownership, borderline on accepting what I would consider theft.
I understand. I am, however, impotent against OpenAI. If I publish code to GitHub, I understand it will be used for training. I'd rather get the win for my family than try to fight a megacorp. I'm sorry.
You don't have to win from a megacorp. Just add a bit of friction to some of their actions. Many small frictions do stack up.
Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit?
I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.
> any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit
I would say that now, more than ever, this means you should be collecting and sharing what you create.
Not on large social media platforms either, on websites that you own and (ideally) host yourself.
Start a blog, host your own instance of Gitea, build a platform for your videos. Spread what you create and activity participate in the community but maintain ownership and an audit trail over what you've created.
People ripping off others works has always been a thing, of course it's much easier and pervasive now. It's still (IMO) beneficial to say "Look! I did this thing first!", with the added benefit of accruing the kind of "social capital" Aaron talked about.
How do you contend with the fact that AI summaries are now halving traffic to people's websites and redirecting it to Google properties? Publishing in 2025 feels like merely feeding two or three megacorps.
No easy answers, I'm afraid. But I would still say you can get lots of social capital from creating things and talking about it. And these days, that can get you past the LLM-inundated HR front door if you want a job. If you hang out on twitter long enough you'll see people go from "hey I made this cool thing" to "hey cloudflare/vercel/etc hired me to come work on cool-thing-adjacent thing!"
It's a pretty repeatable pipeline. And having proof that you can DO something makes you stand out. Maybe moreso than ever!
No easy answers, but a glimpse of hope anyway. Thank you for weighing in!
If you throw my nickname into a search engine, you will see that that is the case for me as well. Doesn't change anything about what I said though.
If anything, the fact that it worked for me, yet I found it necessary to add the full context, probably strengthens the statement even more.
But anyway. Standard damage control statement that latches onto nothing because there is nothing to latch on to as I made sure to structure the comment that way.
I hate corporate so much man. Just because you can predict what happens doesn't mean that the happening would be any less frustrating.
___
I understand that your role requires you to do this. That is clear to anyone moving through these systems.
What I do not understand though is why you even tried to deflect this with such a low-quality "oh it worked for me it might not have worked for you. YMMV" thing, when you could've also just said nothing at all, not forcing my hand and making me call you out on that.
That is, above all else, strategically unwise.
Fortunately, however, this all doesn't matter. It's not like anyone cares about anything on this platform anyway. So even a strategically unwise move might as well not exist at all.
My role? My role as a what?
Oh. Okay, yeah. Makes sense
Yeah, sorry about that. I agree it indeed worked out for you and that is great.
The point that I'm getting at is that it is necessary for the system to occasionally produce a winner, because otherwise, people would stop trying.
Think for example about a casino with zero wins. No one would come to play. If they however occasionally select a winner, that winner will then be the best marketing they can get, encouraging all his friends to also start gambling.
Please do not mistake this analogy as me questioning your merits. I am confident in your abilities at your craft.
What I am however saying is that the system does not select its winners based on that merit. Instead, the criteria for selection are usually based on what benefits the system most. This, in some situations, might line up with general merits to some degree, but it also might not, and that is one of the core deceptions, the corporate world runs on.
I do believe you that the idea of the article was to encourage people so that they can also have these great wins and experiences you had. But, as said, that is just one side of the coin, and it would be unethical to not mention all the outcomes in which a person does not win.
> But the good news is that we can increase our chances of encountering good luck.
Every phrase in the article was carefully selected to make it clear that we're trying to increase the odds. Nothing is sure. But if you play the game right, the odds of winning go up
I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?
I am going through interviews with founders on https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ and it is indeed what happens.
It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show.
And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas.
Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way.
And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.
"Becoming known" (the definition of which I leave as an exercise for the reader) isn't an automatic meal ticket but it does, as I allude to in another comment, lead to connections that you can sometimes take advantage of in various ways.
Whether that's open source code, writing, various consulting, speaking at conferences, etc. will vary with the person. And the more you can do on a company's dime the better.
When we become ghost content producers for LLMs, you are not supposed to hear something in reply to your post, book, or other work. Most of the time, your work will be ingested by a handful of companies as training data; the readers benefitting from your work will pay these companies, and in return these companies will thoroughly shield and insulate you from being thanked by the people you helped. These companies will do their best to ensure you are motivated to continue producing honest content that can keep their LLMs from choking on their own output.
The exceptions to this are closed (or semi-closed) communities and forums where you directly interact with humans, either by inertia due to a large established human user base or (for newer, smaller communities) via personal vetting of participants.
Obviously the solution here is to have the LLMs post thank you notes, and offer a complex network of job offers for all of these people contributing to open source. Of course the jobs don’t actually exist, but these acts of kindness will keep the producers thinking that they are both in demand and appreciated.
Current LLMs seem to have an opposing goal baked in; don't reveal the exact source. They may ignore copyright when training, but revealing actual lists of sources with quotes would be too much of a giveaway.
The best is when a random throwaway post blows up for some unexpected and unknown reason and everything you think is good is met with silence!
But did you record a complementary TikTok dance, though?
You may want to be more goal oriented. If you're just publishing into a void and hoping for things to happen, I mean I'm not an influencer, but the successful ones I do know have specific goals that they're driving towards are not screaming into the void and hoping for the best.
Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?
Hello fellow human!
I strongly relate to this in many ways.
Because of OSS, I’ve never actually applied for a job or done a Leetcode interview. I’ve gotten multiple direct offers through Twitter DMs (I don’t post) and multiple referrals through random encounters that I never used.
E.g. Debugging an interesting issue with GitHub customer support eventually led to a referral for Microsoft by an MD. Similar stories with Cloudflare and more.
It’s not limited to OSS, but just having any sort of backing credibility to your name without going through the whole CV/CL process unlocks a whole slew of opportunities since people can “pre-screen” you from the start.
You're sort of describing networks more broadly whether you initiate a connection or someone at a company does. Latterly, I didn't apply in the usual sense for 25 years or so.
Don't code a lot but have written books which led to book signings at conferences that probably led to other opportunities if I had the need to exploit them.
translated from marketing-droid-ese:
> greetings peasants! er, sorry, valued open source contributors!
> remember, without you feeding us training data, we won't be able to train our AI to replace you at your dayjob!
> now, get back to work
99% of open source authors quit right before they go viral!! Would you please upload your training data ... I mean lovely open source code??
I wrote the article. I'm not a marketing droid, I don't work for GitHub, just a guy recounting his personal experiences and hoping to help others.
I’m sure they probably train on private repos too
There's a reason there's a toggle to prevent matching on public code.
self hosting git is very easy.
This resonates with how I’ve been thinking about open source. I see the steps as:
1. Personally identify a pain in your own work, and it most likely will be a pain for many others.
2. Build a solution to solve for it.
3. Organically talk about it in forums — for me this is Reddit, HN lately and to some extent Bluesky.
When people ask why I build open source, I say it’s about signaling. As other comments have mentioned, if you’re fortunate enough that it gains traction, it becomes your calling card and can lead to consulting and jobs. It’s analogous to academic publishing (used to do more of that) but with different dynamics.
My personal examples of solving for a pain are:
[A] I started building the Langroid LLM agent framework after having a look at LangChain in Apr 2023, at a time when there was hardly any talk of LLM-agents. The aim was to create a principled, hackable, lightweight library for building LLM applications, and agents happened to be a good abstraction: https://github.com/langroid/langroid
[B] With the explosion of Claude Code and similar CLI coding agents, there were several interesting problems to solve for myself, and I started collecting them here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools One such tool is a lossless alternative to compaction, and a Tmux-CLI tool/skill for CLI agents to interact with others.
This has definitely worked for me. Never got rich from putting stuff out there, but got a number of good jobs from it.
oh wow, thanks again for the networking guide Beej!
You're welcome! :)
Same here
I wrote a few math books. Does it increase my luck? A little bit, here or there. Will I recoup the 1200+ hours working on the project and be paid at least minimum wage for that? No chance.
This is why it’s luck.
Putting more out there will increase the probability of a reward, but it doesn’t guarantee it.
Very well said
I've had a similar experience with being a relatively prolific OSS contributor. It's a decent look professionally, but it hasn't led to employment.
The article was written by „Aaron Francis, Marketing Engineer“.
I’m not a language purist, but are we really calling people who work in marketing „marketing _enginners_“ nowadays?
That seems like going a bit too far with the meaning of engineering…
Some fields of engineering have long had roles with names like that.
Want to do something with motors, but don’t know how to calculate the right combination of motor, gearbox, brake, encoder and controller? Maxon’s sales engineers will happily walk you through the calculations.
I'm a software developer who was, at the time, working in a marketing role. Happy to answer questions.
I feel it’s an evolution of the term “Devrel” which still feels tacky.
Nor would you want someone who built most of their career as an actual engineer to suddenly drop that term and become a generic someone in “marketing”. They’re more than that for sure.
I quite like the terminology the more I think about it.
https://github.com/aarondfrancis
Totally. An engineer, who (at the the time) works in marketing! Makes sense to me :D
Well the "software" folks started it, I met a full stack engineer the other day, that word used to have some meaning as well.
"Full stack" grinds my gears, too. Do they really work from sand to human factors?
I hate sand
Hey! I wrote the article a few years ago. Fun to see it on HN again.
It was here back when I wrote it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071137
Lots of comments talking about how this is just some sort of ploy to feed the machine. I don't know what to tell you. I can only tell you it changed my life and the lives of many others. Hope it can help you too!
Sorry to say, but the article is complete BS. Publishing is only desirable when your work is top-notch ;)
You had me in the first half! <3
I used to release some writing and publish code publicly but the mean comments got to me.
If it makes you feel better, on reddit, I shared my very first blog post about deprecating mysql_* functions in php. As a result, someone said something mean about my mother. I figured the web was full of trolls.
But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delete my blog. I was so embarrassed.
When I came back, there was a reply to that comment. It said something like "that's a good thing, 7th grade level writing means we can all understand it easily". And that was enough to keep me going. 13 years so far.
Reddit is now just AI slop, so I don't know if that's an improvement or not over this story. I'm just glad you were able to get over that BS and engage with it all again and kept going! I gave up and never went back in around 2010, but I'm going to try again in 2026.
The problem with environments designed to make interaction low-energy and gamified like Reddit, is that it gathers just the worst people. I've got ~63k karma there, and disengaged some years ago and I can't tell you how much ditching that, twitter and Facebook improved my mental health. There's some great fun to be had there, but it's often the same thing over and over again and increasingly drowned out by utter crap. They've taken multiple actions that have destroyed the sense of community and have become a poster child for ens*tification, unfortunately.
Thanks for sharing. After reading that comment, I realized we should encourage ourselves and others (who are more or less civilized human beings) to be the kind of person who wrote "that's a good thing..." - because fighting trolls is a game with unknown results, but encouraging people works much better. It doesn't always work, though, because sometimes the platform's nature prevents it. Like on Stack Overflow, where commenting on reactions will probably get you downvoted for being off-topic.
I once spoke in favor of remote work (around 2020) and someone here on HN told me to get cancer and die, before it was flagged enough times to get out of the way.
On YouTube, I also sometimes get mean comments, though at least there the automatic moderation catches them so they don't show up publicly and I can shadowban the offenders off the channel easily. None of the content is even controversial, YouTube just attracts a lot of angry people that feel entitled to speak what's on their mind.
I wouldn't publish in an environment where blocking or banning people is difficult. They're not entitled for me to engage with their hateful drivel. My blog also doesn't have comments. At the end of the day, I will say what I want to say.
Turn off comments on platforms that allow you to do that.
One of my projects for the next few weeks is to get my blogging stuff up and running again but with a couple of tweaks:
1. I'll never allow on-blog comments again, ever. The signal/noise was always so poor. I'm sorry that you had a similar experience and the unpleasant odour of drive-by sniping got to you. For what it's worth, I'm always interested in finding new writing on tech topics, and I try to never be mean: I am not unique in this, so consider if there's another way.
2. If I ever publish code, it'll not be on a SaaS platform like GitHub, I'll manage the release through tar.gz/zip files, and if people don't like that, fine. I'm not after pull requests or starting a "real" OSS project. If somebody wants to take that OSS license code and host/manage it, godspeed to them.
3. I will write some code that looks for links back to my blogs, so if something I write is referenced by another blog, I'll learn about it at some point and I can go take a look, and that would be interesting. A long, long time ago there was some automation around this using web hooks that almost became a standard, so I'll look into whether that is a thing or not any more.
In my experience if somebody is writing a blog about something they are normally more constructive and thoughtful than if they are just writing something in a text box while "driving by". I'm OK with those articles normally even if they're critical or in disagreement with me about something.
No need to write any code for 3. Just search for backlink checker and you'll find multiple free ones.
One of the many wonderful things about being a software developer is that you can build tools that fit you perfectly, and I think I might enjoy this specific rabbit hole, but thanks for the tip, I’ll check some of them out.
I'd love to read a couple over the holidays and give you feedback if you'd like :)
The message here is good. I've now spent over 5 years in the OSS world (https://github.com/neuml). I started by picking a problem I was interested in and checking the work into GitHub. I've been extremely fortunate to have gained a following over the years.
Even with a following, most of the time when you publish it goes into the abyss. Every once in a while something hits but most of the time it takes a lot of patience and resolve. I've had some good visibility over the years from Reddit and Hacker News (though any post I make now on HN is marked as [dead]). It's not always fair and others can "pay" to get the visibility.
I've seen some of the other comments talking about the burden of OSS but I haven't felt that. I set my own agenda and fix what I want to fix. If someone wants to change my priorities that becomes a paid effort.
I can attest at least some of this is true.
My blogging and publishing almost never comes up during an interview. Afterwards, I am openly told it's why they either asked for me, or why they chose me over another candidate. This has happened at almost every job I've accepted.
My writing style or content is not all that special. As the saying goes, 90% of success is simply showing up.
Just being explain complex topics in simple ways can go a long way, even if you're not an amazing author.
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Addition: This is especially true with topics so expansive that even great LLM often conflates subtopics in weird ways. While this gap is rapidly closing, being able to clearly explain complex interconnected topics in simple ways is absolutely an advantage.
As an author, I dig what this is saying since it resonates so well with my journey as an author. Everything I publish is one more chance to connect with people who are drawn to other people in motion. I'm still learhing how to bring people along and inspiring others to create.
Here's some of my work - it's free until Jan 1. https://inkican.com/smashwords-white-hot-scifi-winter/
This resonates, but it also feels like we’re entering a phase of content reality drift. Publishing still increases luck, but attention is fragmenting and integrity is harder to maintain.
The advantage now is being able to preserve semantic fidelity as everything else accelerates into noise. Work that stays legible and grounded seems to compound in ways raw visibility no longer does.
Unfortunately, publishing work in my region requires me to dox myself through an imprint.
Usually this only applies to business related websites, but lawyers could even argue a personal blog is business related due to the possibility existing for me to advertise products.
So yea, while I would love to share my work publicly, its simply not feasible due to medieval laws in place.
My problem is I have non-competes and clauses in my contract which makes it difficult to talk about and publish stuff that I might want to turn into a product. So I'm sort of in a catch 22. I want to talk about what I'm building but I can't, not until I can convince myself that I can turn it into something real and I can quit and focus on it, and that's difficult to do without ever putting it out there to see if people want it enough.
Writing I posted online lead to me meeting some cool dudes in SF, which lead to my current job. It’s hard to say if I just won the lottery or not, but it does seem true to need that you get more luck that way
I just want to share software with fellow nerds. I don't care about stars, community, getting famous, or getting a job.
Then define luck as "connecting with fellow nerds." Still works
This worked for me, but I just coded my own personal project in the open and would post its progress. I don't think it "took off" in the sense of people using it, but a lot of people became aware of it. It's still just a hobby project and I do it for fun.
I love the concept of luck surface area. Worth a read
https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...
it's the same logic lotto uses: "you can't win if you don't play".
while i agree it is irrefutable logic, the chance of being seen is quite small because there are literally millions of other people doing the same thing. gauging probability is what human brains have trouble with.
but it does improve your odds a minuscule amount. but it is always always always better to have friends in high(er) places who can amplify your work. that counts for x1000 more. one mention from someone with 1M followers is worth more than publishing 1000 articles.
And guess how you make friends in high(er) places...
by...
publishing your work and making friends in your industry
I don't know enough about different industries to know if this is true in general. But I do know in tech it is all about networking (aka soft nepotism): spending your career making friends ("swiping right on every work relationship"), and the fraction of those who go on to massively succeed you can then call in favors. At least that's how I made three huge jumps in my 35+ year career, and how the majority of my peers got the big step-functions in pay.
Perhaps in my original post I'm just confusing academia with industry, since I know so few academics.
Sounds like Fallout mechanics
A long time ago, I was having a discussion with my clan leader about luck in video games. He said that the better you are, the more lucky you are. Luck and skill go hand in hand. That's always resonated with me.
You make your own luck. “80% of success is showing up”
That reads differently knowing that one single effect of that would be "it will be easier for AI content scraper to get high quality data for their overlords currently destroying the economy"
It's also a great way to train megacorp AI models without compensation.
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