Well I'm here out of curiosity. Bought a account because if I was to wait 2 weeks I would have totally moved on and the price was cheap enough to satisfy a curiosity.
Well now i'm here and they are encouraging me to write blogs and comment and generally... virtual loiter. So it's been a looong time since I blogged. In fact the last blog I did was back when it was a developer thing to do and not some political pundit. WHICH is what really ruined the blog thing for me. So screw it... I'm working on a pretty sizable personal OSS project and you always run into things you want to talk to someone about while your working on these mountain size projects but no one seems near you can relate.
So i'm going to open up with the ambiguous topic of open source coding. Why do we do it?
Well we do it for the reputation in the beginning. As a young developer I wanted to prove how amazing I was. As a teen there wasn't really many venues out there to get that. Ya I did some closed source projects and made some cash here and there. But you just don't get as many eyes on you like open source. Later in adulthood I got programming jobs because of how much street cred I had in the open source world. I mean in the beginning (way before it was popularized by Linux) people would tell me that i'm just giving away my work and ask "don't you think your effort has value?" I've had a person at a job interview tell me that "Why should we hire you to do work when you don't think your work has any value?" The problem with the older generations is that they always struggled with quantifying. While I didn't get that job, I ended up getting hired by someone who understood quality code and got paid double of the confused interviewers job. AND THAT is where my labor paid off. I hate pointing fingers, but the baby boomers really wanted everything here and now. Many of them would sooner eat the goose that lays golden eggs than to wait for the gold egg. Most of my career was in back end work or automation. I really had little experience in frontend development. I went through a weird expertise change a few years back. I was never bad at frontend and for a guy who did mostly back end processes I was pretty good at it. BUT when Node JS came out I switched from Python to Node and started writing a LOT of Node JS code. I had quite a bit of open source code with my name on it by the time I did a interview for what I thought was for a Node JS developer. Turns out it was for a Angular frontend developer. I actually got the job before I ever learned that it was writing something for a world I have never seen before. It didn't bother me... I crash coursed it and got to a professional level in a few weeks. The employer had confidence in that I could do this because he could review JavaScript code that I have written and he could see the transition would be small for me to bridge.
THIS is the benefits of being a open source developer.
I have no love affair with communism or paying anything forward. I "help" people with their projects to get bugs that are plaguing me to go away. I start new projects on visions that I have (not try to retrofit someone else's) and allow others to share the burden of ownership to push things in their direction or fix bugs that are important to them. Things that you yourself would be responsible for in the closed source world.
One thing I have noticed in life... the ones that talk up the merits of communism are the very least likely to contribute anything. One guy actually went to great lengths to exploit what was intended for supporting OSS developers in a Git repository with his private closed source project that had about 2 gigs in resources. He didn't want to pay for a private repo nor did he want to share his code AND he was going to fully monetize the code being hosted. AND he was far from broke. In fact he kept bragging about stuff he had. But my god did he talk up a mean streak of how socialism works. I just said... Communism or socialism (whatever) doesn't work for the very reason you just demonstrated to us all. "What do you mean?" EXACTLY! Exploited the fuck out of a service provided by a company who wanted to have a path to share their services to help others who are also sharing. I have private repos... I pay for them too even though I could probably throw my weight into GitHub or Azure. I don't because it's for stuff that isn't in the spirit of sharing.
That being said... it's nice seeing crypto systems like STEEM and BAT that are trying to quantify our time and I'm
hoping it will create a closer sharing community like open source did with developers. With tipping a small painless click of the button many of the unsung heros of the world that come up with those small time saving things and those small cultural revolutions can get paid for the time they spent keeping the world moving forward.
Well most people start with a small blurb to start their blog... I went renegade and started with an epic. :D Hope this isn't painful to read. Haven't written a blog in a LOOONG time.