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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • My experience with maintaining open source projects (though mine are very much smaller) is that it’s quite similar to a business: you just have to deal with stakeholders and people who think they are stakeholders.

    I had all the same experience at work:

    • Some unknown person from an unrelated team contacted me because something that my team does not manage broke. I tried to help a few times and I suddenly became their personal IT support team.

    • Another time someone not even working at my company demanded that I drop everything and fix their problem, because my name appeared in 3rd parties libraries.

    It’s sad that open source authors don’t always receive the recognition that they deserve.


  • RoR is too much magic for me. Getting started with any new code base is such a pain that I never want to do again. As a manager, I’ll avoid any job post that mentions Ruby. I have maintained projects written in Delphi, Centura, Java, C#, PHP and none of them even come close to the pain of RoR. Java and C# are notorious for ceremonial interfaces but that’s nothing compared to trying to figure out RoR automagics.












  • There are already some attempts but I don’t think it will work, harmful even. Best case scenario, the AI can understand the code as well as a senior engineer from another company. All they can know without the context is what was changed, which is useless. We need the reason why the commit was made, not what was changed. The info is not there in the first place for the AI to try to extract.