It has one? I use ublock origin and have javascript disabled by default. The article is readable with no annoying anti-adblock with javascript disabled ;)

years ago I set myself an annual goal

I love this. Simple, but keeps you learning.

When I did this my coworkers got super mad I wasn’t answering things promptly.

If you read the article, notifications are only a very small part of the problem. The author was speaking about wide scale effects happening at the organization level.

This. So much this. I know that the discussion can take different forms and sometimes there are also larger organizational issues at play. But with that said, I think people often forget that they can disable notification on devices. I’ve seen co-workers across two companies leave notifications on for every single message in a channel (yes, you read that correctly) and with sound nonetheless. It baffles me.

macOS comes with a built-in Do Not Disturb mode. Slack lets you configure your notifications so that you’re not getting notifications for each single message across a bajillion channels.

[Slack] normalizes interruptions, multitasking, and distractions, implicitly permitting these things to happen IRL as well as online. It normalizes insanely short reply times for questions. In the slack world people can escalate from asking in a room to @person to @here in a matter of minutes. And they’re not wrong to – if your request isn’t handled in 5 minutes it’s as good as forgotten.

Somewhere along the way we forgot that interruptions are toxic to real work. It wasn’t always this way. On day 1 of my first trading job the only instruction I received was ‘when the market is open, mute your phone.’ The subtext was ‘or else’. If someone said this to me today I’d give them a hug, and I’m not a hugger.

I think people need this reminder today. Outside of work I see people with group chats on their phones (be it Facebook, Twitter, Hangouts, whathaveyou) that bleeps and bloops without rest. I can’t imagine living in that world.

This perspective is vulgar:

Some people think that giving food to random starving children around the world is ‘meaningful’, but it’s not. You are just doing genetic socialism and propping up bad reproductive strategies that are proven to not work.

Social Darwinism is a sickness.

I used to engage in this sort of nihilism and it was a sad and depressing way to live, so I sympathise, fellow robot. That’s the trouble with too much logic and not enough context (indeed, how robotic!). Once I learned that my conclusions hinged on blatantly false unexamined assumptions, I was able to shift my views to something more constructive.

Having children doesn’t stop questions about meaning, by the way.

You are just doing genetic socialism and propping up bad reproductive strategies that are proven to not work.

There’s something odd about someone calling themselves libertarian but espousing racial collectivism. Or is your username meant to be ironic or something?

Life is without meaning, and any attempt to find one is just your mind incapable of accepting the fact that you are mortal and small, and wanting to be large and forever.

This may be true.

Don’t worry though, sooner or later your children will come home from school and your neural “let’s make sure the children are well so they will propagate my genes” system will fire and you will forget about all these silly questions.

This is completely false.

Your ideas around genetics are outdated and wrong.

I totally agree that your own needs are the top priority if you are an OSS provider. Nobody has a divine right to your time.

I do think that having people be able to report bugs easily is really good. For even relatively small projects, this also serves as a bit of a usability forum, with non-maintainers able to chime in and help. This can give the basis for a supportive community so the owner isn’t swamped with things. Many people want to help as well.

Though if this is your “personal project”, then it could be very annoying (I think you can turn off issues in GH luckily?).

Ultimately though, the fact that huge projects used by a bazillion tech companies have funding of around $0 is shameful. Things like Celery, used by almost every major Python shop, do not have the resources to package releases because it’s basically a couple people who spend their time getting yelled at. We desperately need more money in the OSS ecosystem so people can actually build things in a sustainable way without having to suffer all this stress.

Hard to overestimate how much a stable paycheck makes things more bearable

“Back in the day, if you wanted to file a bug report, you had to jump through hoops”

This is where I disagree. Both maintainer and other contributors’ time are valuable. Many folks won’t contribute a bug report or fix if you put time wasting obstacles in their path. Goes double if they know it was there intentionally. I remember I did one for Servo on Github just because it was easy to do so. I didnt have time to spare to do anything but try some critical features and throw a bug report on whatever I found.

I doubt Im the only one out there that’s more likely to help when it’s easy to do so.

Really, just stop. Maintaining it, I mean. Unless you have contractual obligations or it’s a job or something, just tune it all out. Who cares if people have problems. Help if you can, help if it makes you happy, and if it doesn’t, it’s not your problem and just walk away. It’s not worth your unhappiness. If you can, put a big flag that says “I’m not maintaining this, feel free to fork!” and maybe someone else will take it over, but if they don’t, that’s fine too. It’s also fine if you don’t put a flag! No skin off your nose! You don’t owe anything to anyone!

Totally. In this scenario, you should just quit cold turkey.

The rest of the post is more advice that I’ve found myself giving multiple times to people who do want to keep maintaining the project, or be active in their larger community, but aren’t super focused on that particular library anymore.

There’s a lot of poor communication out there with unstated assumptions on each side for relationships not just open source and that drives a lot of frustration and resentment. There are dozens of books on the subject in the self-help aisle of bookstores. The points in the article are all good advice but I think the best advice is to make it clear what on terms you volunteer your work and not be ashamed to say “I don’t want to do this but feel free to do it or fork it” if it’s not scratching your itch.

Personally, I’ve turned away issues resulting from old and on bleeding-edge compiler or library releases and on OS’s or equipment I don’t run (doesn’t behave on Windows XP? doesn’t work with Chinese clone of hardware? Hell if I know…)

Slanty face for a layoff? Seems to have been a few people in my extended networks hit in the last two weeks. Nobody seems to be having an issue finding a new gig but that is still a slap in the face.

re: LinkedIn being a “hiring environment”, I’m constantly hearing (in the Lobste.rs LI group, for example) people complain about getting harassed by recruiters and the like, but not once has that happened to me. Every once in a while, the thought crosses my mind “that’s probably because you’re fundamentally unhirable – don’t quit your job!” which I quickly dismiss, but this time I’ll ask: is this more common to the more senior folks, or maybe more of a matter of location (not in the US)?

That is extremely harsh. Mistakes happen; I would suggest two strikes, assuming the deficiency in the original posting is rectified immediately.

Given how often people spam bad job postings, and given how basic that information is, I think it is reasonable.

If you put up a sloppy posting, you are wasting the time and being disrespectful to all the people who have to parse through it. If you are unwilling to proof it for those four things, you should be banned.

I’m pretty tired of recruiter shenanigans, but this got upvoted strongly, so I’m rewriting it to say “it will be deleted.” We can reserve banning for repeat offenders, and hopefully it won’t come up.

I agree.

I’ve occasionally floated semi-public postings over the years when I was not ready to divulge the company name until the req was actually public and in all cases salary was listed as “competitive”.

I’d say that “competitive” really means “negotiable” which can be off-putting and doesn’t bracket it. It was only for junior hires that I had a solid range rather than a floor.

Related: classic PHK rant.

This one is even better since its observations apply to even more FOSS than libtool. It also has some laughable details on that along with the person who wrote libtool apologizing in the comments IIRC.

FWIW: bazelbuckpants seem to be written for the proprietary software world: a place where people are hesitant to depend on open-source dependencies in general, and people have a real fear (maybe fear is strong, but still) of their dependencies and environment breaking their build. I use them when I’m consulting, because I can be relatively certain that the build will be exactly the same in a year or so and I don’t like having to fix compilation errors in software I wrote a year ago.

I’m with you on Grunt, but Rake is actually a build tool with Make-style rules and recipes for building and rebuilding files when their dependencies change. There’s a case that Rake is just Make ported to Ruby syntax. It’s just more commonly used as a basic task runner.

https://ruby.github.io/rake/doc/rakefile_rdoc.html

We use Pants here at Square, in our Java monorepo. It works quite nicely, actually. For our Go monorepo, we just use standard Go tooling, but I’ve volunteered to convert to Pants if anyone can get everyone to move to a single monorepo. They won’t, because every Rails project has its own repo, and the Rails folks like it that way.

A few things that bit me:

• containers don’t report real memory limits. Running top will report all 32GB of system memory even if the container is limited to 2GB. Scala/Java or other JVM apps aren’t aware of this limit, so you have to wrap the Java process with -X memory limit flags, otherwise your container will get killed (you don’t even get an OutOfMemory exception) and marathon/k8s/whatever scheduler will start a new one. Eventually most interpreters (python, ruby, jvm, etc.) will have built in support to check cgroup memory limits, but for now it’s a pain.
• Not enough tooling in the container. I don’t want to have to apt-get nc each time I rebuild a container to see if my network connections work. I’ve heard good things about sysdig bridging this gap though.
• Tons of specific Kernel flags (really only matters if you use Gentoo or you compile your own kernel).
• Weird network establishment issues. If you expose a port on the host, it will be available before it’s available to a linked container. So if you want to do a check to see if something like a database is ready, you have to do it in a container.

I’m sure there are more. Overall I actually do like Docker, despite some of the weirdness. However I hate how we have k8s/marathon/nomad/swarm .. there’s no one scheduler or scheduler format and if you switch from one to the other, you’re redoing a lot of tooling, labels and config to get all your services to connect together. Consul makes me want to stab myself. DC/OS uses up 2GB ~ 4GB of ram just for the fucking scheduler on each node! k8s is a nightmare to configure without a team of at least three and really ten. None of these solutions scale up from one node to a ton easily (minikube is a hack).

Containers are nice. The scheduling systems around them can go die in a fire.

I’ve had a positive experience with Triton. It doesn’t support all of Docker’s features, since like Google they opted for emulating Docker and apparently decided some things weren’t having, but for the features Triton does it Just Works.

Of course, that means getting used to administering a different ecosystem.

That stinks, but sounds more like a critique of the Linux kernel? Are you running anything custom?

Newer Docker defaults to overlayfs (no more aufs), and runs fine for us on stock Debian 9 kernels (without the extra modules package, or any dkms modules). This is both on bare metal and the AMIs Debian provides. Though we run on plain ext4, without LVM.

Org could be one component of a solution for this, but on its own it lacks: a way to edit via mobile/other devices, any means of uploading images, a blessed rendering path (there are many ways to render/export org files into something for display).

For instance, one solution might be to use Org’s “publish” feature. You could render to HTML, push that to some web host somewhere with rsync (that handles viewing on other/mobile devices). For editing you could sync your org source files (and any org-rendered images via things like plantuml, as well as static images) with something like syncthing/git/Dropbox/Box/iCloud/OneDrive etc. in combination with a non-Emacs editing app like Beorg (iOS) or Orgzly (Android).

That would be a workable and powerful system, but I think we have to admit it’s not as simple to use as just clicking “edit” in a wiki page from something like dokuwiki/mediawiki :-)

I love orgmode and use it on and off but last I looked sharing it was read-only and meant exporting the static document or running something (node, ruby) that parses the format on the fly.