This was an enjoyable read for me, well-written and reflective and more importantly: critical without being overtly cynical.
There's one thing that's always been kicking around in the back of my mind since I started getting involved in various open-source projects the last couple years that was missing, though: Despite all the unpleasant parts of our participation, we're actually very fortunate to have that inner drive to roll up our sleeves.
There have been so many millions of humans that have tried to answer the call of their era's needs and leave things better than they found them, almost always with scant chances of success and even smaller chances that any of their labors will be faithfully documented and offer them some form of a legacy. While I know VCS often creates its own headaches, it is always silently creating that faithful record of our labors. Sure, there's a good chance that those that come after us will never have any cause to stumble across that one section of the commit log where your ingenuity quietly dominated a problem that people had tried to solve for years, but even so, it exists. I figure between that small perk and the fact that we can listen to whatever music we like or throw up a comforting old TV show from childhood on the second monitor while we do our thing, we have it pretty good even at the worst moments along the way.
As a person who is developing a free software project out of my own passion and will, I wonder if this is what I will think and feel several years from now on if my project gains traction. In a way, isn't this the kind of fate I coin for my own self now?
There's one thing that's always been kicking around in the back of my mind since I started getting involved in various open-source projects the last couple years that was missing, though: Despite all the unpleasant parts of our participation, we're actually very fortunate to have that inner drive to roll up our sleeves.
There have been so many millions of humans that have tried to answer the call of their era's needs and leave things better than they found them, almost always with scant chances of success and even smaller chances that any of their labors will be faithfully documented and offer them some form of a legacy. While I know VCS often creates its own headaches, it is always silently creating that faithful record of our labors. Sure, there's a good chance that those that come after us will never have any cause to stumble across that one section of the commit log where your ingenuity quietly dominated a problem that people had tried to solve for years, but even so, it exists. I figure between that small perk and the fact that we can listen to whatever music we like or throw up a comforting old TV show from childhood on the second monitor while we do our thing, we have it pretty good even at the worst moments along the way.