Do you want meaningful commentary or empty snarky ridicule?

I'm simply saying that at the moment, either of those would be more interesting than total ignorance.

Actually, this makes me think... I don't think I've ever given feedback on an open source project.

Maybe I, as someone horrified by Heather Arthur's story, have some sort of ethical obligation to provide constructive and helpful feedback to people. I'm not a great programmer, but I've been at this for long enough to have some useful opinions.

Open invitation for my fellow HN community members: point me at a repo and I'll try to say something actually helpful.

This reminds me of the recent ShowHN of criticue (http://criticue.com/).

You could do something similar (or those guys could do it) where you provide feedback on other people's repositories in exchange for feedback on your repository. Sort of a community code review process.

I actually have been hoping to get feedback on whether people think https://github.com/ChickenProp/ds-debug is/could be useful.

a wire protocol for named context patches: you'd do better not writing your own wire serialization format, and instead adopting an existing transport: websockets, stomp, and MQTT all strike me as sufficiently stupid simple & end to end enough, or anything from thrift to zmq to flume for transport would be slightly more inter-linkable than your "length/json-payload" ad-hocracy.

it's JS but you might enjoy node-webworker, which uses websockets to implement inter-Node.js message passing: your specific case is debugger being an outbound messaging port, emitting context programmatically.

I did find myself thinking "this has to be a solved problem" as I was writing the socket code. Thanks, I'll look into those.