All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world.

I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years.

Even on these small projects, I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight.

Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level.

In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users).

OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.

Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money.

This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me.

Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart.

Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all.

There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.

Because of OSS, I’ve never actually applied for a job or done a Leetcode interview. I’ve gotten multiple direct offers through Twitter DMs (I don’t post) and multiple referrals through random encounters that I never used.

E.g. Debugging an interesting issue with GitHub customer support eventually led to a referral for Microsoft by an MD. Similar stories with Cloudflare and more.

It’s not limited to OSS, but just having any sort of backing credibility to your name without going through the whole CV/CL process unlocks a whole slew of opportunities since people can “pre-screen” you from the start.

1. Personally identify a pain in your own work, and it most likely will be a pain for many others.

2. Build a solution to solve for it.

3. Organically talk about it in forums — for me this is Reddit, HN lately and to some extent Bluesky.

When people ask why I build open source, I say it’s about signaling. As other comments have mentioned, if you’re fortunate enough that it gains traction, it becomes your calling card and can lead to consulting and jobs. It’s analogous to academic publishing (used to do more of that) but with different dynamics.

My personal examples of solving for a pain are:

[A] I started building the Langroid LLM agent framework after having a look at LangChain in Apr 2023, at a time when there was hardly any talk of LLM-agents. The aim was to create a principled, hackable, lightweight library for building LLM applications, and agents happened to be a good abstraction: https://github.com/langroid/langroid

[B] With the explosion of Claude Code and similar CLI coding agents, there were several interesting problems to solve for myself, and I started collecting them here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools One such tool is a lossless alternative to compaction, and a Tmux-CLI tool/skill for CLI agents to interact with others.

> greetings peasants! er, sorry, valued open source contributors!

> remember, without you feeding us training data, we won't be able to train our AI to replace you at your dayjob!

> now, get back to work

It was here back when I wrote it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071137

Lots of comments talking about how this is just some sort of ploy to feed the machine. I don't know what to tell you. I can only tell you it changed my life and the lives of many others. Hope it can help you too!

I’m not a language purist, but are we really calling people who work in marketing „marketing _enginners_“ nowadays?

That seems like going a bit too far with the meaning of engineering…

My blogging and publishing almost never comes up during an interview. Afterwards, I am openly told it's why they either asked for me, or why they chose me over another candidate. This has happened at almost every job I've accepted.

My writing style or content is not all that special. As the saying goes, 90% of success is simply showing up.

Just being explain complex topics in simple ways can go a long way, even if you're not an amazing author.

---

Addition: This is especially true with topics so expansive that even great LLM often conflates subtopics in weird ways. While this gap is rapidly closing, being able to clearly explain complex interconnected topics in simple ways is absolutely an advantage.

Here's some of my work - it's free until Jan 1. https://inkican.com/smashwords-white-hot-scifi-winter/

The advantage now is being able to preserve semantic fidelity as everything else accelerates into noise. Work that stays legible and grounded seems to compound in ways raw visibility no longer does.

while i agree it is irrefutable logic, the chance of being seen is quite small because there are literally millions of other people doing the same thing. gauging probability is what human brains have trouble with.

but it does improve your odds a minuscule amount. but it is always always always better to have friends in high(er) places who can amplify your work. that counts for x1000 more. one mention from someone with 1M followers is worth more than publishing 1000 articles.

https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...

Even with a following, most of the time when you publish it goes into the abyss. Every once in a while something hits but most of the time it takes a lot of patience and resolve. I've had some good visibility over the years from Reddit and Hacker News (though any post I make now on HN is marked as [dead]). It's not always fair and others can "pay" to get the visibility.

I've seen some of the other comments talking about the burden of OSS but I haven't felt that. I set my own agenda and fix what I want to fix. If someone wants to change my priorities that becomes a paid effort.

Usually this only applies to business related websites, but lawyers could even argue a personal blog is business related due to the possibility existing for me to advertise products.

So yea, while I would love to share my work publicly, its simply not feasible due to medieval laws in place.