"The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an insightful look at the people side of open source maintenance, especially in Elm and maintainer-burnout threads.
What it is
Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.
Recommended by 8 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2018 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec GolDDranks · 2018-10 · on “Must-See Tech Talks for Every Programmer (2014)”
I enjoyed "The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki (the creator of the Elm programming language) a lot. [this video] It's not a talk about technology, but it's a talk on people _in_ technology. As an open source enthusiast, I found the discussion very important, especially in context where we easily tend to be distracted by technical details.
Strong rec spicyusername · 2021-02 · on “Elm Roadmap”
For those interested in hearing about Elm creator Evan Czaplicki's experiences with developing open source software and the complexities of internet social dynamics, there is an exceptional talk 'The Hard Parts of Open Source Software'. [this video] Regardless of whether you agree with his approach to developing a programming language, it is a talk worth listening to. Very insightful.
Recommends shady-lady · 2018-10 · on “What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?”
I think the 2018 Strange Loop talk "The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki hits on some things which SO should adopt. relevant screengrab: [LINK] full talk at [this video]
Recommends mannycalavera · 2020-01 · on “Actix project postmortem”
Evan Czaplicki (Elm designer) has a great talk about this issue "The Hard Parts of Open Source" [this video]
Recommends jlokier · 2020-04 · on “Why I’m Leaving Elm”
For me, the best thing I got from this critique was the link to this 2018 talk by Evan: The Hard Parts of Open Source, [this video] I found Evan's talking style really entertaining and enjoyable, and I totally relate to the first part about "why don't you just..." and "have you thought about delegation..."! The HN comments here are near uniformly negative towards Elm and supportive of Luke's criticisms. Fair enough, it's a reasoned critique and those are definitely issues that would affect users. I found the critique informative and useful. I don't use Elm though I've watched with passing interest for a while. Now I feel there are gotchas or expectations I should be aware of if I'm considering us
Recommends klntsky · 2020-04 · on “Why I’m Leaving Elm”
Great talk indeed. I feel like it might be helpful to online communities to add a real "intent" field to their posting forms, like here in this video: [this video]
Recommends TheDong · 2020-06 · on “Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after December 2020”
"why don't you just" is called out in Evan's "The hard parts of open source" [0] talk. He goes into some of the reasons it's a bad phrase and some of the problems behind it. I'd recommend the talk. [0]: [this video]
Recommends allenu · 2020-11 · on “The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders”
There's a great Strange Loop talk by Evan Czaplicki (of Elm fame) where he alludes to the challenges of maintaining an open source project.[1] In it he describes how feedback often starts as an innocuous "Why don't you just...?" where the person making the request doesn't have the full understanding of the system as a whole and may see their request as a simple one-off that can be done quickly. To answer them fully, the open source maintainer has to respond with a long explanation of why their suggestion isn't an option. Or, maybe they don't respond and now the original poster doesn't feel the community is supporting them. This asymmetry can lead to poor communication in the community. I've