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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

@antirez - Thank you for Redis! It's been a joy to use across so many projects.

> However I never wanted to be a software maintainer.

And nothing say that you have to be. There's this perverted view that anytime someone creates a popular FOSS project, they need to dedicate every waking minute to maintaining it. That's neither economically feasible nor psychologically reasonable.

> Redis was the most stressful thing I did in my career, and probably also the most important. I don’t like much what the underground programming world became in recent years, but even if it was not an easy journey, I had the privilege to work and interact with many great individuals.

What is "underground programming world"?

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> What is "underground programming world"?

The programming world that nobody else sees.

Everybody uses shiny FOSS tools, and some even make big $ using them, but nobody wonders where they come from and how much pain went into building them.

I was also intrigued by that sentence. I expect it means (open source) programming that happens outside of of big corps.

But I'm unsure.

Yep it's the open source, and in general the "spontaneous" development world, that happens without big money, just for hacking. This "place" once was kinda free and not observed much. Now you can't say anything, if you don't respect a good practice (LOL) people yell at you on Twitter. Even saying that commenting is a good idea is a problem. Not cool.

> Yep it's the open source, and in general the "spontaneous" development world, that happens without big money, just for hacking. This "place" once was kinda free and not observed much.

Thanks for explaining.

> Now you can't say anything, if you don't respect a good practice (LOL) people yell at you on Twitter. Even saying that commenting is a good idea is a problem. Not cool.

Just because they're loud does not mean they're correct or that they're the majority. I can understand not wanting to deal with any of it though.

The larger than life you become in your space, they more your words, actions, and non-actions get parsed and twisted for political intent. It's either step away entirely or hide behind the mask of a pseudonymous alt.

> Just because they're loud does not mean they're correct or that they're majority.

They're not. They're the mediocre developers with nothing substantive to contribute. Think of your developer heroes. Almost none of them will ever engage in such nonsense. They're too busy building wonderful things to bother with petty nonsense that gets nothing done.

> Even saying that commenting is a good idea is a problem.

I'm glad I'm not alone experiencing this.

One of the core open source projects I use has taken a no comments stance because "the code speaks for itself". It does if you're a core contributor, but if you dive in less frequently it takes a while to grok what's going on and re-build the mental model. Comments would reduce that.

Thanks for all you've done Salvatore, and for your blogging. Your enthusiasm puts the fun back into my programming!

I think some of these agile thought leaders have a bit to answer for here (but of course it's mainly up to the individual to be responsible for their own judgement - just because somebody else makes their money on marketing doesn't mean you are forced to buy the product)

Lowering the barriers to open-source contribution has allowed in people who have absolutely no business being there. If you have standards, you get accused of gate-keeping.

Thanks for mentioning the T- website specifically, it takes a lot of courage to call it out directly these days, because all it takes is one of them with a lot of followers and then you get swamped with hate. It's fucking unreal man.

There's a ton of us down here programming and having fun, free of politics and bullshit. Look forward to seeing you (again).

Where is "down here"?

outside of social media, inside our IDEs

There are times that discrimination is exactly what you want...

> people yell at you on Twitter.

Dude, the problem is just Twitter. Everybody shouts on Twitter, it's a system that encourages mob reactions. "Back in the day" people had to subscribe to a ML to yell at you, so fewer people did; and we all knew which lists were cesspools of trolls and flamers, making it easier to avoid the bulk of it. Twitter instead gives you the whole firehose, unfiltered and amplified. It's not a problem restricted to opensource or programmers, we see it everywhere at the moment.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with him not wanting to be a software maintainer. I don't want to be either, and I'm not even a programmer.

But there is DEFINITELY something wrong with the fact that, seemingly, NOBODY wants to be a software maintainer.

> NOBODY wants to be a software maintainer.

I think everybody wants it on their resume, but the practical day to day work tends to be more filtering poorly written GitHub issues than writing any interesting code. For a job that doesn't pay much (often at all), that's not something I would want to spend my time doing.

The problem is that people don't recognize the efforts of the ones who do it. Antirez did it for years. Do people expect someone to have the same very high-profile job with constant overtime and the same project for their entire lives? His efforts to stay on that project were heroic.

There are lots of other people who want to maintain it. Let them, and if they screw it up that is not his fault. He finished his project. Give him a break.

> What is "underground programming world"?

If you have to ask... ;)

We're all violating the first and second rules of "underground programming world"

I'd expect the underground programming world to index from zero.

The first rule would have index 0...

This is underground programming. Perhaps it's 1?

I'd make it -1, that way regular programmers wouldn't know about it.

"Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration." — Stan Kelly-Bootle.

I expect the third to be 10

I'd say that's the zeroth rule.

Sorry to be that guy but, why are you posting comments that lead to topic derailing that add nothing to the discussion?

Agree. I’d like to thank conjectures, brodouevencode, Bjartr, kungtotte, m0xte, fidelramos, chii and pokot0 for their contributions, but gently suggest none of the jokes were really that funny. Said well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289

Since we have a norm that those who post unfunny jokes shouldn't complain they are downvoted, we should also have a norm that those who don't like jokes should just downvote without comment. Of course, I'm violating the obvious meta-norm...

We actually have the opposite norm.

HN commenters are encouraged to post feedback in the threads about what's good and bad for HN comments.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7605973

That's fine, and there are probably some would-be HN comedians who haven't heard the news about this yet, but meta-discussion is really boring. This is the last thing I'll post in this thread, and I won't be surprised if it gets downvoted to oblivion.

> "underground programming world"

it's where you program in a basement.

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