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Comment by ayuhito | Hacker News Reader

> and then their customers sent me unfriendly email and demanded that I provide support for the tool and solve their problems

Out of curiosity, what sort of tool were you offering? I’ve always heard about this but it’s never been my experience, so it really depends on the type of end user you have imo.

OP is currently trying to find a job and I think any attempt at open-sourcing his tooling (especially if it is useful) allows potential employers to review him in a better light. Abandoning it all seems wasteful when more and more companies try to find more reasons to filter out candidates.

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Not the OP but, I can relate to this with a side-project I created many years ago that is an online tutorial for shell scripting. It's all open-source, requires minimal resources to run (small VM where I run a bunch of other stuff) and it is used most frequently by online schools to brush up on shell scripting. I get a lot of weird requests from random people which can be a bit annoying sometimes. This is for a site that gets around 100k visitors per month.

With that said I think there is some value in putting stuff out there without any marketing. Even if you don't have plan to monetize it can be rewarding in itself. The trick for me is to have a good way to minimize maintenance, which means use the same scripts and mgmt utils for several projects so you don't have any snowflakes that require special configuration.

The reality for the average person looking for a job is 1 out of 100 employers will ever look at an open source project you list on your resume.

Its better than nothing, better than others without projects, but it wont carry much weight unless its some widely used thing

Only exception is if your project matches the company's market or their products very closely. That may get you a meaningful advantage

I can relate, I used to have a small open source project (eventually transfered it to another maintainer). I often had quite rude and demanding Github issues from users.

a variety of backup scripts

For example, how to backup a running Linux server with rsync while using hard links to deduplicate files that didn't change.

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