Ask HN: OSS / Did you ever ask somebody for help with your project successfully?

Lots of times, yes, but I've never asked a stranger, only people who I already had some sort of relationship with.

So, I think in my local bubble noone is for instance as excited about DB systems as I am, so in essence I thought I could even spend some money to get some expert opinions or rather insights I'm struggling with (currently for instance with bad throughput of my immutable OSS DBS). That said I think noone so far wanted money and some even offered help, but so far I think they didn't have time, thus didn't answer any "pings". So, as I can't spend too much time (and of course not too much money) either on profiling and debugging right now it's kind of a dilemma, as it would IMHO be very interesting to know what's slowing down N read-only trxs in my system :-) that said a couple of years ago I also asked about help with a frontend without much luck. I guess it has to have some value of course, so maybe at least spending some money (even if it's a non profit spare time project since 11 or even more years) should be OK :-)

Guess I just felt a bit frustrated...

That's understandable. The thing about asking others for help is that if it's something that will require more than a small amount of time or effort, then it has to be either a friend who is willing to sacrifice for you, or someone who is really into this stuff. The latter is more rare than the former.

You certainly can hire a contractor to help you out, but that's not going to be cheap. If you can afford the time, I think the best approach is to study up and achieve the level of expertise that you need for the task. You'll gain on two counts this way: you'll solve the issue at hand, and you'll have a new skill in your collection that you can leverage in other ways and on other projects.

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