Empathy
nshipster.com
nshipster.com
At the time, I was ruining some of my professional relationships over arguments about their open source projects, because I only looked at these from a technical stand-point. Once I started putting myself in their shoes, I stopped criticizing. Instead I tried to be that person who always makes you feel like you can do anything, who always praises and never criticizes, who believes in you and your ideas, because that's the kind of person I look up to.
True, I had to ignore some technical deficiencies a few times, but life's too short. Plus, who am I to think I have all the answers? Maybe those technical deficiencies are really innovations in disguise, which I just lack the proper imagination to see properly at this early of a stage? Even more reason to overlook it and be supportive rather than critical.
So far it's working out well. My professional relationships are improving, and I feel like much less of a sour-puss than before. But YMMV.
[1]: http://mattt.me/2011/empathy-and-open-source/
EDIT: This is possibly related to my recent burnout which made it a whole lot easier to not really care about technical details and focus a lot more on the relationships and the positives. These two things happened at the same time.
Your site is named nshipster, which is fine, unless it will become the name of a product which you would ever want to market in Germany.
In public discourse in Germany, the two letters NS are commonly used as shorthand for National Socialism in the historical sense.
So if you want to sell, I don't know, your coffee break management app and call it ns-coffee, nobody in Germany will touch it with a ten foot pole.
Another two-letter combination for which the same holds (I'd even say it is a lot worse) is KZ.
KZ is the everyday stand-in term for concentration camp. So think twice before you name that Kazachstan travel app.
I just thought it might make sense to draw some awareness to the issue because non-German speakers have practically no chance of knowing about this pitfall. It's kind of similar to the Chevy Nova situation.
Ah, I'd been wondering what hipsters had to do with browser plugins (nspluginapi, which I think is from Netscape).
NS is actually part of the Objective C naming history:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-p...
Interesting how we take for granted the potential cultural interpretations of something as simple as a couple initials.
Seriously, even in the context of cultural sensitivity, this seems pretty silly to me. Really? National Socialism gets to own the letters NS for the rest of time? I mean, if it's an objective fact that Germans get upset by those letters, then I guess that just is. I still can't remember ever hearing of anyone being upset about letters that could stand for something else before. There aren't really that many letters, so I'm not sure how feasible it is to restrict two-letter combinations.
I think I've come up with a way of explaining how heavy the connotation is. So again, these are the abbreviations:
NS is bad, quite worse than any comparable thing in English (but not bad enough for Apple to drown in boycott mails, as you noted).
SS is significantly worse than that. Have those two uppercase letters together (better yet, standing freely together) and there is nobody raised in Germany who will not immediately think of the SS and/or death camps.
KZ is the worst. This one is an immediate, unconditional full stop. Now here comes the comparison: Putting that in your product name is _exactly_ the same level of horrible as using the word pedophile in your product name.
That is the level of connotation we are talking about here.
I hope this helps somebody.