Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

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It's unfortunate that someone downvoted you, I've tried to negate that.

The only reason I made a comment to this effect is that I've noticed an uptick in articles about how Github is your resume/marketing yourself/marketing your OSS/how you should only work on 'important' OSS/some other silly notion. I want to believe this isn't a problem, but with open source powering so much, it appears that people want to be the next DHH.

I think there is something to worrying about software shifting to a heavily reputation-based economy (as opposed to one oriented around making things). Namely, in that shift, it rewards people who generate noise, regardless of the amount of signal contained. Polluting the well, in this case, results in everyone having to output a certain amount of signaling just to keep up.

It's entirely possible I am projecting some here, as I've struggled with this myself. I just don't want to always concerned with this tripe, because it's not the same at all as actually making software.

samspot is dead on here, at least from my perspective. I am very private and have suffered from social anxiety for years. I don't use Facebook because I am overly sensitive to the reactions of others (no likes? everyone hates me and thinks I'm stupid). I spend far too much time thinking about what others think of me, so my natural inclination is to completely remove myself from public view at all opportunities. I don't use GitHub for this reason. I'd like to contribute and become part of a community, but I'm so terrified of being judged that I never step forward.

So I completely understand the author's attempts to go public. It isn't about being the next DHH, it's about overcoming the fear of rejection. I have been considering "going public" for years for this very reason.

Just do it.

Seriously. What's the worst that could happen about pushing some open source code on GitHub? You don't have to start by contributing to openssl or something of similar magnitude. Just push some stuff to your personal one.

Trust me, I graduated college with an art degree and some of my earliest GitHub stuff shows this. But I keep pushing, literally. One of my babies has 1300+ stars and that's awesome to me. I don't think of it like validation, but more like "holy shit a lot of people like this." Some of my libraries are sitting at 0 stars, and that's ok.

Freaked me out a bit saying I was dead, I appear to be alive again, at least from checking with some random devices.

I'm not sure if this describes you, but I can be pretty thin skinned on the internet, which often discourages me from posting. I write things and delete them more often than I hit submit.

One nice thing about going public is it's unlikely anyone will notice you for a while. Even patio11 says only his brother looked at his blog for a few years (IIRC).

Even patio11 says only his brother looked at his blog for a few years (IIRC).

If only getting visitors were as easy as being related to them!

No, seriously speaking, my blog had perhaps 200~300 visitors for the average article from 2006 through, hmm, late 2009 or so? (What changed? A combination of discovering HN, going full time, changing my writing style to exclusively focus on the 4k to 8k word essay that I feel is generally my best work, and a minor refocusing on topics.)

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