How to stick with your projects, even when they're janky
28 points by jeaye
28 points by jeaye
The workshop approach is very useful to create a thriving community. If you're afraid of "losing" the credit from completing the project all by yourself, you also miss the opportunity to create a recognized and productive community.
In many ways, creating a software development community or team around a project is more valuable than just writing the software itself.
Yeah! I like how you put this. By building the community, you're building the project, not yourself. This is especially important if you want the project to surpass yourself. There's a threshold of community momentum where even a BDFL can step down and it just means the community will step up (like Python).
Thanks! One could also argue that by building the project, you eventually get the personal benefits later on - if the project is successful. However, that takes some patience, timing and luck, so it might be more tempting to push ahead and try to build something on your own :)
Reminds me of the quote “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”. So I guess the best approach for a given project depends on the expected lifetime of the software: A quick experiment like a library or prototype application might be easier to just hack together, but something long-term like a programming language is a completely different endeavor.
I'm not involved in Clojure (yet!), but keep up the good work with jank! :)
Great talk. I’m really struggling with this same problem and was looking for help actually.