Re:Why isn’t someone using my software product or open sourc...
by dahart on Monday July 30, 2018 @12:06PM
(#17645467)
> Please feel free to correct my thought process on this
Okay.
- It's not a new trend. People at all levels of experience have been sharing good & bad advice for as long as talking has existed.
- Are you certain the author is inexperienced? She appears to own a functioning software company, which alone is more than most developers can say.
- So what if someone has less experience than you? This is an ad hominem argument. How much coding experience should one need before they're allowed to talk? Because the field of software development is growing, the majority of developers are newer. That will remain true until the day software development starts shrinking. What about her experience disqualifies her from sharing useful advice?
- She's right, many OSS devs complain about lack of exposure while at the same time not making it easy to understand or explain what they're doing. Programmers as a group have this problem, even very experienced programmers. She's right, the way to get attention is to spend some time making your project easy to find and easy to understand.
- She's right in a broader sense too. Good marketing is valuable, and it takes time and effort that is not programming. This applies to communication within a team, and it applies to starting businesses. This is something that took me personally a long time to learn. My decades of programming experience, surprise, didn't make me an expert in communicating the value of my software to other people.
Okay.
- It's not a new trend. People at all levels of experience have been sharing good & bad advice for as long as talking has existed.
- Are you certain the author is inexperienced? She appears to own a functioning software company, which alone is more than most developers can say.
- So what if someone has less experience than you? This is an ad hominem argument. How much coding experience should one need before they're allowed to talk? Because the field of software development is growing, the majority of developers are newer. That will remain true until the day software development starts shrinking. What about her experience disqualifies her from sharing useful advice?
- She's right, many OSS devs complain about lack of exposure while at the same time not making it easy to understand or explain what they're doing. Programmers as a group have this problem, even very experienced programmers. She's right, the way to get attention is to spend some time making your project easy to find and easy to understand.
- She's right in a broader sense too. Good marketing is valuable, and it takes time and effort that is not programming. This applies to communication within a team, and it applies to starting businesses. This is something that took me personally a long time to learn. My decades of programming experience, surprise, didn't make me an expert in communicating the value of my software to other people.