As mentioned already in this thread, in my initial comment on this thread in fact, I had no idea this post was even going to end up on HackerNews. I write independently without Hacker News in mind. I write for myself. Why would I have read the comment guidelines on Hacker News before writing a blog post that I had no intention of putting up on Hacker News in the first place?
@chanux asked a question with regards to my blog post and I answered it with my justified opinion. It was hardly a mindless flamewar, in fact both of us ended up agreeing with each other as you can see by the comments and this tweet if you want further proof: https://twitter.com/chanux/status/366211657241862145. I was not going to ignore a user who had a question about my blog post.
I appreciate the Hacker News community's feedback and contributions but I do not feel that in this specific example I created an unhealthy discussion by mentioning Stallman. I have a lot of respect for his work as already stated and I accepted @chanux's constructive criticism wholeheartedly.
No worries, no offence taken at all. I welcome all constructive criticism, more so than positive feedback so thanks!
I know it was a tangent from the initial impression readers got from the title but it served as an analogy that people can blindly misuse beliefs just like they can blindly misuse tools. I am not a fan of name dropping and in that given example I admit I could have avoided mentioning Stallman looking back at the post and generalized it to free software advocates who try force their beliefs on others. Also want to add that I do not think all free software advocates force their beliefs on other developers.
Criticism appreciated, like I said, no offence taken, I did not think you were attacking me.
Not saying Stallman is like Hitler but I honestly find his views such as "everything should be free (as in speech)" very hypocritical. At a conference I attended he also stated "artists and musicians should not expect money for their work" which I find is again very arrogant. Those pursuits also require effort and those people can determine how much they value what they create. I still think Stallman has provided a ton of value to the community, I just disagree with some of his views. He is still a good person.
For my first developer position, I actually went into the interview with my own laptop and showed the two developers some of my projects written in DarkBasic. They could see the code if they wanted to but I haven't released that code anywhere. The demos were very visual which was a great hook in an interview, I highly recommend that people take their closed source projects to interviews just to demonstrate what they are capable of.
I fully support this. If it's not your secret sauce then why not give it to the community? The common rebuttal I hear for this is "but we have to then maintain it". Granted, maintenance is time consuming but even if you do not do anything after open sourcing it, someone could still fork it and tailor it to suit their needs. I don't open source something if I am on the fence about whether what I have coded is a tool or a potential product. I also don't open source something if it's really untidy, I try to do a bit for the community before putting it out there like making sure it runs on Heroku for example (if it's a web app let's say) and that it is somewhat readable. Not saying my current work on my Github is perfect but I am always learning.
That was just an example in my post. I used to do a lot of C programming in my spare time. My commonly used tools back then included splint, valgrind, gdb and man. Like I said, developers will find similar tools when the language they are coding in changes.
It seems to be a growing trend with the Valley startups but I have noticed some other companies on the East coast adopting the pattern. I can't really comment on the UK/Europe, I am based in Canada myself. Are there any sites that UK/European companies use instead of LinkedIn and Github? I'm genuinely curious.
Oh wow, that's pretty interesting. Was the recruiter from a small company just trying to aggressively go after candidates or were they legitimately interested in you project? Not to undermine your work at all but it's the first time I have heard of an experience like this. Congrats!
Actual author here. Wrote this post last night to express my thoughts on hiring trends I've noticed but mostly to thank a friend of mine, went to bed, woke up to a bunch of tweets and one of my other friends said my post was on Hacker News. I have read everyone's comments and will try to answer as many of them as possible. Thanks for all the feedback everyone, no matter how positive or negative. It's interesting reading all of your perspectives. This made my day!
@chanux asked a question with regards to my blog post and I answered it with my justified opinion. It was hardly a mindless flamewar, in fact both of us ended up agreeing with each other as you can see by the comments and this tweet if you want further proof: https://twitter.com/chanux/status/366211657241862145. I was not going to ignore a user who had a question about my blog post.
I appreciate the Hacker News community's feedback and contributions but I do not feel that in this specific example I created an unhealthy discussion by mentioning Stallman. I have a lot of respect for his work as already stated and I accepted @chanux's constructive criticism wholeheartedly.