that interview is fucking trash and I’ll prove it.
there is a high bar to clear. It often feels as if you need to surpass whatever the existing functionality is. Just to get accepted, you have to offer something better than some existing product that may have been around for decades.
when has it NOT been a high bar? the original maintainers weren’t just creating a thing for a thing. they were creating THE thing that usually directly competed with a global tech powerhouse with hundreds of developers and a budget in the millions.
getting a youngster to share their code for the whole world to see is a very intimidating prospect.
when has it not been?! stop being a bitch and put your shitty code out there. nobody is going to give a fuck about it anyway.
problem is, they[classes] often don’t cover material that’s essential for contributing. For instance, using tools like Git, and indeed, not just Git itself, but also supporting infrastructure such as GitHub. And this applies equally to GitLab and other alternatives.
git gud. git over it. this person acts like experienced devs just popped out of their mothers vagina knowing all the shit they do. invest the time in to improve your skills and you will reap the benefits a hundred fold. you can’t become a master overnight, it takes time and experience.
Why do FOSS at all? What’s the incentive to write something and make it open source? Why not spend your time and effort on starting a company and trying to get rich? As most contributors report, working in FOSS can often lead to a terrible life/work balace.
I’m so glad he finally said it. the WHOLE problem with young devs is that almost all of them are looking to get rich and retire from developing with some “big idea”. they don’t want to solve problems. they don’t want to improve technology. if it wasn’t for the fact that they spend the majority of their day in their job as “developers” you would have to call them vulture venture capitalists. VCs are negatively aligned with FOSS ideologies, so of course they aren’t interested in building something for free.
it’s because Jr devs were indoctrinated into the church of google and microsoft and apple and ibm and amazon before they even knew what code was. they were handed keys to big flashy sdks and told “you’re a real dev now! go create something big for us!”
being a developer is more than just slinging code. it’s more than the salary. it’s more than the clout and the hype and the long hours and thankless weekends.
being a developer is about seeking out problems in the world and solving them with science. but not just any problem, a problem that can actually be solved with science. not masked, not repaired, solved.
any dev that can’t understand that will always be subpar in my opinion. I’m not gatekeeping, I’m just setting the bar high enough that the field isn’t flooded with talentless greedy VC-wannabes that it collapses. Setting the bar high is healthy, after all not just anybody can apply and become a QB for a national football team, or a CEO of a company, or a doctor…
anyone working with FOSS should be celebrated much more. They are the people who make the world better for all of us while money grubbers are driving it to hell.
The short of it is that the standardization and OSS of the 90s was an anomaly, allowed by commercial interests taking their eye off the ball at a critical time. The challenges are that those commercial interests have the hang of things now and for new developments are all over making sure things develop in a way more consistent with their strategies.
For example, if AOL back in the day had made ‘campus edition’, then we might never have seen a federated internet, with AOL providing the “modern” connectivity and communications features before Mosaic could spawn Netscape and spell the end of AOL’s strategy, which was miles friendlier than NNTP, Gopher, IRC, and various BBSes of the time. All those ultimately fell to the browser in one way or another, but AOL could have easily beaten the federated answer to the punch, except they neglected academic, government, and business market.
Same for Linux, it was enabled by the Unix vendors neglecting the user experience and also the opportunity opened up by the PC clone ecosystem. If people weren’t already replacing most of the user-facing stuff in their Solaris workstation with open source stuff, they might not have had such an easy time going to Linux on much more affordable hardware. If Sun had done Solaris PC edition with something more competitive with KDE, bash, and all the utilities, then Linux might not have been “worth it”.
So in the 90s, they let their guard down and a federated internet happened with lots of open source viable all over the stack. With the massive investment since, that facet has been “contained” to the places where it’s pretty much unassailable now, but the evolution and growth of that mindset is firmly throttled by the business interests.
git checkout - change branches (-b to create a new branch); a branch is a set of changes (commits, state of the code) and you can easily jump between them
git add - select files you want to commit (submit to the project)
git commit - do the commit; etiquette for the message is one line brief summary of the change, then a blank line, then optional additional paragraphs with more explanation
git push (-u origin <branch name> the first time for a new branch) - send the changes to your online repo
When you run into problems, ask for help. Each team does things a little differently, so you’ll want to ask your lead before doing most other git operations.
I’m a lead and I’m happy to sit with new team members for a half hour and walk them through the basics and with their first few commits. Everyone seems to catch on pretty quickly.
being a developer is about seeking out problems in the world and solving them with science
Eh, let them try and fail at starting their own thing. It turns out, writing software is hard, and writing good software is even harder, especially when you need to build it from scratch. FOSS is a wealth of pretty good code that you can build off of to make cool stuff quickly.
But it doesn’t build itself, FOSS needs people to maintain it, and at some point you’ll need something nobody else wants to build. But maintaining that thing takes time, and people out there will help you with it once you build it. So build your thing in such a way that it can solve other use cases, and people will start using it, and some will contribute to it, solving their own use cases because it’s easier than making their own thing.
That’s what FOSS is, it’s a community effort to share solutions to problems so others help you make it better. You benefit from their work, and they benefit from yours, and everyone is better off. Businesses are easier to build on FOSS, as are hobby projects, so share as much as you can so you don’t have to maintain it yourself.
I honestly don’t see a business case for not using and contributing to FOSS extensively. It’s just too expensive to build or buy everything yourself.
You don’t need to gate keep to only those with a quest to solve problems, just appeal to human nature and demonstrate that FOSS is good for selfish pursuits as well. It turns out that a rising tide (FOSS) lifts all boats.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/14/youngsters_in_foss/
Read this a few days ago and it feels pretty relevant here.
that interview is fucking trash and I’ll prove it.
when has it NOT been a high bar? the original maintainers weren’t just creating a thing for a thing. they were creating THE thing that usually directly competed with a global tech powerhouse with hundreds of developers and a budget in the millions.
when has it not been?! stop being a bitch and put your shitty code out there. nobody is going to give a fuck about it anyway.
git gud. git over it. this person acts like experienced devs just popped out of their mothers vagina knowing all the shit they do. invest the time in to improve your skills and you will reap the benefits a hundred fold. you can’t become a master overnight, it takes time and experience.
I’m so glad he finally said it. the WHOLE problem with young devs is that almost all of them are looking to get rich and retire from developing with some “big idea”. they don’t want to solve problems. they don’t want to improve technology. if it wasn’t for the fact that they spend the majority of their day in their job as “developers” you would have to call them
vultureventure capitalists. VCs are negatively aligned with FOSS ideologies, so of course they aren’t interested in building something for free.it’s because Jr devs were indoctrinated into the church of google and microsoft and apple and ibm and amazon before they even knew what code was. they were handed keys to big flashy sdks and told “you’re a real dev now! go create something big for us!”
being a developer is more than just slinging code. it’s more than the salary. it’s more than the clout and the hype and the long hours and thankless weekends.
being a developer is about seeking out problems in the world and solving them with science. but not just any problem, a problem that can actually be solved with science. not masked, not repaired, solved.
any dev that can’t understand that will always be subpar in my opinion. I’m not gatekeeping, I’m just setting the bar high enough that the field isn’t flooded with talentless greedy VC-wannabes that it collapses. Setting the bar high is healthy, after all not just anybody can apply and become a QB for a national football team, or a CEO of a company, or a doctor…
anyone working with FOSS should be celebrated much more. They are the people who make the world better for all of us while money grubbers are driving it to hell.
The short of it is that the standardization and OSS of the 90s was an anomaly, allowed by commercial interests taking their eye off the ball at a critical time. The challenges are that those commercial interests have the hang of things now and for new developments are all over making sure things develop in a way more consistent with their strategies.
For example, if AOL back in the day had made ‘campus edition’, then we might never have seen a federated internet, with AOL providing the “modern” connectivity and communications features before Mosaic could spawn Netscape and spell the end of AOL’s strategy, which was miles friendlier than NNTP, Gopher, IRC, and various BBSes of the time. All those ultimately fell to the browser in one way or another, but AOL could have easily beaten the federated answer to the punch, except they neglected academic, government, and business market.
Same for Linux, it was enabled by the Unix vendors neglecting the user experience and also the opportunity opened up by the PC clone ecosystem. If people weren’t already replacing most of the user-facing stuff in their Solaris workstation with open source stuff, they might not have had such an easy time going to Linux on much more affordable hardware. If Sun had done Solaris PC edition with something more competitive with KDE, bash, and all the utilities, then Linux might not have been “worth it”.
So in the 90s, they let their guard down and a federated internet happened with lots of open source viable all over the stack. With the massive investment since, that facet has been “contained” to the places where it’s pretty much unassailable now, but the evolution and growth of that mindset is firmly throttled by the business interests.
And it’s not that hard. Here’s a primer:
-u origin <branch name>the first time for a new branch) - send the changes to your online repoWhen you run into problems, ask for help. Each team does things a little differently, so you’ll want to ask your lead before doing most other git operations.
I’m a lead and I’m happy to sit with new team members for a half hour and walk them through the basics and with their first few commits. Everyone seems to catch on pretty quickly.
Eh, let them try and fail at starting their own thing. It turns out, writing software is hard, and writing good software is even harder, especially when you need to build it from scratch. FOSS is a wealth of pretty good code that you can build off of to make cool stuff quickly.
But it doesn’t build itself, FOSS needs people to maintain it, and at some point you’ll need something nobody else wants to build. But maintaining that thing takes time, and people out there will help you with it once you build it. So build your thing in such a way that it can solve other use cases, and people will start using it, and some will contribute to it, solving their own use cases because it’s easier than making their own thing.
That’s what FOSS is, it’s a community effort to share solutions to problems so others help you make it better. You benefit from their work, and they benefit from yours, and everyone is better off. Businesses are easier to build on FOSS, as are hobby projects, so share as much as you can so you don’t have to maintain it yourself.
I honestly don’t see a business case for not using and contributing to FOSS extensively. It’s just too expensive to build or buy everything yourself.
You don’t need to gate keep to only those with a quest to solve problems, just appeal to human nature and demonstrate that FOSS is good for selfish pursuits as well. It turns out that a rising tide (FOSS) lifts all boats.