<story><title>Stopping at 90%</title><url>https://austinhenley.com/blog/90percent.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>w-m</author><text>I put a lot of work into doing the last 10% for a project recently, and I&amp;#x27;m not convinced yet that I&amp;#x27;ll be getting anything out of it, other than my own satisfaction. After my colleagues and I got our paper (on real-time depth estimation with an event camera and a laser projector [0]) accepted at a workshop, we could have just dumped the convoluted, messy research code on GitHub and be done with it. For other people to figure it out, if they really cared.&lt;p&gt;But I sat down and completely rewrote all the scaffolding around the presented algorithm, to make for a smooth and fast demo. Wrote up documentation for the implementation, gave it a command line interface, set up a script to reproduce the measurements in the paper with a single execution (downloading the required data and comparing several methods). Broadcast in all channels available to me (institution press release, LinkedIn posts, GitHub awesome list linkings). And I actually brought the demo to the workshop, which wasn&amp;#x27;t required at all, I could have just presented it as a poster.&lt;p&gt;The feedback of the people seeing the polished demo was fantastic, but now I&amp;#x27;m sitting here with my 5 GitHub stars on the repo, after I put like 2.5 extra months of work into it. Maybe it led to more people noticing it, and finding it useful. Maybe not.&lt;p&gt;Getting stuff out there to be noticed is difficult, a lot of work, and going the the last 10% does not guarantee any more success.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fraunhoferhhi.github.io&amp;#x2F;X-maps&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fraunhoferhhi.github.io&amp;#x2F;X-maps&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scarface_74</author><text>I work in the cloud consulting department at BigTech.  We have a very straightforward open source approval process where we can open source any code (MIT-0) that we write for a client as long as we scrub the business processes and anything proprietary to the customer.&lt;p&gt;It does take some work (not two months) to sanitize the project, write documentation, put the boilerplate open source documentation and go through the approval process.&lt;p&gt;I’ve released 8 projects to GitHub using this process over 3 years and collectively may have gotten 15 stars in total.  But the way I see it, it’s a great portfolio and the only chance in my career that I could actually show production code from work I’ve done professionally along with my resume.&lt;p&gt;Also, how many times have we changed jobs and had to solve the same problem from scratch because we couldn’t legally or ethically use code from a previous company? This solves that problem too.&lt;p&gt;Your work represents you.  Even if no one stars it, you now have a portfolio of work you can be proud of that you can point to when you’re interviewing instead of yet another to do app.</text></comment>
<story><title>Stopping at 90%</title><url>https://austinhenley.com/blog/90percent.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>w-m</author><text>I put a lot of work into doing the last 10% for a project recently, and I&amp;#x27;m not convinced yet that I&amp;#x27;ll be getting anything out of it, other than my own satisfaction. After my colleagues and I got our paper (on real-time depth estimation with an event camera and a laser projector [0]) accepted at a workshop, we could have just dumped the convoluted, messy research code on GitHub and be done with it. For other people to figure it out, if they really cared.&lt;p&gt;But I sat down and completely rewrote all the scaffolding around the presented algorithm, to make for a smooth and fast demo. Wrote up documentation for the implementation, gave it a command line interface, set up a script to reproduce the measurements in the paper with a single execution (downloading the required data and comparing several methods). Broadcast in all channels available to me (institution press release, LinkedIn posts, GitHub awesome list linkings). And I actually brought the demo to the workshop, which wasn&amp;#x27;t required at all, I could have just presented it as a poster.&lt;p&gt;The feedback of the people seeing the polished demo was fantastic, but now I&amp;#x27;m sitting here with my 5 GitHub stars on the repo, after I put like 2.5 extra months of work into it. Maybe it led to more people noticing it, and finding it useful. Maybe not.&lt;p&gt;Getting stuff out there to be noticed is difficult, a lot of work, and going the the last 10% does not guarantee any more success.&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fraunhoferhhi.github.io&amp;#x2F;X-maps&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;fraunhoferhhi.github.io&amp;#x2F;X-maps&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sidmitra</author><text>There might be people years from now that could benefit from your work. Caring about something and putting it out there is never in vain.</text></comment>