<story><title>Stopping at 90%</title><url>https://austinhenley.com/blog/90percent.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scruple</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know. I don&amp;#x27;t think people &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; care. Maybe I&amp;#x27;m a cynic, maybe I&amp;#x27;m jaded. I&amp;#x27;ve sat through a handful of interviews after submitting a resume with links to my GitHub profile, links to my (former) co-founded startup, the parents we received for our work, the projects I painstakingly polished before open sourcing, etc... At the end of all of that, I can recall exactly 1 person who even casually mentioned this stuff. He ended up being a manager and he would sometimes bring it up as a point of conversation with others on our team but it never found traction. My conclusion is simply that exceedingly few people (in the wild) give a shit about this stuff. Probably other like-minded folks.</text></item><item><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></item><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>dxbydt</author><text>I totally agree with you. Nobody gives a fuck. I sweated 6 months on my CS Masters thesis. After the day of the presentation, I walked up to my Professor&amp;#x27;s office. As per the rules, you are supposed to hand a printed copy of your thesis to your thesis advisor. So I handed over the printed thesis proudly. Then we chatted, I said my goodbyes &amp;amp; left. In those days we had no github internet etc. All the C++ code for my thesis was on a 5 1&amp;#x2F;4 floppy. When I reached home I found the floppy. I was like, God I&amp;#x27;ve forgotten to give him my code! So I picked up the floppy and trudged back to the university. Then I walk up to my advisor&amp;#x27;s office again &amp;amp; knock on the door. He is ofcourse surprised to see me. I say - Sorry I forgot to give you my code. Here is the floppy. I&amp;#x27;ll put it next to my thesis. Where is my thesis ?&lt;p&gt;He doesn&amp;#x27;t say anything. I look around to see if my thesis is on his bookshelf, but no, it isn&amp;#x27;t there. Then I turn around &amp;amp; I find my thesis. It is in his trashcan. I was so stunned &amp;amp; shocked. My advisor says sheepishly - look its just a Master&amp;#x27;s thesis. Its not like you have discovered a new theorem or something. These results are well known in the literature.&lt;p&gt;I just put my floppy in that trashcan and walked out. Its been more than 2 decades now but I still remember that incident like it was yesterday. Literally, nobody gives a fuck.</text></comment>
<story><title>Stopping at 90%</title><url>https://austinhenley.com/blog/90percent.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scruple</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know. I don&amp;#x27;t think people &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; care. Maybe I&amp;#x27;m a cynic, maybe I&amp;#x27;m jaded. I&amp;#x27;ve sat through a handful of interviews after submitting a resume with links to my GitHub profile, links to my (former) co-founded startup, the parents we received for our work, the projects I painstakingly polished before open sourcing, etc... At the end of all of that, I can recall exactly 1 person who even casually mentioned this stuff. He ended up being a manager and he would sometimes bring it up as a point of conversation with others on our team but it never found traction. My conclusion is simply that exceedingly few people (in the wild) give a shit about this stuff. Probably other like-minded folks.</text></item><item><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></item><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>koreth1</author><text>I always look, and I&amp;#x27;m always happy to see something meaty enough to actually talk about in an interview.&lt;p&gt;Somewhat to my surprise, I&amp;#x27;ve found that at least 90% of candidates who include a GitHub username, when I go look at their repositories, either have nothing but unmodified forks of existing open-source projects or obvious &amp;quot;go through the tutorial for technology X&amp;quot; projects. I can totally get how, after seeing that kind of thing ten times in a row, people might give up looking.&lt;p&gt;But I still always look, both at the person&amp;#x27;s public repositories and at their contribution history in other public repos.</text></comment>