OSS is hard mostly because there’s an enormous number of zombie projects out there and you need to find the one that fits you. Sort of like, say, a job. I’m mostly in the rust world, but try these crates: ratatui-rs, nushell. Python: cadquery, build123d
They’re active, the contributors and maintainers are helpful, and are doing interesting (to me) work.
My point however wasn’t that open source monolithically solves the problems. My point was it can solve the problems that an endemic to office culture, and I’ve rarely found office cultures that solve these problems. My assertion was that the modalities of OSS work can apply to corporate work, with strong effect, but only if people are committed to making it work and invest in each other. The same is true of in office, but I hold that the asynchronous style of work is inherently more efficient due to the fact that asynchronous work in general is more efficient than synchronous.
In my career I’ve seen a lot of fads including importing OSS style work into the office. These were done by cargo culting- using pull requests, open code base, etc. The real magic behind OSS is that everyone works asynchronously - irc, slack, discord, mail lists, Usenet, uucp, etc except for when it’s absolutely necessary to stop the world and synchronize. This is intuitively more productive, or at least as an engineer you should see clearly how that applies to computers, programs, logistics, and every every production process - why not to software development?
The primary “why not” is “I like working in an office with people because after college I’m lonely.” But that’s just because you’ve not re-adapted to living in your community. Before the automobile and it’s associated infrastructure most people worked from home, or extremely proximate. You can have friends again outside college and without an office. It’ll just take some adapting to being human again. The human hamster wheels aren’t necessary.
They’re active, the contributors and maintainers are helpful, and are doing interesting (to me) work.
My point however wasn’t that open source monolithically solves the problems. My point was it can solve the problems that an endemic to office culture, and I’ve rarely found office cultures that solve these problems. My assertion was that the modalities of OSS work can apply to corporate work, with strong effect, but only if people are committed to making it work and invest in each other. The same is true of in office, but I hold that the asynchronous style of work is inherently more efficient due to the fact that asynchronous work in general is more efficient than synchronous.
In my career I’ve seen a lot of fads including importing OSS style work into the office. These were done by cargo culting- using pull requests, open code base, etc. The real magic behind OSS is that everyone works asynchronously - irc, slack, discord, mail lists, Usenet, uucp, etc except for when it’s absolutely necessary to stop the world and synchronize. This is intuitively more productive, or at least as an engineer you should see clearly how that applies to computers, programs, logistics, and every every production process - why not to software development?
The primary “why not” is “I like working in an office with people because after college I’m lonely.” But that’s just because you’ve not re-adapted to living in your community. Before the automobile and it’s associated infrastructure most people worked from home, or extremely proximate. You can have friends again outside college and without an office. It’ll just take some adapting to being human again. The human hamster wheels aren’t necessary.