In Fear of Judgement to OSS

I love OSS

Yes, even though the title of this blog is talking about the fears of publishing code to the world wild web, I found a huge love in using OSS. Most of my tooling is using mostly OSS software. Benefit of that is that I can keep track of their issues and PRs to see how well the projects have been maintained & fixed.

I love that there are roadmaps for OSS projects and if the project has a Discord, I join it to be part of their community.

Why do I have a fear to publish my code in OSS?

Good question I would say… So here is the thing. I tell to my friends in the coding space that the judgement of others should not define them, my friends should know that their skillset does not have to match the judgement of people in the space.

Understandably most of them do not care, and I envy that. Maybe most of them struggle with the part of open source too, but they are damn good at not showing their fear of judgement.

I am quite confident in my coding skills and pratice daily on newer ways to improve my skill set. Heck, I even took time to learn some of the “easy” DSA questions over at leetcode in January. But still that doesnt mean I am a extremely good software engineer. There are far more experienced software engineers in the world.

I have currently like 2 projects that are kinda like SaaS/PaaS (idk the difference really). I change so much on the codebase that I have big commits, bad commit messages and no real roadmap. I just code whenever I feel like it. And when I compare that to actual OSS projects, I feel like I am doing a incredibly bad job at open sourcing my code.

I know that these small things don’t matter in the bigger picture - who reads a commit message (example from my current plaaaner project) feat: nearby plans, notifications, design chores (13 hours ago) and thinks “ahh yea i get that”???. I sometimes put things into commits that have nothing todo with the actual commit message, just to get over the git push to origin part. Like I want to put a weird checkpoint to git so I don’t loose track of things later on.

My goal was is it always to open source the software I write - no matter how ugly the code looks like. And yet, I write this blog about the judgement of people who potentially never heard of me, or even my projects. It’s the overthinking part that puts me into such a huge pressure, that it triggers imposter syndrome. I’ve read a few blogs about the negative perspective of open source, where maintainers are struggling to take breaks and live life. Getting bombarded with issues and feature requests that are not completely clear or just not within the context of the project or roadmap. So naturally maintainers either gave up on communication and handling these issues or just burn out and eventually take a looong break. I don’t want to fall into that situation.

What should I do? What would you do?

How did you work on your projects and thought: “Yea, lets open source this.” - just moved on? What was the driving factor for you to go ahead and work in public. Is there anything I could improve on my thoughts, to improve my perspective? I want to open source all of my projects, for fun and to “showcase” my skills. I want to get over the state of overthinking this.

And for those who struggle with this too, let me know what your thoughts are on this topic too. I would love to hear more about open source and the community around it.

If you have any tips, let me know at my Twitter.