Am baby
My code is disgusting 🫠
But I’m getting better every day!
Many years ago I made a library for Arduino to control an 8x8 LED matrix to display running text. It was not very clean but I like it enough to upload it to the forums (I couldn’t find anything similar). One week later it was complely different to what I uploaded and it was super efficient and a bunch of people added new functions and availability but my name still appeared as a main contributor. Of course I put it on my CV and showed it to my professors!
This is encouraging!
You don’t open-source your code because you’re embarrassed by it.
I don’t open-source my code because I don’t understand how git works.
We are not the same.
I have multiple 200+ loc shell scripts with their own little built-in changelog-parser because i rather did that than setting up the server i’ve built already.
I am ashamed to say that it took me far longer than it should have for me to understand what the hell I was doing with Git.
But you did it! You understand it and that’s pretty rad. Every victory, no matter how small, is still a victory!!
That’s one way of looking at it haha. Nice username btw.
Thanks, haha. All your hives are belong to me!
Have at it. My hives are like my brain in that they’re entirely void of any signs of intelligent life. 😂
I found this website, it helped me learn about Git in a quick way, it’s not perfect, but hey at least no javascript😉
Thanks. I’ll try to check it out when my ADHD meds kick in here in a bit! (not sarcasm)
No problem, rock on🤟
OK, yes, but what if you do open source them, and they help one other devloper?
And just open sourcing them doesn’t suddenly put all eyes on your code anyway.
I suppose you make a point, I’m not sure how my school would feel about me open sourcing my project code though 😅
Once I have more time for Personal projects I plan to open source everything.
My school made open source a requirement. The funny part was having to argue with the people we were developing this for about opening the source. They were planning to make it a commercial app and were concerned that this would hamstring their monetisation.
One of them also somehow expected an app developed by students to have innovative value that would need to be kept closed source because otherwise people would steal it. In particular, he threw out the idea that he was hoping to eventually include an AI – long before the LLM hype – to help people, and that would obvioisly be such a technical achievement that it needed to be protected.
I needed the project, otherwise I’d have told him in no uncertain terms why I think leaving people alone with an AI assistant instead of forcing them to consult a specialist is a really dumb idea in healthcare.
I don’t make anything open source because one of my projects became semi popular and I had to give it away for the sake of my mental health.
Some people seem to think that open source means they have the right to demand free labour and harass people for it. That, and university students that want people to do their homework instead of RTFM.
So what? The best outcome is that someone issues a pull request that teaches you how to do what you did in a “better” way. The worst outcome is that someone starts using your code in an LLM and vibecoders learn your style.
Joke’s on you, all my embarrassing code is online.
My code is inept.
I release it with a free software license anyway.
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Whether people want it or not is beside the point.
It’s a learning experience.
And please don’t call me no one. I want it.
(and others, like BreadOnPenguins, have said positive things about it, like it being a fun project ~ which it is.).
;D
And, again, to the point, being capitalist or the code embarrassing, is not relevant criteria to releasing with a free software license.
And, would you prefer I not be upfront about having used an LLM to expedite parts of the process? … Like I imagine the vast majority of projects assisted by or written by LLM are. Several of which you may be using without realising. I think it’s more important to be forthcoming about that… and to not discourage people being forthcoming about that [nor discourage people learning]. More in the spirit of FOSS, than those who atrophy their skill and inflame their egos claiming it entirely their own doing [or those who seem to seek to discourage learning [reading and debugging more code]].
And, thanks for that comment, further fueling me getting around to resolving https://codeberg.org/Digit/fin/issues/58 too.
Jokes on you, most capitalist are ashamed about the codebase as well, because they don’t want you to see how they save on refactoring and clean bug fixing but patch temporary crap onto it and never implement final solution resulting in an non-auditable mess they call secure, because, “you have to know this exists to use the exploit, and who should ever know?!”
I hope my proprietory coffee never gets open sourced because I’ll never work again if anybody sees this shit.
I’d also add this reason (in addition to embarrasement): I don’t open source my stuff because I know microsoft will “steal it” to train copilot.
Dont even need to make it open source for that. Just use either visual studio/vsc or have the code on github (private repo so not OSS)
I know github would probably steal it (I have my own forgejo server). Didn’t know about VS code doing that. You have any source for that? I guess proprietary MS plugins might do so, but surely there would be backlash if the open source version did so. So I hope using Code OSS would be fine. Might switch to vscodium though, which shouldn’t phone home at all.
Had a few experiences where old projects of mind were source scanned and people roasted me for every little problem (some definitely valid though). I rarely open source my little projects now.
Don’t take it personally, we neurodivergent people are just bad at giving constructive feedback without hurting anyone
I can take direct and blunt feedback, but the way I have seen people talk about things:
[projectname] is dogshit
makes me terrified to open repos. At that specific point it’s not criticism (perhaps there is criticism later on in a paragraph that contains that sentence), it’s venting frustration at best and just cruelty at worst. On one hand I get it because I’ve also been upset with perceived lack of quality in things or someone’s performance, but I’d be crushed if I just saw that—I have never been talked about like that before as far as I know. I can handle “your code is bad because X”. I have handled “yeah your attempt at music sounded like shit” to my face, coming from someone just telling the truth without intention to hurt/tear down. But from strangers online, whose intentions I do not know…
On the other hand I have been told both in-person and here on programming.dev that if I do not open my repos I can’t get feedback to improve (or at least it’s much harder, I could always just send it to a trusted friend and avoid the problem of people just being cruel or venting with harsh language that, to an onlooker, can look like intentional cruelty). And I just saw in the comments that I can poison LLM training, so…
Ha
Most of my stuff is badly hacked together “runs on my machine” code. If I released any of it onto a public repository, I’d then be on the hook for maintaining it and making it run on more than just my machine, or else examining, deconflicting, and merging pull requests where other people have done the work. I really don’t have what it takes for all that.
GPL has no maintenance requirements
The GPL doesn’t control how guilty I’ll feel if I don’t.
Make your bad code public, it might help train an LLM
I don’t really think you will have enough people see your code, just because you put it on the internet.
I have uploaded quite a few things (some of them are even useful) and nobody really cares. Though they most probably just get bored and move onto other people’s profiIes, after starting with the useless ones.
Well that’s not the attitude now, is it?
Just think how much you can poison those LLMs.
I’m currently sitting on a codebase that’s perfectly ok and I have no reason not to open-source it, but it’s 95% generated by AI so I don’t know. Probably I’ll just use it myself like it was an embarrasing sex toy.
Looking at github lately, it seems a lot of people don’t share my reservations.
Relatable content.
I was reviewing some PowerShell script today and it was absolutely atrocious. It’s only saving grace was that it was using actual PowerShell, not some hacky wmic call or anything.
I didn’t write it and I’m really glad for that. Whole lines of rewritten code commented out and just left there. Entire lines of # marks. There’s no reason this should be so densely commented. Your code should be self explanatory.
There were multiple queries to the same database that was then passed through a “where-object” selector by pipe, looking for a single value (pulling a database of thousands of entries for one line).
It was disgusting.
I’m not even a developer and I thought it was horrid.









