Ask HN: Authors Said I Suck After I Made Some Reviews on Open Source Software | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Authors Said I Suck After I Made Some Reviews on Open Source Software

16 pointsvecio6 comments

About two weeks ago, I wrote a blog about we comparing some SFU software, and finally made our own one to support E2EE group audio conferencing.

I said some SFUs development is slow and API difficult to understand. Today they come to my GitHub and said "This is a very disrespectful post. It's just that you suck. Bye."

I want to know that if I was wrong. What's a proper way to compare open source software and do reviews?

https://github.com/MixinNetwork/kraken/issues/4

And I have an emotional response https://vec.io/posts/reviews-of-open-source-software

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As an aside, I think you should've just posted the blog post you wrote to HN instead of an Ask HN with a link to in the text. The blog post covers the whole scenario well enough, imo.

On your main point, though. I think it's a bit disingenuous for you to say you were just reviewing open source code when your blog post is written more in the style of exploring alternatives and pitching your own solution, but I genuinely do not think you were anywhere close to disrespectful in that post. To be honest, this seems to me like a freak incident way outside the norm. Lots of major companies post about how they explored alternatives or decided to roll their own thing; almost nobody thinks that that's equivalent to panning the alternatives they didn't choose. You've just got to take it on the chin and move on.

As another aside, regardless of how emotional you were, the last paragraph of your new post is rude and unprofessional.

It takes two to tango, but it takes just one to quote out of context. Here's some of it:

    <OP>
    I understand for someone like you, an core engineer of 
    the famous mediasoup, you are able to make an audio only
    SFU from scratch in under 15 minutes, good job.

    ...

    At least could you please make an working example like
    the one in Kraken readme, in 15 minutes, without your
    awesome but too complicated client library?

And the reply in full was:

    No, I won't waste my time with people like you. Sorry,
    nothing personal. It's just that you suck. Bye.

The "This is a very disrespectful post" part is from another comment altogether.

Tempest in a teacup. Flagged.

There are no winners or losers here, just unexpected feedback in an unexpected forum. Best to move on from it.

To your broader point about reviewing libraries; it is an interesting area. I feel that a lot of people (myself included) will assess a library based on an odd combination of heuristics; last commit, timely issue response; thorough documentation etc. Everyone has different priorities. I do wonder if there is value in bringing together reviews or real-world-use feedback in a single place. But you'll need to bring asbestos gloves.

I don't see how your original post is disrespectful, and I don't think you were wrong in explaining why you chose to implement your own thing for audio only.

The other person's response 'that you suck' is unprofessional and immature.

If that happened to me I would be inclined to fork and refactor their entire library.

If that person wants to throw their toys out of the cot because someone didn't like something they did. Let them waste their time doing that. Don't let it impact you.

There's no right way, you could praise the hell out of something and conclude that you wanted to write your own just to gain the experience, and someone will still call you an idiot for re-inventing the wheel or find something to complain about.

You simply can't make everyone happy. Don't try. If someone sees value in your work, let them in, if they want to cry about it, ignore them. Life's too short to deal with twats.

Step 1: Grow thicker skin

Step 2: Move on...

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