This github "community of people" is apparently more interested in pontificating about pointless differences in tools and wanking off to tool complexity than they are in actually getting shit done.

The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination, because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.

No to new features. No to breaking changes. No to working on holiday. No to fixing issues or merging pull requests from people who are being unpleasant. No to demands that something has to be fixed right now.

The general state of the open source ecosystem is that most maintainers are building software they want other people to use and find useful.

The creator of CodeTriage, Richard Schneeman, was surprised to learn one day that the Ruby on Rails core team (of about 7 or so people) were responsible for handling ALL the issues opened on the Rails GitHub repo. At the time, there were about 700 or so issues. These maintainers are hugely valuable to the project due to their depth of knowledge, however keeping up with issues was taking a huge amount of time. Would you rather these highly specialized maintainers spend their time developing new features and actually fix bugs, or would you want them to spend their days responding to hundreds of issues? Asking for simple questions like "what version of Rails are you using?", and "can you provide an example app?", and "is this fixed on master?”. While asking these questions might only take 5 or 10 minutes of time, the sheer volume of issues per maintainer was unreasonable. This was highlighted by the herculean efforts of another developer Steve Klabnik, who went through every single issue and responded to all of them in a marathon session spanning multiple days. The effort got him accolades and commit access to the Rails repo. While he deserves the praise, the efforts were ultimately unsustainable.

getting set up requires a github account and “pushing” commits every time I write a post

it's very easy to measure how many github back and forths people have

That people show off these illegible globs in public only makes sense from a signaling perspective: They are saying, “look at how many nodes I have in my brain, amazing nodes

I can enjoy my hobby in open-source without Github issues becoming a shouting match that spans 200 comments from people who aren't even invested in the codebase

Except it sucks for everybody who's left out.

While it's true that GitHub has become more accessible to non-programmers than it once was, these folks won't be comfortable making pull requests anytime soon.

On the Web, the file extension doesn’t really matter

a perverse use of those signs which we make use of to convey truth to one another.

Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.