Increment

Two-thirds of projects on GitHub have 1-2 maintainers, as of 2015.[1][2] I’m sure many of those people are in other areas or occupations, or in other countries, where these high-paying jobs may not exist. Some people simply don’t wish to work at a company, and those folks still may produce value to those other than themselves.

Let’s not appeal to productivity too hard; learners and those of lesser coding capability also create value in the form of skills and knowledge.

It’s hard to identify and quantify those whose contributions helped most, but I feel all contributions are worthwhile. Not all code may be tip-worthy, but I don’t feel chagrin toward those collecting, however they do so.

> Only three projects—less than 3 percent of the study’s sample—had more than 50 contributors.[1]

[1] https://increment.com/open-source/the-rise-of-few-maintainer-projects/

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308894462

Right, let me give you a comparison of the approach this magazine has taken, and another place I consider pretty good: Wikipedia.

https://increment.com/programming-languages/language-history/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languages

What does the magazine article do better than that Wikipedia article? Wikipedia has hyperlinks - the thing that differentiates paper magazines, from the internet. The article doesn't.

The wikipedia article is more thorough, you can actually go and explore.

I just don't understand the authors or the publishers - they seem to be re-inventing the wheel that Wikipedia in the case of programming languages, has solved by spending much more time, care and expertise on it.

This is a fundamental problem with the internet - it's filled with people re-inventing things that need not be re-invented. Maybe I'm just a grump, I'm sorry.

Worth highlighting here: Stripe also publishes a software engineering magazine called Increment [1] that puts out some really high-quality articles -- on a different level than any of your standard "corporate eng blog" kind of stuff (and I love those!).

They focus their issues on different engineering topics: May 2021 was "Containers," August 2020 was "APIs," Feb 2019 was "Internationalization," you get the idea. Can't recommend it enough. Worth scrolling through the topics to one that hits close to your interests.

Nearest to my own heart is the "Frontend" issue [2] -- every article is fucking fascinating, and one of my favorites is a deep dive from Evan You, the author of Vue, about the decision to do a full rewrite for Vue 3.

I am endlessly impressed by the quality of writing that comes out of Stripe.

[1] https://increment.com

[2] https://increment.com/frontend

This part is really eye-opening on getting an organization to open source their code:

https://increment.com/security/open-sourcing-buzzfeeds-single-sign-on-process/#securing-our-systems

There's understandably a lot of pressure in open sourcing anything security related. I wonder if that's because this SSO project belongs to Buzzfeed, and not a company that specializes in API gateways, like Kong:

https://github.com/ohioit/kong-oauth-sso

So many devs end up implementing oauth & sso through an API gateway when they move to microservices (we did). I'm just surprised that those features don't exist in popular gateways like nginx & haproxy in the non-enterprise versions. It seems sorely needed!

Exactly. There's very good reasons why tools like Webpack and Babel exist.

Here's two excellent articles that go over the history and use cases behind the JS tooling ecosystem:

http://tinselcity.net/whys/packers

https://www.swyx.io/writing/jobs-of-js-build-tools

As a counter-point, there's also valid reasons why a lot of the JS tooling ecosystem is painful to work with:

https://increment.com/development/the-melting-pot-of-javascript/

https://www.swyx.io/writing/js-tooling/

For myself personally, I'm quite happy with the React ecosystem. For the kinds of "desktop-app-in-a-browser" apps I work on, it's fantastic.

(Caveat: I'm a Redux maintainer, so I'm also a bit biased here.)

I think so. Even if it's a little watered down at times, it's nice to have the strong focus on a given topic every time. It's also just nice to be able to go back to specific issues. I like to think of them as discussion starters: you can share them with your team, and do a little bit of a deeper dive into any of the given topics. It's really helpful to see some companies of various size's opinions/organization on specific issues(the architecture issue has a great example: https://increment.com/software-architecture/architecture-at-scale/).

It's also pretty spread out between issues(quarterly) so it's not very spammy.