It?s OK for your open source library to be a bit shitty

I’m here to tell you as someone who has done the work of producing quality software for free, you don’t have to and you shouldn’t feel bad about not doing so.Want to know how I did everything right in Hypothesis? I doubt I could have done it in less than 400 though, and I would be foolish to expect I could do any project in the smallest amount of time I could feasibly do it in.Hypothesis is a large and complicated project though (if it doesn’t look like one, that’s because a lot of those 800 hours were spent on making it easy to use). Most projects are probably an order of magnitude simpler.i.e. only 80 hours.i.e. only you having to take two weeks off work, working literally for free, in order to produce quality software.i.e. nearly half your holiday allowance if you live in a civilized country, or possibly more than your holiday allowance if you live in the US.This is still not a reasonable requirement.Can you produce quality software in less time than that, working only in your free time? Also, thank you for Hypothesis, I’m using it in one of my newer projects and liking it a lot.Great way to approach it, sometimes you KNOW about a bug but it’s not an issue for you, then when someone strolls along and is using your code you get this new found energy to start fixing it and making it usable by others.I think there does need to be one counter point though – if you open source the darned thing, you either need to look after it; *or be willing to open up access so others can*.There’s a lot of repos that you see that just are dead – https://github.com/jaz303/tipsy is my personal bug bear – where the community just wants to fork it and run with it; but the maintainer won’t open up the access or point to another fork as the maintained one.Maybe I’m missing something, but given any (real) OSS project, how would someone be able to prevent others to fork it? I can’t count the number of ideas that I have developed to the point where I can use it and said “I will tidy this up and open source it one day”, only that “one day” still hasn’t come yet…The next time that happens I will try to think of this and tell myself that it doesn’t matter if it’s perfect-code or not, if it works, someone else can benefit from it and maybe even do some of that tidying up along the way!This is refreshing, thank you.Amen, brother. I’ve now started… for example: if I write a react component just to play with the framework, it’s getting a github public repo.Time and Money, if only we could convince the people who had those things to allow for work on our software it’d make life a lot simpler.