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Who Finds the Bugs?
My apps collect nothing, so no crash report has ever told me about a bug. Today I found three in an afternoon, simply by using the apps for my work. That is how the bugs get found here, and it has a blind spot the size of one person.
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Not Invented Here
I built SpaceMan because nothing else remembered my window arrangement the way I wanted. Somebody else has since built a better version of it, so SpaceMan is retired and I am contributing to the app that beat it. The price of admission is the one idea in SpaceMan I was actually proud of.
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I Love Open Source Software Development
I released MenuTidy, QuitProtect and RainbowApple when I thought they were finished. Then people I had never met arrived on GitHub with bug reports, feature requests, translations and code — including one pull request I closed that still led me to a serious fault of my own. All three apps are better for it, and this is a thank-you to the open source community for lending me the one thing I cannot contribute to my own projects: another pair of eyes.
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Changelog: QuitProtect 2.0.9, 2.1.0 and 2.2.0
Three releases in a day, prompted by the first substantial contribution anyone has ever sent me. QuitProtect now speaks Simplified Chinese, has an optional overlay telling you what to do next, and no longer claims to be protecting you when it isn’t. That last one was mine, and I only found it because I was reading someone else’s code.
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Better Late Than Never
An afternoon with no business case whatsoever: I opened the dead issue tracker of a PHP library I’d kept frozen since 2014 — eighty-five issues, the newest a decade old — and cleared the lot. Not by mass-closing, but by reading every one, fixing the two that were genuinely still broken, and replying by hand to all eighty-five people who’d once filed into a void. This is the whole story: the humane method, the gnarliest bug (a one-character CSS mistake that survived ten years), and what a dead repo taught me about the actual shape of software maintenance.
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Open by Design: Why I Contribute to the Public Domain
Every app, every line of source code, every screensaver — free, open source, public domain. No catches, no conditions, no asterisks. Here's why.
Community
Open source, contributors, and other people’s projects. 6 notes.