Just commit it.
or it is just me ranting. Take this with a grain of salt.
I like the feeling of navigating through the huge code bases made public by people I guess I would never have a chance to meet them in person. Some of the code bases are bad, some are brilliant, but I don’t get to choose and even if I do, I would choose both. I am forever grateful of the people who make their code public, even awful code.
And I like the public repositories on GitHub where developers voice their opinions and contribute to the code bases. The OSS community is so democratic from what I can see: If you don’t like it, feel free submit a PR or fork the code base and add changes on your own. If the changes are good enough, chances that they later become for everyone to use.
But here is something that bugs me recently: Some people sharing their laptop screens with some code in it. It is all fine and dandy but not until I see NO links to the GitHub/GitLab/… repositories. And sometimes ago when I was scrolling through Threads, I saw threads with people taking pictures of their coding sessions(?): Macbooks with fancy 4K monitors showing XCode or VSCode or whatever they are comformtable with, but the captions are so unrelated to what they are programming. Something like this:
Now now, I hear ye: A) I’m kinda a dick, and B) People can share whatever they want, why do I have to be such a dick? And I get it, I am a dick. Some of you are commiting to private repositories for work, some of you fear being judged by the quality of your code so you don’t do commit, or whatever reasons you can come up with. I get it, really, and I make exceptions for such cases.
But if showcasing what you code is allowed, say your spare-time projects, I say push the damn code because no one even cares. If they even do, they don’t judge, and if they judge, it could be some constructive criticism, you should try it sometimes. Hell, I bet some people just love reading other people’s code without judegement, and I am one of them.
I think my problem here is just for a niche group of people: Performative coding. From my book, performative coding (TM) is like performative reading—you read not because you enjoy the book, you just want to be seen by an audience. What is the damn point then? Just read the book. Do the actual thing.
I like showing people my code, even if my code is from tutorials (most of my code IS from tutorials actually). Call me a code exhibitionist: I feel good typing them out and getting the code soaked into my brain, because that is just how I learn things—getting my hands dirty. I even do (nearly) daily commits here:
(Yes I am showing off. No I don’t recommend doing this as we all have other things in mind, but what I do recommend is to stay consistent. You don’t have to push great changes—some small fixes or daily notes will do just fine)
So I just don’t get it. Why won’t you show off what you did? Why hiding it behind fancy desk setups and nonsense captions? We have GitHub, GitLab and a bajillion websites out there to show your code to the world with beautiful syntax highlighting and LLMs explaining every nitty-gritty of your code. So why the wait?
BTW, I would like to end this blog with a meme:
(Funny enough, I was trying to convert a video from mkv to mp4 with ffmpeg when I saw this meme. The command line was short and super readable, so I did not expect the messy codebase behind that)