Logbook

"Write one sentence." - implementing "sisyphus" across multiple platforms

My magnum opus of published open source software is sisyphus, which is a simple little shell script that produces a random pair of suggestions of things to do next. The observation is that the world is full of repeated tasks that never make it onto todo lists, and that being mindful of same helps get you away from the keyboard and into real life.

My modest goal for sisyphus is to implement it into every environment that I touch. I think of it as randomness as a microservice, or perhaps just an exercise in connecting a tiny shell script to some hulking bit of complex infrastructure.

Some list of places this might show up if I get the right combination of time and energy:

• an OpenFaas function on top of faasd on a Pi 4
• a Jamstack function in Netlify
• a dynamic page in Gopher or Gemini
• the page https://sisyphus.annarbortelegraph.com somehow
• at the end of a curl command
• implemented in Go, Python 3, or Rust
• as a Telegram bot or a Slack command
• in a protected environment requiring two factor auth to access
• via a function call that generates a postcard

Fortunately the algorithm at the heart of sisyphus is very simple, as implemented by the GNU "shuf" command. And also fortunately the data set it shuffles from is small enough that there is no risk of any kind of performance problem, no matter how hard I try to make things fast or slow it shouldn't matter much.

More at the sisyphus repo on Github.

sustainability and open source

How do you incentivize people to act or work towards sustainability of an OSS project? -

Adhita, query posted to Twitter, August 30 2020.

Twitter is too small to answer such a good question.

There's a lot of variety within open source, and a lot of levels of project maturity. Sustainability for a personal project with a few casual followers is really different from the same question about the Linux kernel, because the kernel has already been through more than 25 years of sustained effort, and your initial commits have not.

25 years! And it's still not done. So perhaps that's one sustainability key objective - never admit to being finished with anything, so that there's always a free surface to experiment on or to take new contributions.

Sustained effort on a project is the combination of lots of factors - financial, for one, but also personal and structural. It's easy to be motivated by work if your next paycheck depends on it, and it's easy to stop being motivated by work on open source if your circumstances change and it's no longer sensible for you to know or care about how that particular bit of software works in order to make your living.

It's very hard to get sustained effort on anything that doesn't provide someone with sustenance. You have to believe that core maintainers of projects have figured out how to get an income out of their efforts, or to believe that they have figured out how to get an income out of something else that pays for this particular itch to be scratched. If you can't believe either scenario then it's likely that the project is not sustainable, not at least to the extent that it depends on the original effort to continue.

"Form follows funding" is pithy; but also "Follow your passion". It's hard to divide your passion among several competing projects, especially projects in a state where there's lots of interest but few contributions. The most sustainable way to keep a project moving forward may be to abandon it once it becomes a burden! The inrush, if any, of people and resources applied to keeping it going ahead may not accrue to you directly as ex-maintainer, but the project itself may work out better with someone new in the lead.

There are lots of open source stories, of projects that have had continuous sustained effort by one person, and projects that have changed hands a few times. Sustaining your personal effort might not be healthy, even if it's good for the project and the net. Open source gets abandoned, reinvented, forked, appropriated, and buried as dependencies in other projects. If you can see your way forward to a personal or career goal that is improved by open source, you can sustain that effort throughout a career.