Applying the Web Dev Mindset to Dealing With Life Challenges - Related to applying, life, dealing, web, promoting

5 tips for promoting your open source project

After months or years of hard work, you’ve just pushed your open source project to GitHub and made it public. Now it’s time to tell the world about it.

Chances are you’d rather spend time writing code than getting the word out about your project. Maybe your project will go viral and you won’t have to spend much time on marketing. But chances are you’re going to need to do some work to build awareness, at least in the early days. Fortunately, there are plenty of people who have been down this path and are willing to help. In this article, experienced maintainers offer their advice on sharing open source projects with the world.

Start with the obvious. Post to social media about your project. Submit it to Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt, and similar sites. Then keep an eye peeled for people who have the problem that you’re trying to solve. Respond to their posts and let them know you have a potential solution. Reach out to podcasts and YouTube channels. Submit talks to conferences. Offer to speak at meetups.

Keep promoting your work as you improve the project. Remember that people want to hear about helpful tools that solve real problems, as long as you’re genuinely trying to help, and not just spamming your followers. You might not be comfortable with self promotion, but you need to promote your work to get it out there. “You shouldn’t feel icky about it,” Sidecar maintainer Aaron Francis told us in a Q&A. “You put a lot of time into making something helpful.”.

Focus on the problem your project solves.

What should you say when you’re promoting your work? First and foremost, you need to know what problem your project solves and be able to communicate that to potential customers as simply as possible. “One of the biggest mistakes I see is the use of too much technical terminology,” says Chakra UI maintainer Segun Adebayo. It might be tempting to talk about the technologies you’ve built your solution upon, or the latest buzzwords you think customers might be interested in. Open source customers are, after all, often your fellow developers and technical people. But it’s easy to go overboard and obscure the value of the project.

For example, your project might make clever use of decentralized computing principles, points out Tasha Drew, co-chair for Kubernetes’ Working Group for Multi-tenancy, but what people really care about is why they should use it. “What’s the message you want people to take away from your webpage or your README? It’s probably not related to the theory behind the code,” she says.

Use that core message everywhere: Social media posts and profiles, blog posts, tutorials, etc.

Getting someone’s attention is only one part of the battle. If you want people to actually use, share, and contribute to your project, you need clear, up-to-date documentation. “Write as much as you can stand to write,” Francis says. Not only will it make your user experience enhanced, it might even improve your code. “If you find it’s hard to document a particular feature, that’s probably a sign that it’s too complicated and you need to simplify it,” he explains.

Think beyond just documenting the code. You should provide things like quick starts, tutorials, and screencasts. “Video is really helpful for a lot of people,” Adebayo says. “People learn in different ways so it’s critical to provide different types of content.”.

No matter how good your documentation is, people are still going to have questions—and, if you’re lucky, pull requests. It’s significant to be responsive, especially when you’re just starting out. “Time is finite, we only get one life, so value those people who are willing to spend some of their precious resources on you,” Francis says. “That applies not just to people sending pull requests, but to people pointing out problems or making suggestions on social media as well.”.

That doesn’t mean you have to be on call 24/7 to provide an immediate reply to every single question and comment. But it does mean you shouldn’t let pull requests, issues, and comments sit for too long without a response. You have to let people know your project is active, and that you value their input. “It might be intimidating at first to interact with people you don’t know, but you have to do it if you want to grow,” says Adebayo. “This is a sure way to meet new people and make new friends that might be helpful to you in the future.”.

You need to document both how to use your project, and how to contribute to it. Create [website] and [website] files with your contribution guidelines and code of conduct. These let potential contributors know that you’re open to contributions and that you’ve put some thought into working with others. It’s especially helpful to provide a list of what you would, and would not, like potential contributors to help with.

Remember that non-code contributions, like documentation, support, and graphic design, are a big part of any successful project. While these aren’t necessarily non-technical, you shouldn’t assume too much technical knowledge. “You want to make your language and project easy to understand so that people of various technical skill levels will be interested,” Drew says.

Also be sure to take advantage of the “Help wanted” and “Good first issue” labels. These can help people who are looking for ways to contribute find your project.

Get started contributing to open source now.

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Applying the Web Dev Mindset to Dealing With Life Challenges

Editor’s note: This article is outside the typical range of topics we normally cover around here and touches on sensitive topics including recollections from an abusive marriage. It doesn’t delve into much detail about the abuse and ends on a positive note. Thanks to Lee for sharing his take on the intersection between life and web development and for allowing us to gain professional insights from his personal life.

When my dad was alive, he used to say that work and home life should exist in separate “watertight compartments.” I shouldn’t bring work home or my home life to work. There’s the quote misattributed to Mark Twain about a dad seeming to magically grow from a fool to a wise man in the few years it took the son to grow from a teen to an adult — but in my case, the older I get, the more I question my dad’s advice.

It’s easy to romanticize someone in death — but when my dad wasn’t busy yelling, gambling the rent money, or disappearing to another state, his presence was like an AI simulating a father, throwing around words that sounded like a thing to say from a dad, but not helpful if you stopped to think about his statements for more than a minute.

Let’s state the obvious: you shouldn’t do your personal life at work or work too much overtime when your family needs you. But you don’t need the watertight compartments metaphor to understand that. The way he stated it hinted at something more complicated and awful — it was as though he wanted me to have a split personality. I shouldn’t be a developer at home, especially around him because he couldn’t relate, since I got my programming genes from my mum. And he didn’t think I should pour too much of myself into my dev work. The grain of truth was that even if you love your job, it can’t love you back. Yet what I’m hooked on isn’t one job, but the power of code and language.

The lonely coder seems to free his mind at night.

Maybe my dad’s platitudinous advice to maintain a distance between my identity and my work would be practicable to a bricklayer or a president — but it’s poorly suited to someone whose brain is wired for web development. The job is so multidisciplinary it defies being put in a box you can leave at the office. That puzzle at work only makes sense because of a comment the person you love noted before bedtime about the usability of that mobile game they play. It turns out the app is a competitor to the next organization you join, as though the narrator of your life planted the earlier scene like a Chekov’s gun plot point, the relevance of which is revealed when you have that “a-ha” moment at work.

Meanwhile, existence is so online that as you try to unwind, you can’t unsee the matrix you helped create, even when it’s well past 5 [website] The user interface you are building wants you to be a psychologist, an artist, and a scientist. It demands the best of every part of you. The answer about implementing a complex user flow elegantly may only come to you in a dream.

Don’t feel too bad if it’s the wrong answer. Douglas Crockford believes it’s a miracle we can code at all. He postulates that the mystery of how the human brain can program when he sees no evolutionary basis is why we haven’t hit the singularity. If we understood how our brains create software, we could build an AI that can program well enough to make a program more effective than itself. It could do that recursively till we have an AI smarter than us.

And yet so far the best we have is the likes of the aptly named Github Copilot. The branding captures that we haven’t hit the singularity so much as a duality, in which humanity hopefully harmonizes with what Noam Chomsky calls a “kind of super-autocomplete,” the same way autotune used right can make a good singer sound more effective, or it can make us all sound like the same robot. We can barely get our code working even now that we have all evolved into AI-augmented cyborgs, but we also can’t seem to switch off our dev mindset at will.

My dev brain has no “off” switch — is that a bug or a feature?

What if the ability to program represents a different category of intelligence than we can measure with IQ tests, similar to neurodivergence, which carries unique strengths and weaknesses? I once read a study in which the researchers devised a test that appeared to accurately predict which first-year computer science students would be able to learn to program. They concluded that an aptitude for programming correlates with a “comfort with meaninglessness.” The researchers noted that to write a program you have to “accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test, the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact.”.

The realization is dangerous, as both George Orwell and Philip K. Dick warned us. If you can control what words mean, you can control people and not just machines. If you have been swiping on Tinder and take a moment to sit with the feelings you associate with the phrases “swipe right” and “swipe left,” you find your emotional responses reveal that the app’s visual language has taught you what is good and what is bad. This recalls the scene in “Through the Looking-Glass,” in which Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that words mean what he wants them to mean. Humpty’s not the nicest dude. The Alice books can be interpreted as Dodgson’s critique of the Victorian education system which the author thought robbed children of their imagination, and Humpty makes his comments about language in a “scornful tone,” as though Alice should not only accept what he says, but she should know it without being told. To use a term that itself means different things to different people, Humpty is gaslighting Alice. At least he’s more transparent about it than modern gaslighters, and there’s a funny xkcd in which Alice uses Humpty’s logic against him to take all his possessions.

Perhaps the ability to shape reality by modifying the consensus on what words mean isn’t inherently good or bad, but in itself “meaningless,” just something that is true. It’s probably not a coincidence the person who coined the phrases “the map is not the territory” and “the word is not the thing” was an engineer. What we do with this knowledge depends on our moral compass, much like someone with a penchant for cutting people up could choose to be a surgeon or a serial killer.

For around seven years, I was with a person who was psychologically and physically abusive. Abuse boils down to violating boundaries to gain control. As awful as that was, I do not think the person was irrational. There is a natural appeal for human beings pushing boundaries to get what they want. Kids do that naturally, for example, and pushing boundaries by making CSS do things it doesn’t want to is the premise of my articles on CSS-Tricks. I try to create something positive with my impulse to exploit the rules, which I hope makes the world slightly more illuminated. However, to understand those who would do us harm, we must first accept that their core motivation meets a relatable human need, albeit in unacceptable ways.

It reminds me of the trope that cops and criminals share many personality traits. Everyone who works in technology shares the mindset that allows me to bend the meaning and assumptions within technology to my will, which is why the qualifiers of blackhat and whitehat exist. They are two sides of the same coin. However, the utility of applying the rule-bending mindset to life itself has been recognized in the popularization of the term “life hack.” Hopefully, we are whitehat life hackers. A life hack is like discovering emergent gameplay that is a logical if unexpected consequence of what occurs in nature. It’s a conscious form of human evolution.

If you’ve worked on a popular website, you will find a surprisingly high percentage of people follow the rules as long as you explain properly. Then again a large percentage will ignore the rules out of laziness or ignorance rather than malice. Then there are hackers and developers, who want to understand how the rules can be used to our advantage, or we are just curious what happens when we don’t follow the rules. When my seven-year-old does his online math, he sometimes deliberately enters the wrong answer, to see what animation triggers. This is a benign form of the hacker mentality — but now it’s time to talk about my experience with a lifehacker of the blackhat variety, who liked experimenting with my deepest insecurities because exploiting them served her purpose.

Verbal abuse is like a cross-site scripting attack.

William Faulkner wrote that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Although I now share my life with a person who is kind, supportive, and fascinating, I’m arguably still trapped in the previous, abusive relationship, because I have children with that person. Sometimes you can’t control who you receive input from, but recognizing the potential for that input to be malicious and then taking control of how it is interpreted is how we defend against both cross-site scriptingand verbal abuse.

For example, my ex would input the word “stupid” and plenty of other names I can’t share on this blog. She would scream this into my consciousness again and again. It is just a word, like a malicious piece of JavaScript a user might save into your website. It’s a set of characters with no inherent meaning. The way you allow it to be interpreted does the damage. When the “stupid” script ran in my brain, it was laden with meanings and assumptions in the way I interpreted it, like a keyword in a high-level language that has been designed to represent a set of lower-level instructions:

Intelligence was conflated with my self-worth. I believed she would not say the hurtful things after her tearful promises not to say them again once she was aware it hurt me, as though she was not aware the first time. I felt trapped being called names because I believed the relationship was something I needed. I believed the input at face value that my actual intelligence was the issue, rather than the power my ex gained over me by generating the reaction she wanted from me by her saying one magic word.

Patching the vulnerabilities in your psyche.

My psychologist pointed out that the ex likely knew I was not stupid but the intent was to damage my self-worth to make me easy to control. To acknowledge my strengths would not achieve that. I also think my brand of intelligence isn’t the type she values. For instance, the strengths that make me capable of being a software engineer are invisible to my abuser. Ultimately it’s irrelevant whether she believed what she was shouting — because the purpose was the effect her words had, rather than their surface-level meaning. The vulnerability she exploited was that I treated her input as a first-class citizen, able to execute with the same privileges I had given to the scripts I had written for myself. Once I sanitized that input using therapy and self-hypnosis, I stopped allowing her malicious scripts to have the same importance as the scripts I had written for myself, because she didn’t deserve that privilege. The untruths about myself have lost their power — I can still review them like an inert block of JavaScript but they can’t hijack my self-worth.

Like Alice using Humpty Dumpty’s logic against him in the xkcd cartoon, I showed that if words inherently have no meaning, there is no reason I can’t reengineer myself so that my meanings for the words trump how the abuser wanted me to use them to hurt myself and make me question my reality. The sanitized version of the “stupid” script rewrites those statements to:

I want to hurt you. I want to get what I want from you. I want to lower your self-worth so you will believe I am advanced than you so you won’t leave.

When you translate it like that, it has nothing to do with actual intelligence, and I’m secure enough to jokingly call myself an idiot in my previous article. It’s not that I’m colluding with the ghost of my ex in putting myself down. Rather, it’s a way of permitting myself not to be perfect because somewhere in human fallibility lies our ability to achieve what a computer can’t. I once worked with a manager who when I had a bug would say, “That’s good, at least you know you’re not a robot.” Being an idiot makes what I’ve achieved with CSS seem more beautiful because I work around not just the limitations in technology, but also my limitations. Some people won’t like it, or won’t get it. I have made peace with that.

We never expose ourselves to needless risk, but we must stay in our lane, assuming malicious input will keep trying to find its way in. The motive for that input is the malicious user’s journey, not ours. We limit the attack surface and spend our energy understanding how to protect ourselves rather than dwelling on how malicious people shouldn’t attempt what they will attempt.

In my new relationship, there was a stage in which my partner noted that dating me was starting to feel like “a job interview that never ends” because I would endlessly vet her to avoid choosing someone who would hurt me again. The job interview analogy was sadly apt. I’ve had interviews in which the process maps out the scars from how the organization has previously inadvertently allowed negative forces to enter. The horror trope in which evil has to be invited reflects the truth that we unknowingly open our door to mistreatment and negativity.

My musings are not to be confused with victim blaming, but abusers can only abuse the power we give them. Therefore at some point, an interviewer may ask a question about what you would do with the power they are mulling handing you —and a web developer requires a lot of trust from a firm. The interviewer will explain: “I ask because we’ve seen people do [X].” You can bet they are thinking of a specific person who did damage in the past. That knowledge might help you not to take the grilling personally. They probably didn’t give four interviews and an elaborate React coding challenge to the first few developers that helped get their firm off the ground. However, at a different level of maturity, an organization or a person will evolve in what they need from a new person. We can’t hold that against them. Similar to a startup that only exists based on a bunch of ill-considered high-risk decisions, my relationship with my kids is more treasured than anything I own, and yet it all came from the worst mistake I ever made. My driver’s license mentioned I was 30 but emotionally, I was unqualified to make the right decision for my future self, much like if you review your code from a year ago, it’s a good sign if you question what kind of idiot wrote it.

As determined as I was not to repeat that kind of mistake, my partner’s point about seeming to perpetually interview her was this: no matter how much older and wiser we think we are, letting a new person into our lives is ultimately always a leap of faith, on both sides of the equation.

Releasing a website into the wild represents another kind of leap of faith — but if you imagine an air-gapped machine with the best website in the world sitting on it where no human can access it, that has less value than the most primitive contact form that delivers value to a handful of customers. My gambling dad may have put his appetite for risk to poor use. But it’s significant to take calculated risks and trust that we can establish boundaries to limit the damage a bad actor can do, rather than kid ourselves that it’s possible to preempt risk entirely.

Hard things, you either survive them or you don’t. Getting security wrong can pose an existential threat to a enterprise while compromising on psychological safety can pose an existential threat to a person. Yet there’s a reason “being vulnerable” is a positive phrase. When we create public-facing websites, it’s our job to balance the paradox of opening ourselves up to the world while doing everything to mitigate the risks. I decided to risk being vulnerable with you today because I hope it might help you see dev and life differently. So, I put aside the CodePens to get a little more personal, and if I’m right that front-end coding needs every part of your psyche to succeed, I hope you will permit dev to change your life, and your life experiences to change the way you do dev. I have faith that you’ll create something positive in both realms.

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GitHub Copilot: The agent awakens

When we introduced GitHub Copilot back in 2021, we had a clear goal: to make developers’ lives easier with an AI pair programmer that helps them write advanced code. The name reflects our belief that artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t replacing the developer. Instead, it’s always on their side. And like any good first officer, Copilot can also fly by itself: for example, when providing pull request feedback, autofixing security vulnerabilities, or brainstorming on how to implement an issue.

Today, we are upgrading GitHub Copilot with the force of even more agentic AI – introducing agent mode and announcing the General Availability of Copilot Edits, both in VS Code. We are adding Gemini [website] Flash to the model picker for all Copilot customers. And we unveil a first look at Copilot’s new autonomous agent, codenamed Project Padawan. From code completions, chat, and multi-file edits to workspace and agents, Copilot puts the human at the center of the creative work that is software development. AI helps with the things you don’t want to do, so you have more time for the things you do.

GitHub Copilot’s new agent mode is capable of iterating on its own code, recognizing errors, and fixing them automatically. It can suggest terminal commands and ask you to execute them. It also analyzes run-time errors with self-healing capabilities.

In agent mode, Copilot will iterate on not just its own output, but the result of that output. And it will iterate until it has completed all the subtasks required to complete your prompt. Instead of performing just the task you requested, Copilot now has the ability to infer additional tasks that were not specified, but are also necessary for the primary request to work. Even more effective, it can catch its own errors, freeing you up from having to copy/paste from the terminal back into chat.

Here’s an example where GitHub Copilot builds a web app to track marathon training:

To get started, you’ll need to download VS Code Insiders and then enable the agent mode setting for GitHub Copilot Chat:

Then, when in the Copilot Edits panel, switch from Edit to Agent right next to the model picker:

Agent mode will change the way developers work in their editor; and as such, we will bring it to all IDEs that Copilot supports. We also know that today’s Insiders build isn’t perfect, and welcome your feedback as we improve both VS Code and the underlying agentic technology in the coming months.

showcased at GitHub Universe in October last year, Copilot Edits combines the best of Chat and Inline Chat with a conversational flow and the ability to make inline changes across a set of files that you manage. The feedback you provided in the past was instrumental in shipping this feature as GA in VS Code today. Thank you!

In Copilot Edits you specify a set of files to be edited, and then use natural language to ask GitHub Copilot for what you need. Copilot Edits makes inline changes in your workspace, across multiple files, using a UI designed for fast iteration. You stay in the flow of your code while reviewing the suggested changes, accepting what works, and iterating with follow-up asks.

Behind the scenes, Copilot Edits leverages a dual-model architecture to enhance editing efficiency and accuracy. First, a foundation language model considers a full context of the Edits session to generate initial edit suggestions. You can choose the foundation language model that you prefer between: OpenAI’s GPT-4o, o1, o3-mini, Anthropic’s Claude [website] Sonnet, and now, Google’s Gemini [website] Flash. For the optimal experience, we developed a speculative decoding endpoint, optimized for fast application of changes in files. The proposed edits from the foundation model are sent to the speculative decoding endpoint that will then propose those changes inline in the editor.

Using your voice is a natural experience while using Copilot Edits. Just talking to Copilot makes the back and forth smooth and conversational. It almost feels like interacting with a colleague with area expertise, using the same kind of iterative flow that you would use in real-life pair programming.

Next on our roadmap is to improve the performance of the apply changes speculative decoding endpoint, support transitions into Copilot Edits from Copilot Chat by preserving context, suggest files to the working set, and allow you to undo suggested chunks. If you want to be among the first to get your hands on these improvements, make sure to use VS Code Insiders and the pre-release version of the GitHub Copilot Chat extension. To help improve the feature, please file issues in our repo.

Beyond the GA in VS Code, Copilot Edits is now in preview for Visual Studio 2022.

SWE agents, first introduced in this paper, are a type of AI-driven or automated system that assists (or acts on behalf of) software engineers. They can perform various development tasks, like generating and reviewing code, refactoring or optimizing the codebase, automating workflows like tests or pipelines, and providing guidance on architecture, error troubleshooting, and best practices. They are intended to offload some of the routine or specialized tasks of a software engineer, giving them more time to focus on higher value work. The performance of SWE agents is often measured against SWE-bench, a dataset of 2,294 Issue-Pull Request pairs from 12 popular Python repos on GitHub.

We’re excited to share a first look at our autonomous SWE agent and how we envision these types of agents will fit into the GitHub user experience. When the product we are building under the codename Project Padawan ships later this year, it will allow you to directly assign issues to GitHub Copilot, using any of the GitHub clients, and have it produce fully tested pull requests. Once a task is finished, Copilot will assign human reviewers to the PR, and work to resolve feedback they add. In a sense, it will be like onboarding Copilot as a contributor to every repository on GitHub. ✨.

Behind the scenes, Copilot automatically spins up a secure cloud sandbox for every task it’s assigned. It then asynchronously clones the repository, sets up the environment, analyzes the codebase, edits the necessary files, and builds, tests, and lints the code. Additionally, Copilot takes into account any discussion within the issue or PR, and any custom instruction within the repository, so it understands the full intent of its task, as well as the guidelines and conventions of the project.

And just as we did with Copilot Extensions and the model picker in Copilot, we will also provide opportunities to integrate into this AI-native workflow and work closely with partners and people in a tight feedback loop. We believe the end-state of Project Padawan will result in transforming how teams manage critical-yet-mundane tasks, such as fixing bugs or creating and maintaining automated tests. Because ultimately, it’s all about empowering developers by allowing them to focus on what matters, and letting copilots do the rest. And don’t worry. We will have patience, so the agent won’t turn to the dark side. 😉.

Awaken the agent with agent mode for GitHub Copilot in VS Code today.

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