Holy shit. Didn't know I had to vent this out before I had revisited this shit.

Storytime!

Back in May last year, I started working on a dream project (call project X) of mine. Surprisingly it's still a novel idea and shit like this doesn't exist. Made some huge incremental changes. Added all the necessary automation pipeline stuff. Added some sick ass readme with screenshots/badges/glitz/glam.

Worked my ass of for about a month or so until I got distracted by other pending projects in need of clearances. Somewhere partway in that clearance period, I receive a mail from this "GitHub user" asking me why the development of project X had suddenly stopped.

I was a bit taken aback. Firstly because my project had ZERO stars and NO user interaction. Secondly because I hadn't encountered someone with confrontation like this since my middle-school teacher asking me for my homework.

Being the good, responsible child I am, I informed them on my situation and asked them to contribute according to the guidelines and I'd be more than happy to see this becoming a joint effort by the community.

Apparently, they were quite ecstatic to learn that my development was halted. They didn't have plans to contribute. Instead they wanted me to take down the project and stop working on it entirely.

Tough luck fucko.

Their organization had been working on something similar for longer than a couple of years. A similar open-sourced project will *apparently* ruin their market impact and I can *apparently* be sued for it.

I don't know much about open-source "laws" (and I've seen laws fuck people over) but this just seems retarded. At the moment, I'm not quite sure how to continue with the project. I'll still work on it but the fact being that I started receiving threats before stars makes me question the gatekeeping capacity of toxic market conditions (I still don't blame the person entirely. It's just really hard to keep your head above the water)

This is a one off thing but somehow it has definitely hampered my drive to work on the project (combined with the sheer amount of pending project that I've dug my grave with).

On the brighter side I've got 10 anonymous stars with zero promotion. 2 new message threads with productive insights and a person who says "I'm relying on this to work out". So not everything has gone to shit.

It really grinds my gears if colleagues from non-technical departments attempt to use technical terms but use them wrong. It might be gatekeeping but please, use a technical term if you are confident you are using it correctly. Otherwise use layman's words. Using technical terms incorrectly sends our brains down the wrong road and we have to make a mental U turn. And you sound like a masterhacker from a TV show or movie.

On the game front, I see so much conflicting advice. "Start getting feedback" as soon as possible. "Donnt soft launch on steam! The algol will wreck you.", "soft launch on itch to get feedback", "dont soft launch on itch!"

"Start marketing today", "focus on influencers", "get to know communities *before* you advertise", "dont get to know communities beforehand if you're just planning on self prompting", "dont self promote".
"CPM is important.", "CPA is important". Etc.

Sounds a lot like "have a bunch of money upfront." The solution is just to succeed from the start! It's so obvious. Just invent the next gta. The next facebook. Get a small loan of 50,000 dollars, or a million. Donate for a year to other kickstarter projects so people will know you and reciprocate! But also dont ebeg!

How about no. How about fuck all this advice by silver spoon assholes that didnt have to work on shoestring budgets. The advice is the equivalent of having a 300 page tonedeaf book, every page blank except page 150, where the words "fuck you. I got mine." Are printed in times new Roman, 14pt font, neatly in the center of the page.

The truth is most of the "indies" already made it in the software industry proper, before switching over. $5k kickstarter videos, with $15k marketing budgets, no doubt funded in part through their own money funneled through services that provide shell donations, because KS is being used as a glorified advertising service. People buying off steam curators for promotions, youtubers making sponsored videos without disclosing they're sponsored. Fake viralility. Fake campaigns. Predetermined success for those who could *already* afford to develop and go commercial without a publisher. And they came into the market and cannibalized the opportunity, raising the bar for everyone that wasnt them. I guess that's actually a good thing, because we wouldnt have half the amazing games we do, and the pressure to produce quality. But then I see fantastic games utterly ignored or flailing in an attempt to compete for eyeballs in an industry frequently dominated by gatekeeping marketeers and influencers, where human grace determines success or complete oblivion. And I'm just disgusted with it.

Also buy my game. Preorder NOW! And you'll get a REAL canvas bag, I'll go to like the goodwill and buy one and screen print the game logo on it or some shit. Buy the special collectors edition and get pictures of my feet. Buy the game of the year edition and get a real gasmask. Preorder now and I'll fucking suck your di k right now. No lie. Preorder the diamond edition RIGHT NOW in the next six minutes and I will send you one hundred thousand dollars in gold plated bottle caps. Limited supply. one million per customer. Offer expires soon. This is not a scam. I repeat. This is NOT a scam.

In other news I'm soft launching Atom Ranger in six months (assuming the nuclear apocalypse hasn't *actually* started by then). Its state of decay and fallout meets rimworld. Build and manage a sprawling base, resolving conflicts, exploring post apocalyptic Colorado and surrounding territories of no-mans-land. Navigate hazardous weather, radioactive terrain, collapsed bridges, dangerous rivers, and deal with cultists, bandits, slavers, and hungry cannibals. Broker peace between not just the factions outside your settlements, but within your base too. Manage conflicts, settle disputes, avert disasters, barter, scavenge, and survive in a fully dynamic world, where buildings slowly crumble, grass and trees sprout up in the road and vacant lots, fires burn out of control, and factions loot, ruin, and takeover settlements. Watch the world and the survivors in it change and survive. Help them to survive, or become a warlord and rule over the wastes.

Lets be honest. It's basically kenshi but less complicated.

If you want to volunteer to test (instead of paying to be a glorified tester, aka "alpha") let me know in the comments.

I'm currently setting up a discord and mailing list.

An online community I've been part of for years has seen a lot of popularity/hate overnight due to a new policy. The influx of new people who want nothing to do with us but just drop by to troll and be cunts is impressive. Also, a significant amount of bots. I want my online home back :( I'm for the new policy and very much against these new clowns who don't really have any reason to be on our page. Before anyone yells gatekeeping, it's a site about knitting and crochet. Why would you go there if you don't know either craft and have no desire to learn or talk about those? So disappointed. I hope it brought new crafters in and that the trolls will go away soon. It's been such a nice place for so long with barely any idiots because it was reasonably small.. And now look at this mess. I logged in to 20 friend requests from people I don't know and am almost certain aren't real people.

Why is it so hard for humans to accept that some people may disagree with them and that's okay?

Dr. Robert Ford is that dev who made himself indispensable to the organisation by deliberately not commenting his code. He operated under the notion of those senior developers that are the physical manifestation of the documentation gatekeeping the project

For me, per day:
-> what the client pays/ what the gatekeeping consultancy sells me for: 1200 (profit +- 400/66%)
-> what the gatekeeping consultancy pays/ what my consultancy sells me for: 600 (profit +- 200/66% - extralegal advantages cost)
-> what my consultancy pays me gross: 300
-> what I get net after wage taxes: 150

The state takes +- 500 in wage & company tax in the whole process.
That´s why I give you my full 20%-capacity effort.

StackOverflow veterans: "this is an elitist meritocracy, so play by the rules to earn reputation and practice the same gatekeeping behavior that we have established for years." Then they wonder why mostly white male US academic guys keep engaging in their community.

Yes, it's "stackoverflow again".

Another one of those sites you can't really avoid as a dev, too good to ignore, to bad not to get upset about. Maybe also a mirror of antisocial patterns still prevalent in society and especially in the developer industry.

Hey, a bit of a dumb question.

When can someone call themselves a "real" programmer? I'm not one to gatekeep and say dumb shit like "iF yOu OnLy KnOw PyThOn Ur NoT a PrOgRaMmEr!", but I guess I want to know when I can call myself one. All I've done so far is make unpolished games in Unity for school that are created only to meet some requirements. I've also worked in my class' team for collaborative Unreal games, which has been painful to say the least. So, when I can stop gatekeeping myself over it? What sorts of experiences should I have? I understand that it's not a list of requirements like my projects are, but I'd like a general idea of when I can call myself a real developer.

Hey, so I'm making this just to be able to create and avatar but I want to bring something up - why is there so much elitism/gatekeeping in programming in general? Why aren't devs more open to helping interns/juniors out?

I wish we could stop to push candidates to do TDD or even asking questions about it during interview. This thing is a lie, has always been and will ever be. It is cool for small coding exercises but nothing else.
Let’s stop gatekeeping with stupid concepts.

On stackoverflow, I saw a new user post a comment as an answer, probably just because they had not enough reputation to post a comment. Before I could finish a helpful comment about the situation, that post got downvoted -5 and deleted because the user considered his own abilities "shitty" which was considered an illegal swear word by stackoverflow. Stackoverflow is like the Sunday school of programming, oh my ️🤦‍♂️😠

StackOverflow gatekeepers: "Voting is already communicating." Maybe it is, but in such a minimal way like an error message saying "an error occurred". Sadly this is current UX as well as long as nerds are in charge. Sometimes I feel ashamed to be a developer. Are we human or robots?

The hotly debated topic that anybody can learn to code is always seems to devolve into a definitional or even epistemological argument to the point of being valueless. But I like to think about it like this:

Anybody can learn to code in the same way anybody can learn to drive. The most rudimentary of searches for 'dash cam fails' should provide some valuable context for the practical implications of this.

"This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers." (not my question, but by a newbie who, for some reason I will never find out, tried to use an outdated Ubuntu version)

Seen that bullshit so many times.
If you don't have a minute to ask a question to a new contributor, but you do have the time to downvote or close questions, do you really think you are doing the community a favour?

I see that AskUbuntu is not a little bit better than StackOverflow. I will just shut up and leave the assholes alone then they can tell the newbies that they're not welcome on any StackExchange and that's it.

Any advice on how to deal with gatekeeping developers? How to deal with red tape?

I work with people that are resistant to code and process change. Continuous pedantic pushback on nearly anything; one raised a fuss over metrics not being satisfactory at a 5% threshold for alerting stating that 4.99% metrics variance wouldn't trigger an alert.

It's genuinely as though my coworkers are all scared of code based on the way they behave. They don't seem to code very often either.

I'm someone that codes quickly but I have to constantly write proposals for quite literally any change to the codebase. Even IF there were issues we could always rollback (and even then we have metrics, alerts, canary rollouts, feature flags, etc etc). As a quick aside, my pace isn't related to the pushback nor experience/skill level. Just affects my morale and mental heth to be blocked.

I can communicate effectively and I try to be as clear as possible in my proposals but this is absolutely driving me up the wall and killing my motivation.

This is a faang-level company and I would've expected better.

Any advice on how to best navigate this? Is this the norm???

In any field, there's a noisy couple of Orthodoxs whining that this or that isn't halal enough and that people who do that are retards. Remember, by gatekeeping your community and abusing outsiders, all they do is to defend their turf.

Those people should die.

The only community that is more toxic than Software is Gaming. Mfs gatekeeping openly. If you haven't been called a noob, you haven't played a game in your life. I thought this was just CSGO community but turns out Valorant is full of same shitheads. Frustrated fucktards.