Stopping at 90%
I put a lot of work into doing the last 10% for a project recently, and I&#x27;m not convinced yet that I&#x27;ll be getting anything out of it, other than my own satisfaction. After my colleagues and I got our paper (on real-time depth estimation with an event camera and a laser projector [0]) accepted at a workshop, we could have just dumped the convoluted, messy research code on GitHub and be done with it. For other people to figure it out, if they really cared.<p>But I sat down and completely rewrote all the scaffolding around the presented algorithm, to make for a smooth and fast demo. Wrote up documentation for the implementation, gave it a command line interface, set up a script to reproduce the measurements in the paper with a single execution (downloading the required data and comparing several methods). Broadcast in all channels available to me (institution press release, LinkedIn posts, GitHub awesome list linkings). And I actually brought the demo to the workshop, which wasn&#x27;t required at all, I could have just presented it as a poster.<p>The feedback of the people seeing the polished demo was fantastic, but now I&#x27;m sitting here with my 5 GitHub stars on the repo, after I put like 2.5 extra months of work into it. Maybe it led to more people noticing it, and finding it useful. Maybe not.<p>Getting stuff out there to be noticed is difficult, a lot of work, and going the the last 10% does not guarantee any more success.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fraunhoferhhi.github.io&#x2F;X-maps&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fraunhoferhhi.github.io&#x2F;X-maps&#x2F;</a>