Being Ridiculed for My Open Source Project (2013)
&gt; I tell them to make something that they would find useful and put it out there. Can you imagine if one of these new open sourcerers took my advice and got this response, without the support I had. Can you imagine?<p>That brought forward a repressed&#x2F;unref&#x27;d memory...<p>Way back in the late 00&#x27;s, a teenage me was dipping his toes into contributing to open source projects. I don&#x27;t recall the specific project and won&#x27;t try to guess, but I can vividly recall this horrible response I got after posting some code for review.<p>Some presumably older person on the mailing list discovered I was, in fact, a teenager. Went on a tirade about how &quot;children&quot; need to stay out of programming - on the project&#x27;s mailing list. Nothing about the code, just an attack on me because of my age.<p>I remember asking my parents what they thought. They told me I could be interested in whatever I damn well please to be, and that if I could avoid internalizing the response, reach out to this person and see whatever they had to say. Needless to say, this person didn&#x27;t have anything friendly or actionable to say in a direct email either.<p>I think that&#x27;s the first time I ever bumped into an asshat online.<p>Oh well, joke&#x27;s on him. I only became more interested in computing and started a career in it.