Stopping at 90%
I put a lot of work into doing the last 10% for a project recently, and I'm not convinced yet that I'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.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't required at all, I could have just presented it as a poster.The feedback of the people seeing the polished demo was fantastic, but now I'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.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.[0]: https://fraunhoferhhi.github.io/X-maps/