- Sat Jan 17, 2015 5:37 am
#7495
That's really great for lots of reasons!!
1 - you get some small reward for the work you did in the past and then shared freely - it can be thirsty work programming!
2 - if problems come up in the future, and you fix them, you may well get more beer!
3 - it is a way of people saying that what you do is valuable to them, we all need to see our impact on the world.
4 - look at the actual process for doing small software projects - in our open-source world - you get feedback from users immediately, they say thank you and buy you beer just because they really want to, not because some contract got signed. You feel that what you do is important and worth you spending time and effort over. Too many times I've seen salaried software development mired in hell - the dev's don't care about the project, managers don't understand the problem or the devs, you wouldn't do it if you weren't paid to be there.
This way is the road to hell, and certainly if any quality software got written it was in spite of the process, not because of it. Making things in hardware or software is part engineering, part art, and you can't make art within a performance management framework or a process control system. You need to be intrinsically motivated to do any really good work, having money etc. waved around isn't any substitute for caring about this. (Obviously we need to eat, if you are actually hungry this is a motivation!)
Anyhow, keep up the good work
G
