mini_racer VS Picnic CSS

Some years ago I was on a shitty job - not technically, but the company turned out to be inhumane - at a Ruby shop, and on the side I was toying with mini_racer and I just upgraded to some macOS beta where it failed to build. A shitty +1-1 hack† for a compiler flag later and it was back flying.

A month later I received a cold email from a CTO to chat a bit about that PR, turns out they were using mini_racer heavily and forked it for their own purpose, and also created PyMiniRacer for the Python side of things. Next thing I know I got hired. Two years later the company got acquired.

Of course conditionally adding a compiler flag wasn't what got me hired per se, it only got my profile noticed. Probably side projects such as porting go by example to Ruby by implementing a ~1:1 CSP channel API[1], an Electron desktop client for Mattermost basically on a dare[2], ex mode for the Atom editor so that I could have that frackin' `:w`[3], leveraging Blocks to bolt on object-oriented-ness onto C because "closures are a poor man's object"[4], or reverse-engineering the Xbox One USB gamepad and writing a kext to turn it into a HID device on macOS from scratch on a lonely 7+h train ride with passengers judgementally staring at me sideways[4] probably contributed to it a bit.

My takeaway: luck is when preparation meets opportunity; but don't to side projects to get hired, because if you don't get hired then that time is lost. Rather, of all things, scratch your itch, have fun, embrace whatever quirkiness you fancy; no one can take that away from you.

[0]: https://github.com/rubyjs/mini_racer/commit/2086db1bbf2b5de4...

[1]: https://github.com/lloeki/normandy

[2]: https://github.com/lloeki/matterfront

[3]: https://github.com/lloeki/ex-mode

[4]: https://github.com/lloeki/cblocks-clobj/blob/master/main.c

[5]: https://github.com/lloeki/xbox_one_controller

Cue libv8-node+mini_racer from which PyMiniRacer was born. It is non-trivial but not as hard as one might think.

The most painful part is the libv8 build system and Google tooling, which makes it an absolute PITA for libv8 consumers that are not Chrome.

This is why the libv8 gem was atrocious to keep up to date and to build for several platforms, and why libv8-node was born, because the node build system and source distribution are actually sane.

Disclaimer: worked at Sqreen, now maintainer of libv8-node and collaborator of mini_racer

https://github.com/sqreen/PyMiniRacer

https://github.com/rubyjs/mini_racer

https://github.com/rubyjs/libv8-node

Eventually, we’ll want to call this JavaScript from a Rails controller using ExecJS or MiniRacer or some similar tool. None of the Ruby-to-JavaScript gems I found were sophisticated enough to know how to load npm modules with common.js or ES module syntax, so my solution is to just build the JavaScript with a watcher and have that run as part of bin/dev.

https://github.com/rubyjs/mini_racer/issues/190 has some info an then this PR: https://github.com/rubyjs/mini_racer/pull/210 that has been merged. Hope that all helps!

This was about 10 years ago, where there was Bootstrap, Pure CSS and little more, so I published:

https://picnicss.com/

It went to the front page of Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8315616). At the time I was a student in Spain doing coding just for fun, so any job-related opportunity would be slim and with really bad pay (I had actually already worked a bit as a dev for a pittance).

Someone contacted me and offered some really fun freelancing projects for what at the time seemed like an absurdly ridiculous large amount of money, so much that I got a great designer friend involved and split the money so the project would be even better.

I learned many things from that and as my curiosity pumped me to keep learning. I read about cases of people making 500k+/year as "normal" devs (meaning, not managers, and also not famous). Most of my Spanish peers didn't even believe that existed at the time, and thought I was crazy believing those "obviously fake" blog posts. But I've been working for USA companies basically since then, and couldn't be happier/wouldn't look back.

Picnic CSS:

https://picnicss.com/

My own and one of the older ones, almost 10 years ago, see the original Show HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8315616

Added support for Picnic CSS

2. Picnic.css

franciscop/picnic - 👜 A beautiful CSS library to kickstart your projects

I've disabled Issues in some of my more popular but end-user libraries and I couldn't be happier. Specially notorious was a CSS library[1] where many of the issues were on the level of "hey can you give me the code for X" or "how do you do X" where X was a general CSS question and not related to the library at all. I've received a bit of hate when I closed some of my repos issues as a PR [2][3]:

> If you spot a bug or any other issue you may go to hell because this software is officially Bug Free(TM).

> part of offering these to the public through open software is maintaining them and allowing feedback from users.

> It seems umbrella.js project suffers the same desease.

I've noticed there was a strong push around 2016-2018 to recommend newbie programmers NOT to go to Stackoverflow, but instead to ask the questions straight in the Github issues. Turns out, the problem was low quality questions and not the medium at all, and that just converted an issue that StackOverflow had solved long ago into burnout for open source developers on Github.

There's so many entitled developers out there that will come and demand changes. Github needs to step up their game and give authors more powerful tools. It might make new devs feel less welcome, but the balance is tipped way too much to allow anyone to create massive spam for projects right now.

[1] https://picnicss.com/

[2] https://github.com/franciscop/picnic/pull/203/files

[3] https://github.com/franciscop/picnic/pull/202