Ask HN: Is it still conceivable to remain an anonymous developer nowadays?

• FinderFix

  10 69 2.7

  FinderFix lets you resize and reposition Finder windows to your liking

HN has been my morning coffee favourite read for years now but it's my very first post. I'm an old man, so please bare with me.

I am a seasoned systems architect and developer, now retired. While I was tempted in the first few weeks of my retirement to just turn the page and let it go, I remembered how much I used to enjoy writing small utilities for my own daily workflows. A year ago, I asked my fellow forum members (a Mac-dedicated one) if they would like to beta test some of my applications (and oh, they did). I got high quality feedback I would not have gotten elsewhere. I kept striving to answer their feature requests and today many of my first beta testers are insisting that my applications have outgrown the private beta.

I was caught completely off guard by FinderFix (https://synappser.github.io/apps/finderfix/), the first application I'm opening to public beta, making the top row on Reddit a couple of weeks ago. This sudden limelight is both an opportunity and a challenge.

I am not complaining. Any publicity is good publicity and I got this kind of genuine enthusiastic feedback: "OH MY GOD! Bro you’re a god sent. Thanks man I love this app. Also that Cmd + X for cut/paste. Oof so good!".

I however cherish anonymity and I laud the Internet for allowing me to enforce it. I am thus publishing my software under a pseudonym (a pen name, if you prefer) with a free Apple Developer Certificate. How long will I be able, with Apple's current Gatekeeper policy, to preserve my anonymity if I were to turn this hobby into a real business, albeit a small one?

For more context, please refer to a couple posts of mine (a manifesto of my core ethos):

http://synappser.github.io/blog/

I guess this is a tough question to answer, unless you're an Apple insider, but I'd really appreciate any guidance you could give me.

Thank you

• SQLite

  20 1,961 9.9 C

  Unofficial git mirror of SQLite sources (see link for build instructions) (by mackyle)

Daniel Stenberg, developer of very popular opensource library/utility curl, once received a threatening email:

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/

SQLite developers were receiving phone calls in the middle of the night, so decided to change temporary files prefix:

https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/3cf493d/src/os.h#L52-...

In both cases, their libraries were used in some other software, which upset users.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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