Grateful for extensions
Today, I spoke with someone about our extensions we have made and it made me realize something... I love making something, the challenge of not knowing how to do it and learning how to do it and the thrill of that moment of success! I'm the kind of person that if I don't know something, I want to challenge myself to figure it out; probably one of the reasons I am where I am today and where I will be in the future. But, it's nice to get a pat on the back for a good job once in a while.
Right now, I have about 70 private and public repositories of extensions, plugins and other code on GitHub. The public ones are of course free to use, private ones are either Sencha code or stuff I'm not ready to release. I also have lots of code on my local computer that I love tinkering with, plus seems I don't like putting server-side code up for some reason... JavaScript ftw!
Anyway, lots of people use code I have put up and a couple have even sent Pull Requests which is fantastic! Some people reach out to me to thank me which is also fantastic! But then you have those who use it and some who just complain because it doesn't work for their situation. You have to understand, most of the time people create extensions for their personal projects but there are many times where things are created just to create something and give back. For instance, my grid component for Sencha Touch 1 and 2 I created for no reason. To be honest, I have yet to use it in an actual application but it's my mostly used extension. I have spent many hours working on it and changing things for some people and I don't have a whole lot of free time these days so an hour is quite valuable to me. There really has only been a handful of people who have given back or thanked me for my work.
On the flip side, my repositories kind of make up my resume as I treat my name as a brand so I shouldn't expect anything back but if I look at something someone created or even use it I will tweet about it and/or post on the Sencha forums thanking the person or giving suggestions. It really wouldn't be a first time I have forked a project to pitch in development. I do my best to at least give back by thanking if nothing else. Sort of like my work on the Sencha forums, I answer a lot of questions but thanks is few and far in-between. That is my job really so that doesn't bother me much but creating things for the sake of creating things for people isn't my job, I do it to provide solutions for people and to teach myself.
Do note, this blog post is also therapeutic to get something off my chest. The reason this is categorized as Personal so take it all with a grain of salt.
