6 ms·

Funding Open Source: How Webpack Reached $400k+/year

118 points by naspeh 9y ago

hguhghuff 9y ago
Maybe they could employ a programmer who knows how to turn unbelievably complex software into incredibly simple software that doesn't include constant relentless breaking changes.
- pandemi 9y ago
  How do you hire programmers like that?
  - techdragon 9y ago
    <stereotype joke> By not hiring a JavaScript developer. </stereotype joke> More seriously... I've just today finished updating some C++ code that integrates the Chromium Embedded Framework into Unreal Engine 4 to work with current versions of both CEF and UE4 and even building all this, Separate CEF sub process binaries without a strait forward make && make install, and debug builds of the entire unreal engine editor to track down CEF initialisation errors. Was simpler than React, Redux, WebPack, Babel, et.al. ... and I'm not a professional C++ dev using it every day either! I'm also not going to blame the language either. I sat down and worked through the entire EmberJS documentation in a couple of afternoons worth of spare time. It was clear, concise and orderly. It was easy and now I'm even looking forward to EmberJS 3.0 with Glimmer and full support for building stand alone web components using just the EmberJS ecosystem. So clearly it's not some fundamental failure of my ability to learn/understand JavaScript. So at the end of this joke/rant I guess I have to point my criticism at the subset of JavaScript developers who have allowed the crazy parts of the JavaScript ecosystem that they maintain, to get out of hand. I suspect because they never stop working with it and consequently are able to hang on to the rollercoaster and productively make use of it while being blind to outside criticism because as far as they can see it's all simple and logical and it's everyone else that doesn't understand it.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      It just sounds like you found a quality C++ library, there's thousands that are horrific messes. Compiling some of them is unbelievable amounts of frustration, which npm mostly avoids. Webpack works fine and is easy to use, part of the issue is that people criticizing JS don't know what they are talking about because they don't actually use JS that much and they don't understand why that makes their criticism not that useful (not you, just in general). JS has a magnitude more devs than some languages and a lot of them are new users, with that being the case, it isn't shocking that it makes for a large number of bad libraries. But if you know your tools, it's not that big of an issue.
      - swsieber 9y ago
        Webpack is terrible to use. Very inconsistent and results in a mess of code for your configuration. I suppose part of that comes from the 10+ loader interfaces it uses under the hood. But most of it comes from organic growth (I assume) and the fact that there are no JavaScript standards (e.g. no filesystem or pipe like interfaces, the competing module systems and no standard library) This is a nice guide to starting with webpack that I think describes it very well: https://what-problem-does-it-solve.com/webpack/index.html https://what-problem-does-it-solve.com/webpack/index.html I'd recommend this guide to anyone who is trying to get started with webpack. I wish there was an intuitive way to chain JavaScript file transformations together, but it doesn't seem like there is one yet. Webpack is close, but I think it has too much baggage to get there.
        Chyzwar 9y ago
        Webpack standardizes JS build process. It is a massive improvement from Grunt - plugin dumpster, Gulp spaghetti code and makefile - DIY everything. Issues you might have are related to broken web frameworks (angular4) than webpack itself.
    - gortok 9y ago
      I had a similar issue very recently with webpack. I was attempting to use its bundling capabilities to bundle css and js files for a web application. Believe it or not, the very simple end-user use case of bundling css is not a part of the core library, nor is it well demonstrated or explained in the docs. After a few hours, I simply gave up and continued to use gulp. We don’t treat user time as precious because our audience is developers; yet startup developers are the people who can ill-afford to lose an afternoon to try to figure out something as demonstrably simple as bundling CSS.
  - hacker_9 9y ago
    Hire someone who has worked on legacy systems and practices TDD, then once hired give him the time he needs to break apart the codebase into testable units.
  - fuckjstbqh 9y ago
    Simple: don’t hire JavaScript programmers.
  - srslyfuckjs 9y ago
    Seriously, don’t hire JavaScript programmers. Why is this so difficult? There’s a goddamn one-liner in npm that determines an array’s length, and like a billion packages depend on it. Anyone who has JS on their resume and is proud of it will soon find their resume as part of a child’s birthday confetti.
  - throwawayxo9z 9y ago
    See if they can fog a mirror, apparently.
- travmatt 9y ago
  Which breaking changes are you referring too? I remember updating some configs in the jump from 1 -> 2, but none since then
  - acemarke 9y ago
    Webpack 1 -> 2 had several breaking changes, primarily around loader configuration syntax. The migration guide at https://webpack.js.org/guides/migrating/ https://webpack.js.org/guides/migrating/ covers the changes. 2 -> 3 was primarily internal changes, with little to no migration steps needed other than bumping the installed version.
    - travmatt 9y ago
      Yes, I’m well aware - im asking the basis for the belief that these constitute “constant relentless breaking changes”
- fuckjstbqh 9y ago
  Not if they use JavaScript. Somehow the language and the ecosystem around it breed nothing but overly complex, brittle software. I blame bootcamps.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  People leave nonsense comments like this just to spread FUD are so irritating. I upgraded 1–>2 a while back and it took a few changes based on informative error messages. People like this made me dread the upgrade thinking it would be complicated. It was basically painless. I’m on version 3–something now and have encountered no other breaking changes. It’s a great tool. I guess people who leave comments like this have literally 0 threshold for any kind of error message and just want all the interfaces they ever use to be static and permanent. I’m not a webpack fanboy. I don’t like JavaScript. But I don’t go around posting nonsense FUD about “relentless changes” that don’t exist. Sorry buddy, you’re full of it.
  - thejosh 9y ago
    Great it worked out for you, but if it wasn't such a pain to upgrade (I know this from personal experience), wouldn't there be lesser FUD?
    - always_good 9y ago
      Is this your first time on HN? People will complain about anything and everything. They'll incessantly dismiss anything that they think they could have done better in a weekend. There's this whole FUD around Javascript in general. If you didn't know better, you'd think there were client-side tools in other ecosystems where you didn't have to learn or credentialize in anything to build a full-featured client.
    - linkmotif 9y ago
      I’m saying explicitly he or she is making up problems that don’t exist. My presumption is they never used webpack or tried for a second and gave up. My theory is this user likes to parrot things about the JS scene. Upgrading webpack involved changing some things from an array to a keyed object or something. It was nothing. I’m not particularly smart or JS savvy.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bryanrasmussen 9y ago
The difficulty I have with Webpack is that there does not seem to be any unifying principle of how things work. The stream model of gulp and the resulting highly structured code that most often results means that I can generally find and fix bugs quickly, this is even possible in the horribly convoluted gulp file that we use at my current working place. In my experience when you have even a bit of webpack and there is a problem somewhere it can be difficult to figure out the cause because it seems every capability of the system works in its own way.
- aphextron 9y ago
  Completely agreed. Webpack faces the exact issue that Grunt ran into which is these huge 'config files of doom' that end up as snowflakes which are hard to understand. Rather, defining the build process entirely in code lets you step through the whole thing logically.
  - ng12 9y ago
    I don't find that to be true at all. In fact I would guess that across all my projects the configs are 80-90% identical. The only thing that changes are different loaders depending in the tech stack and maybe the addition of a few bells and whistles such as i18n.
- ng12 9y ago
  What exactly are you referring to? Webpack has an incredibly simple model -- do everything with a loader. I've only had to really wrestle with webpack twice: once to get it working with a huge corpus of legacy code, the other to get it building a node backend and ES6 frontend with lots of shared code. Other than that my config has always been pretty simple.
CloudYeller 9y ago
So TL;DR: tshirts, ads embedded in their docs, and corporate sponsorships. Makes sense for an open source project with a fairly large community at least.
jondubois 9y ago
It's a great project but I don't understand why they need so much money for the future. It's a bundling tool. Wasn't it supposed to be a transition project? Won't Webpack get replaced by simpler things like ES6 module import and HTTP2 push? It was the same thing with CoffeeScript; it inspired some neat features in JavaScript but it has made itself obsolete; the ecosystem caught up. It fulfilled its purpose nonetheless. Webpack would probably have benefited more from this funding a few years ago.
- acemarke 9y ago
  No, HTTP2 doesn't just replace bundling, and definitely not what Webpack does. Based on what I've read, sending a few bundled chunks instead of many individual module files will still generally have less overhead. In addition, Webpack's ability to load and transform other file formats like images and styles is something that simply requesting ES modules over HTTP2 can't deal with. Webpack's ability to code-split an application is also important. Tobias Koppers, the main Webpack developer, wrote an article last year on how Webpack and HTTP2 relate: https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6 https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6 . It's also worth noting that Tobias had only been able to work on Webpack intermittently for the last couple years, until this recent funding allowed him to work on it full-time. Tobias has been writing reports on what he's been doing [0]. Also, grants and full-time development is enabling the team to work on projects like integrating WebAssembly support directly into Webpack [1]. [0] https://medium.com/webpack/the-chunk-graph-algorithm-week-26-29-7c88aa5e4b4e https://medium.com/webpack/the-chunk-graph-algorithm-week-26... [1] https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-freelancing-log-book-week-17-48233121afbe https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-freelancing-log-book-week...
stevebmark 9y ago
The state of Webpack does not reflect a 400k/year budget. The docs, API, source code, ecosystem... so happy to hear people making software engineering money get a second salary to keep doing this. We're all waiting for the thing that will replace Webpack so we don't have to keep using it. Maybe we should just go and make it.
- naspeh 9y ago
  I think it does. This area where webpack is trying to shine is just over-complex, so the tool can't be simple, that's it. And most importantly as for me, developers who works full-time on such projects can sustain the higher quality and improve it over time and if you chose it for now it may been relevant year later or 2-3... I hope at least.
  - thelarkinn 9y ago
    The tool aims to be agnostic to work flow it's a trade-off to be generic in our case. We realize it too.
- acemarke 9y ago
  Tobias Koppers isn't making a "second salary". He was working on Webpack in his spare time, and can now work on it full-time thanks to the funding that's come in.
- solidr53 9y ago
  Brunch.io maybe?
  - stevebmark 9y ago
    No, brunch is a major step backwards. So are Browserify, gulp, and grunt. We need something new.
    - makmanalp 9y ago
      ... and so the cycle continues :-) Seriously though, this is how the JS community ends up changing tools every 2-3 years. What about joining in and improving what exists? A non-trivial amount of work must have gone into webpack. As an outside observer, I see so much wasted effort.
perpetualcrayon 9y ago
"Ever since we were able to grow the budget large enough for Tobias to work on Webpack full time..." This is what the open source community needs. Steal the maintainers of the top 1% of open source projects from the "free market". The projects not already sponsored by corporations that is. Or, why not work toward pairing these maintainers w/ companies who will let them spend most of their time working on said project. Might make it easier as far as fund raising is concerned. I bet there's a niche for this second idea. It's not always obvious to the people cutting the checks just how valuable these side projects are to the world.
tzm 9y ago
Thanks for making and continuing to improve WebPack. I use poi.js which uses WebPack internally for low/no config dev. https://poi.js.org/ https://poi.js.org/
zx2c4 9y ago
Nice to hear there's some hope... I managed to get some small grants and donations and things for WireGuard over part of this last year -- https://www.wireguard.com/donations/ https://www.wireguard.com/donations/ -- but I don't have much lined up for next year, and I'm hoping I can figure it out in time to do WireGuard things full time. The thing is just getting funding lined up for [part of] this last year was a pretty time consuming hustle, and I'd rather spend that time writing code. This leads me to think I should find somebody to handle "fund raising" or "community mumblemumble" or something, but as WireGuard is a security-oriented project, communicating correctly is important, and I could imagine that somehow backfiring. The other thing is that I'd feel really uncomfortable putting up one of those thermometer overlays on the wireguard.com website; just adding the "donate" link in the corner was a bit much for me. So, hm. Nice to see the Webpack guys figure it out. Maybe I'll take some clues from there.
- naspeh 9y ago
  Here is one more success story nowadays about Vue.js and Evan You (creator) - https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-in-2016-8df71d98bfb3#9af5 https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-in-2016-8df71d98bfb3#9a... > Going Independent > In early March I decided to work on Vue full-time independently and started a Patreon campaign, which has been (to my surprise) quite successful so far. It is my first time working independently without having to report to a manager, and it has been a very liberating experience. They also use OpenCollective: https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-is-now-on-opencollective-1ef89ca1334b https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-is-now-on-opencollectiv...
infinity0 9y ago
>> fuck webpack >> sorry to hear you feel this way! [..] >> [..] When I first read the quote, I thought "that's nice of webpack". Then I saw this: > The greatest power you have for haters or trolls is love. I would not call someone saying "fuck webpack" a hater or a troll, I would call them a frustrated user. OTOH, you can turn a frustrated user into a hater or a troll by dismissing their concerns or by trying to shift the blame onto them by calling them rude. Venting your frustration is an absolutely understandable behaviour when faced with unintuitive software, especially for users who don't understand what they're using (including software developers!) - they're in a position of lesser power, feel helpless, and need an outlet to express this. No developer should be taking these expressions as a personal attack, nor belittling it as rude or trolling. Because of this, I saw the original quoted interaction in a new light - upon a second look, it is a bit unsubstantial, bordering on virtue-signalling. A proper quote that actually indicates caring about your users, would include responding to a specific problem from a very frustrated user, by actually fixing the issue. Not just saying nice words.
- stevebmark 9y ago
  Sean Larkin's favorite game is to respond to every single Tweet containing the word "Webpack" and not help them in any way
  - thelarkinn 9y ago
    Hey maybe you are victim of this and I missed out! I don't consider this a game, I take it pretty seriously to help others. However, I am human like many others and as of late I've been a bit caught up with family. If this happened to you then by all means I can own it and apologize. Otherwise shoot me a DM if you really need help and if I can't help I'll find someone who can
- wellpast 9y ago
  I don't think it's acceptable in any situation to express your frustration this way in a public forum, especially for OSS. Thoughtful critical pieces are fine and necessary, but I don't think blatant vitriolic "cathartic" outlets should be encouraged at all -- in this case, it is being encouraged by the maintainer, but I don't think that helps anything. I get the frustration...I've said "Fuck XYZ" a thousand times for a thousand different software XYZs but to take that to a public forum is suitable behavior for a toddler, and does harm. How many nights & weekends were spent building Webpack? How many nights & weekends coming up with "fuck webpack"? Show some respect and at least spend a few hours in thoughtful critique. Civility must still have a place, even online. Tangentially, Rich Hickey recently responded (I think appropriately) to a similar outlet re Clojure [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_authority/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au...
marknadal 9y ago
This is really encouraging to hear, I run an Open Source community that is a fifth the size of Webpack. And in the back of my mind I'm trying to figure out how to help fund/pay/reward the community, without then making it awkward, political, or money driven. How did you get the companies to sponsor? It seems like once you are above a certain threshold/community level, it makes sense for a company, but did you just reach out or was it people you already knew? Or people you bumped into while talking at a conference? But how do you know if they are the ones at a company that can sign off on sponsorship? This very much seems like "sales", how does an Open Source-loving engineer get good at sales?
jackmott 9y ago
Why is it so slow with that kind of funding?

118 points by naspeh 9y ago

Maybe they could employ a programmer who knows how to turn unbelievably complex software into incredibly simple software that doesn't include constant relentless breaking changes.

pandemi 9y ago
How do you hire programmers like that?
- techdragon 9y ago
  <stereotype joke> By not hiring a JavaScript developer. </stereotype joke> More seriously... I've just today finished updating some C++ code that integrates the Chromium Embedded Framework into Unreal Engine 4 to work with current versions of both CEF and UE4 and even building all this, Separate CEF sub process binaries without a strait forward make && make install, and debug builds of the entire unreal engine editor to track down CEF initialisation errors. Was simpler than React, Redux, WebPack, Babel, et.al. ... and I'm not a professional C++ dev using it every day either! I'm also not going to blame the language either. I sat down and worked through the entire EmberJS documentation in a couple of afternoons worth of spare time. It was clear, concise and orderly. It was easy and now I'm even looking forward to EmberJS 3.0 with Glimmer and full support for building stand alone web components using just the EmberJS ecosystem. So clearly it's not some fundamental failure of my ability to learn/understand JavaScript. So at the end of this joke/rant I guess I have to point my criticism at the subset of JavaScript developers who have allowed the crazy parts of the JavaScript ecosystem that they maintain, to get out of hand. I suspect because they never stop working with it and consequently are able to hang on to the rollercoaster and productively make use of it while being blind to outside criticism because as far as they can see it's all simple and logical and it's everyone else that doesn't understand it.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    It just sounds like you found a quality C++ library, there's thousands that are horrific messes. Compiling some of them is unbelievable amounts of frustration, which npm mostly avoids. Webpack works fine and is easy to use, part of the issue is that people criticizing JS don't know what they are talking about because they don't actually use JS that much and they don't understand why that makes their criticism not that useful (not you, just in general). JS has a magnitude more devs than some languages and a lot of them are new users, with that being the case, it isn't shocking that it makes for a large number of bad libraries. But if you know your tools, it's not that big of an issue.
    - swsieber 9y ago
      Webpack is terrible to use. Very inconsistent and results in a mess of code for your configuration. I suppose part of that comes from the 10+ loader interfaces it uses under the hood. But most of it comes from organic growth (I assume) and the fact that there are no JavaScript standards (e.g. no filesystem or pipe like interfaces, the competing module systems and no standard library) This is a nice guide to starting with webpack that I think describes it very well: https://what-problem-does-it-solve.com/webpack/index.html https://what-problem-does-it-solve.com/webpack/index.html I'd recommend this guide to anyone who is trying to get started with webpack. I wish there was an intuitive way to chain JavaScript file transformations together, but it doesn't seem like there is one yet. Webpack is close, but I think it has too much baggage to get there.
      - Chyzwar 9y ago
        Webpack standardizes JS build process. It is a massive improvement from Grunt - plugin dumpster, Gulp spaghetti code and makefile - DIY everything. Issues you might have are related to broken web frameworks (angular4) than webpack itself.
  - gortok 9y ago
    I had a similar issue very recently with webpack. I was attempting to use its bundling capabilities to bundle css and js files for a web application. Believe it or not, the very simple end-user use case of bundling css is not a part of the core library, nor is it well demonstrated or explained in the docs. After a few hours, I simply gave up and continued to use gulp. We don’t treat user time as precious because our audience is developers; yet startup developers are the people who can ill-afford to lose an afternoon to try to figure out something as demonstrably simple as bundling CSS.
- hacker_9 9y ago
  Hire someone who has worked on legacy systems and practices TDD, then once hired give him the time he needs to break apart the codebase into testable units.
- fuckjstbqh 9y ago
  Simple: don’t hire JavaScript programmers.
- srslyfuckjs 9y ago
  Seriously, don’t hire JavaScript programmers. Why is this so difficult? There’s a goddamn one-liner in npm that determines an array’s length, and like a billion packages depend on it. Anyone who has JS on their resume and is proud of it will soon find their resume as part of a child’s birthday confetti.
- throwawayxo9z 9y ago
  See if they can fog a mirror, apparently.
travmatt 9y ago
Which breaking changes are you referring too? I remember updating some configs in the jump from 1 -> 2, but none since then
- acemarke 9y ago
  Webpack 1 -> 2 had several breaking changes, primarily around loader configuration syntax. The migration guide at https://webpack.js.org/guides/migrating/ https://webpack.js.org/guides/migrating/ covers the changes. 2 -> 3 was primarily internal changes, with little to no migration steps needed other than bumping the installed version.
  - travmatt 9y ago
    Yes, I’m well aware - im asking the basis for the belief that these constitute “constant relentless breaking changes”
fuckjstbqh 9y ago
Not if they use JavaScript. Somehow the language and the ecosystem around it breed nothing but overly complex, brittle software. I blame bootcamps.
linkmotif 9y ago
People leave nonsense comments like this just to spread FUD are so irritating. I upgraded 1–>2 a while back and it took a few changes based on informative error messages. People like this made me dread the upgrade thinking it would be complicated. It was basically painless. I’m on version 3–something now and have encountered no other breaking changes. It’s a great tool. I guess people who leave comments like this have literally 0 threshold for any kind of error message and just want all the interfaces they ever use to be static and permanent. I’m not a webpack fanboy. I don’t like JavaScript. But I don’t go around posting nonsense FUD about “relentless changes” that don’t exist. Sorry buddy, you’re full of it.
- thejosh 9y ago
  Great it worked out for you, but if it wasn't such a pain to upgrade (I know this from personal experience), wouldn't there be lesser FUD?
  - always_good 9y ago
    Is this your first time on HN? People will complain about anything and everything. They'll incessantly dismiss anything that they think they could have done better in a weekend. There's this whole FUD around Javascript in general. If you didn't know better, you'd think there were client-side tools in other ecosystems where you didn't have to learn or credentialize in anything to build a full-featured client.
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    I’m saying explicitly he or she is making up problems that don’t exist. My presumption is they never used webpack or tried for a second and gave up. My theory is this user likes to parrot things about the JS scene. Upgrading webpack involved changing some things from an array to a keyed object or something. It was nothing. I’m not particularly smart or JS savvy.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bryanrasmussen 9y ago

The difficulty I have with Webpack is that there does not seem to be any unifying principle of how things work. The stream model of gulp and the resulting highly structured code that most often results means that I can generally find and fix bugs quickly, this is even possible in the horribly convoluted gulp file that we use at my current working place. In my experience when you have even a bit of webpack and there is a problem somewhere it can be difficult to figure out the cause because it seems every capability of the system works in its own way.

aphextron 9y ago
Completely agreed. Webpack faces the exact issue that Grunt ran into which is these huge 'config files of doom' that end up as snowflakes which are hard to understand. Rather, defining the build process entirely in code lets you step through the whole thing logically.
- ng12 9y ago
  I don't find that to be true at all. In fact I would guess that across all my projects the configs are 80-90% identical. The only thing that changes are different loaders depending in the tech stack and maybe the addition of a few bells and whistles such as i18n.
ng12 9y ago
What exactly are you referring to? Webpack has an incredibly simple model -- do everything with a loader. I've only had to really wrestle with webpack twice: once to get it working with a huge corpus of legacy code, the other to get it building a node backend and ES6 frontend with lots of shared code. Other than that my config has always been pretty simple.

CloudYeller 9y ago

So TL;DR: tshirts, ads embedded in their docs, and corporate sponsorships. Makes sense for an open source project with a fairly large community at least.

jondubois 9y ago

It's a great project but I don't understand why they need so much money for the future. It's a bundling tool. Wasn't it supposed to be a transition project? Won't Webpack get replaced by simpler things like ES6 module import and HTTP2 push? It was the same thing with CoffeeScript; it inspired some neat features in JavaScript but it has made itself obsolete; the ecosystem caught up. It fulfilled its purpose nonetheless. Webpack would probably have benefited more from this funding a few years ago.

acemarke 9y ago
No, HTTP2 doesn't just replace bundling, and definitely not what Webpack does. Based on what I've read, sending a few bundled chunks instead of many individual module files will still generally have less overhead. In addition, Webpack's ability to load and transform other file formats like images and styles is something that simply requesting ES modules over HTTP2 can't deal with. Webpack's ability to code-split an application is also important. Tobias Koppers, the main Webpack developer, wrote an article last year on how Webpack and HTTP2 relate: https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6 https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6 . It's also worth noting that Tobias had only been able to work on Webpack intermittently for the last couple years, until this recent funding allowed him to work on it full-time. Tobias has been writing reports on what he's been doing [0]. Also, grants and full-time development is enabling the team to work on projects like integrating WebAssembly support directly into Webpack [1]. [0] https://medium.com/webpack/the-chunk-graph-algorithm-week-26-29-7c88aa5e4b4e https://medium.com/webpack/the-chunk-graph-algorithm-week-26... [1] https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-freelancing-log-book-week-17-48233121afbe https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-freelancing-log-book-week...

stevebmark 9y ago

The state of Webpack does not reflect a 400k/year budget. The docs, API, source code, ecosystem... so happy to hear people making software engineering money get a second salary to keep doing this. We're all waiting for the thing that will replace Webpack so we don't have to keep using it. Maybe we should just go and make it.

naspeh 9y ago
I think it does. This area where webpack is trying to shine is just over-complex, so the tool can't be simple, that's it. And most importantly as for me, developers who works full-time on such projects can sustain the higher quality and improve it over time and if you chose it for now it may been relevant year later or 2-3... I hope at least.
- thelarkinn 9y ago
  The tool aims to be agnostic to work flow it's a trade-off to be generic in our case. We realize it too.
acemarke 9y ago
Tobias Koppers isn't making a "second salary". He was working on Webpack in his spare time, and can now work on it full-time thanks to the funding that's come in.
solidr53 9y ago
Brunch.io maybe?
- stevebmark 9y ago
  No, brunch is a major step backwards. So are Browserify, gulp, and grunt. We need something new.
  - makmanalp 9y ago
    ... and so the cycle continues :-) Seriously though, this is how the JS community ends up changing tools every 2-3 years. What about joining in and improving what exists? A non-trivial amount of work must have gone into webpack. As an outside observer, I see so much wasted effort.

perpetualcrayon 9y ago

"Ever since we were able to grow the budget large enough for Tobias to work on Webpack full time..." This is what the open source community needs. Steal the maintainers of the top 1% of open source projects from the "free market". The projects not already sponsored by corporations that is. Or, why not work toward pairing these maintainers w/ companies who will let them spend most of their time working on said project. Might make it easier as far as fund raising is concerned. I bet there's a niche for this second idea. It's not always obvious to the people cutting the checks just how valuable these side projects are to the world.

tzm 9y ago

Thanks for making and continuing to improve WebPack. I use poi.js which uses WebPack internally for low/no config dev. https://poi.js.org/ https://poi.js.org/

zx2c4 9y ago

Nice to hear there's some hope... I managed to get some small grants and donations and things for WireGuard over part of this last year -- https://www.wireguard.com/donations/ https://www.wireguard.com/donations/ -- but I don't have much lined up for next year, and I'm hoping I can figure it out in time to do WireGuard things full time. The thing is just getting funding lined up for [part of] this last year was a pretty time consuming hustle, and I'd rather spend that time writing code. This leads me to think I should find somebody to handle "fund raising" or "community mumblemumble" or something, but as WireGuard is a security-oriented project, communicating correctly is important, and I could imagine that somehow backfiring. The other thing is that I'd feel really uncomfortable putting up one of those thermometer overlays on the wireguard.com website; just adding the "donate" link in the corner was a bit much for me. So, hm. Nice to see the Webpack guys figure it out. Maybe I'll take some clues from there.

naspeh 9y ago
Here is one more success story nowadays about Vue.js and Evan You (creator) - https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-in-2016-8df71d98bfb3#9af5 https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-in-2016-8df71d98bfb3#9a... > Going Independent > In early March I decided to work on Vue full-time independently and started a Patreon campaign, which has been (to my surprise) quite successful so far. It is my first time working independently without having to report to a manager, and it has been a very liberating experience. They also use OpenCollective: https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-is-now-on-opencollective-1ef89ca1334b https://medium.com/the-vue-point/vue-is-now-on-opencollectiv...

infinity0 9y ago

>> fuck webpack >> sorry to hear you feel this way! [..] >> [..] When I first read the quote, I thought "that's nice of webpack". Then I saw this: > The greatest power you have for haters or trolls is love. I would not call someone saying "fuck webpack" a hater or a troll, I would call them a frustrated user. OTOH, you can turn a frustrated user into a hater or a troll by dismissing their concerns or by trying to shift the blame onto them by calling them rude. Venting your frustration is an absolutely understandable behaviour when faced with unintuitive software, especially for users who don't understand what they're using (including software developers!) - they're in a position of lesser power, feel helpless, and need an outlet to express this. No developer should be taking these expressions as a personal attack, nor belittling it as rude or trolling. Because of this, I saw the original quoted interaction in a new light - upon a second look, it is a bit unsubstantial, bordering on virtue-signalling. A proper quote that actually indicates caring about your users, would include responding to a specific problem from a very frustrated user, by actually fixing the issue. Not just saying nice words.

stevebmark 9y ago
Sean Larkin's favorite game is to respond to every single Tweet containing the word "Webpack" and not help them in any way
- thelarkinn 9y ago
  Hey maybe you are victim of this and I missed out! I don't consider this a game, I take it pretty seriously to help others. However, I am human like many others and as of late I've been a bit caught up with family. If this happened to you then by all means I can own it and apologize. Otherwise shoot me a DM if you really need help and if I can't help I'll find someone who can
wellpast 9y ago
I don't think it's acceptable in any situation to express your frustration this way in a public forum, especially for OSS. Thoughtful critical pieces are fine and necessary, but I don't think blatant vitriolic "cathartic" outlets should be encouraged at all -- in this case, it is being encouraged by the maintainer, but I don't think that helps anything. I get the frustration...I've said "Fuck XYZ" a thousand times for a thousand different software XYZs but to take that to a public forum is suitable behavior for a toddler, and does harm. How many nights & weekends were spent building Webpack? How many nights & weekends coming up with "fuck webpack"? Show some respect and at least spend a few hours in thoughtful critique. Civility must still have a place, even online. Tangentially, Rich Hickey recently responded (I think appropriately) to a similar outlet re Clojure [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_authority/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au...

marknadal 9y ago

This is really encouraging to hear, I run an Open Source community that is a fifth the size of Webpack. And in the back of my mind I'm trying to figure out how to help fund/pay/reward the community, without then making it awkward, political, or money driven. How did you get the companies to sponsor? It seems like once you are above a certain threshold/community level, it makes sense for a company, but did you just reach out or was it people you already knew? Or people you bumped into while talking at a conference? But how do you know if they are the ones at a company that can sign off on sponsorship? This very much seems like "sales", how does an Open Source-loving engineer get good at sales?

jackmott 9y ago

Why is it so slow with that kind of funding?