Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by robscallsign 1693 days ago
I second this. If your goal is to release it publically, chances are most of your dirty laundry and uglier hacks are either pain points that are systemically hard (installation, different OS versions/platform, dependencies, build environment) that everyone suffers with in which case the community can help, or it's in a part of the code that migth not be a core competency of yours, and so the community can also help.
2 comments

  > chances are most of your dirty laundry and uglier hacks are either pain points that are systemically
  > hard (installation, different OS versions/platform, dependencies, build environment) that everyone suffers with
To add to this point, I would love to see the commits that do resolve these issues. I could learn from them too.
It's really just guessing though.

Maybe that "dirty laundry", in this case, is security-through-obscurity (maybe even with a TODO: this is insecure, fix it) or hardcoded values such as keys or ids that might compromise stability or security.

E.g. I normally open source everything from day one, but keep my Ansible (and before Chef) stuff behind closed doors: it's full of commits that would compromise security. E.g. "quick hardcoded list of private IP-addresses that can access the reporting Database until we have the VPC coupled to a VPN."