The Response I Got Was Cynical
A little over a week ago, I published a blog post about a project I've been working on to build a cross-platform package manager. I took a risk in sharing this idea because it's pretty ambitious, and it's something that doesn't currently exist, at least not in the form I described it, which is a unified end-to-end solution.
Unfortunately the online response that I got was pretty cynical and disappointing. I did get some thoughtful comments on X, but the replies on Reddit were the worst. That felt pretty bad, because I had email notifications on, and so I ended up getting a stream of negative Reddit comments appearing in my inbox. I kept the blog post, but I ended up deleting the social threads because it was honestly too much and I didn't see the point.
I wish I could have gotten constructive feedback, but there were no questions or comments about the design of the VM, and nobody criticized what is in my opinion the real significant weak point of the idea that I presented, which is that there's a network effect component to building a package manager, and network effect is hard to get going. The most challenging piece of the puzzle isn't actually technical.
I feel pretty upset and discouraged. I don't know if it was always like this, it's easy to think that the past was always rosier, but online tech communities have become very cynical. It's hard to put yourself out there and share your ideas with the world, especially when it's something places like Hacker News and Reddit actively punish. You're much more likely to get a response like "it's already been done", or "what about XYZ?" and people generally shitting on your idea than you are to get some kind of positive comment, thoughtful discussion or encouragement.
For the moment, I think I'm going to take a step back from UVM and re-center myself. I genuinely think that a cross-platform package manager with sandboxing is technology that needs to exist, and I think it will eventually. If I don't build it, someone else will. For me to work on a project like that, however, I would need allies, a community, and building a community is hard. I'm enough of a realist to know that I can't do this sort of thing alone. For the time being, I'll try to find simpler and smaller side-projects to work on. I may also revisit UVM with a narrower scope, maybe focus on making the VM embeddable or building a simple JIT compiler for it.
