written by owen on 2023-Feb-24.

It's been a month since my original race to the bottom article.  I figure I should do a follow up post to cover the latest events surrounding the project that I used as a benchmark.  At this point the project has 23 stars up from 8 it had at the time the original article was written - progress is progress.

But I do not plan to check on the github project every month.  The initial plan was to check on it in another year's time but something happened.  A new thread was created by the author as a call to order to get help.  Fresh out of the solo programmer basement he had not gotten the "open source" attention that was assumed when all the rules were followed.  So this prompted me to write a new article.  Let's see what attention he gets now.  The star count increased but for the most part it was more of the same in the comments section;

I charge $150/hr. HMU.

Programmers need money just like everyone else.

Why reinvent the wheel with invoicing?

Here the comment listed a few other projects that have the same functionality but of course are more popular.  This is one of those fall backs for people who are not actually interested in programming at all but exist only to discourage other people from designing something new and innovative.

there isn't a single open issue to help people get started. How do you expect someone to jump into a project with no roadmap or any place to start?

Egg or chicken problem.  There are no issues because no one is participating.  No one is participating because there are no issues?  Classic.

I would suggest you write some tests, before inviting other people to participate, so as to make integrating their contributions easier and save yourself a LOT of manual testing.

My brother in the God-Emperor's light, you are not yet in that phase. Not even close.

Like, you committed the Vendor folder ...

Also, you have what looks like maintenance scripts triggered by (unprotected) routes ... no bueno.

i'm sure you mean well, but the people who come here are *NOT* your users.

This person probably put in the most work in looking into the project only to end up just putting another hurdle in front of the person without directly telling them that the thing he is trying to do is futile.

I had a brief look through some of the controllers and classes - a few things I spotted immediately:

Your code should adhere to psr standards - Capitalise class names and their corresponding files. This means contributing developers don't have (too many) differing styles.

Consider using form requests to validate your form submissions. There was little to no validation that I could see, which is a huge red flag.

You shouldn't commit the vendor folder.

There don't appear to be any tests ...

Here we go again.  Add tests and we will love you.  Do X or Y then run around in a circle.  Superficial syntax sugar that exists to keep you coding in your basement forever which they sell programming books.

Didn't you post this on Reddit before and people were asking where your tests are?

You might've changed the name of the application but I swear the repository and the pictures look very similar. I remember going through it.

Thank you for not using a new Reddit account.

Lol, didnt you get a hurdle to jump over?  why aren't you jumping over it?

Conclusion

The author also posted the request in the Laravel subreddit where it did not even get 1 up vote.  This is not surprising to me because the organisation is not interested in helping anything but itself.  And this inherent drive to get bigger spreads into the community - you are already trapped in the ecosystem so....

So that is pretty much it for now, the dev has probably given up on reddit or has started working on another project.  I added some new screenshots.  I need to reiterate that this is not a dig on the programmer but on the ecosystem of web slavery, pointless OOP API bloat and the meme of design patterns sold as community open source but are really masochistic rabbit holes that you pay to enter.

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