I couldn’t care less about solo developers who never release their hobby projects. The cautionary tales are always about potential coworkers, and as far as I can tell that stereotype simple doesn’t exist in the business world.
replyI have not just worked with but had code rejected by these people. “Don’t fix that bug, we are going to write an entire new structure that will make it irrelevant”, “don’t upgrade that library, we are going to rewrite our code to not use it”, “don’t improve exception handling, fix all the bugs that throw bad exceptions”. Not at all surprisingly, all of those planned upgrades took at least two years after my attempted improvement was rejected (the library I didn’t upgrade stuck around for six years).
replyI'm just like that, but minus the expectation of release/money/success. To me, the building and programming itself is the reward, and I have no motivation or desire to release anything I work on--or any belief that it would/should make money for me. To me, the hours spent fine sanding down and polishing my code, always approaching but never achieving perfection, is its own reward.
replyI would say thats a different thing entirely, an amateur in the original sense of the word
replyLatin amator, French amateur, means lover.
In this sense, it means somebody who is doing something because he/she loves it, not as his/her profession. It is not a large semantic shift to infer that he/she is not as skilled.