A huge yet underappreciated impact on the modern world. People don’t realize how much work goes on behind the scenes to bring those apps/websites to life.
Thank you for all your contributions Simon. Rest in peace sir.
SELECT * FROM real_influencers WHERE name = ‘Simon Riggs’;
Being a developer I slowly noticed that 99% if the people in this world don’t even think for a single milisec how anything in tech came to be. They use extremely advanced smartphones, apps, huge servers, games, everything. And no one ever thinks “huh, how did they made this?” They literally think making a whole OS is like making a pancake, 5 steps and 5 minutes and you are done. Or heck, they don’t even think that, they don’t think anything at all about it. They just… use it. Like it magically appeared there and they can now use it. They have absolutely zero idea how much effort the simplest things they use daily took. Some don’t even think about the fact that stuff like Facebook is a company and needs to make money. They just know that Facebook is magically there and works. How does it work? “Well, you open the app and click buttons”. But they never think about how the app and buttons came to be.
Stuff like “what is a cloud? What happens when you put something on the cloud, like Google drive?” They get absolutely broken and cant answer because they can’t even understand what a cloud is and why the files are accesible from everywhere.
It gets to a point where people get “shocked” when you tell them that Android or macOS has hundreds or thousands of developers working on it daily. They literally think Android just happened to appear out there and brands just decided to pre-install it on the phone they sell, like it was something that you “just install”.
Well, long story short, this eventually comes back to bite devs in the ass when we try but fail to explain to a client that “creating an AI that takes stuff from a database and magically creates new stuff” takes more than 2 days. Client gets mad when we say something is impossible in the hours budget that we got.
Simon Riggs like many other people literally make our world turn but people will never know who they are or why they are needed. This world biggest heroes often go unnoticed.
that got me thinking, is there any kind of statistic for average maintainer age for major FOSS projects and libraries? Is the influx of new maintainers still going strong, or should we expect a really huge problem in the next few decades?
Also, what are some good resources if you want to start with maintaining or collaborating on something, if you have zero experience with the dev side of FOSS ecosystem?
Small airplane crash? RIP.
Really sad that BBC did not say what he did.
