Startup Engineer Unwittingly Implements Crappier Version of Open Source Project
September 13, 2016
SAN FRANCISCO - While attempting to neatly rectify problems with his company's API, bay area software engineer Kevin Wright discovered Tuesday morning that the library he spent the last four days implementing was an unintentional rehash of an existing and far superior open source project. The 25-year-old developer happened upon the first-rate Github repository while reading StackOverflow answers during a debugging session. "Oh what the hell", remarked an exasperated Wright as he navigated around the tidy and perfectly formatted source code that made a mockery of his efforts. Wright discovered that not only does the open source implementation accomplish precisely what his library intended to, but also features a brilliant architecture and broad extensibility. The full-stack developer noticed that his library is much less idiomatic and far sloppier, and also lacks a single unit test. The 1000+ starred open source repository features prominent "100% test coverage" and "passing continuous integration" badges at the top of the README. In stark contrast, Wright's README is simply the repository title, for which he spent a concerningly long time trying to think of something clever. At press time, Wright was seen sheepishly adding the repository to the main application's dependencies.