My two best points of advice is:

Go to meetups/hackathons

Threads the app, reply to coders on posts you find interesting and have things to add to.

Relevant critique of this article. I should probably have elaborated more on WHY one should dare to do that and HOW you can that in a respectful and mutual way.

How to increase the signal and not the noise.

Sending an email without any clear purpose is not something I would encourge. But a highly thoughtful email about some of their works or question you have about a recent piece of code is probably appreciated. Genuine conversation.

The easiest way to start your journey towards overcoming the imposter syndrome while not burdening someone is to reply to a recent tweet.

If you have something relevant to say that is. But you probably do: more often than not.

I would certainly read that reply or even better the book!

That’s actually what I asked Mike Pall to do regarding JIT. He was reluctany and probably thinks too little of his teaching ability.. but that book would be awesome for future generations of compiler folks to read!

Back to Bellard, maybe a good first approach is to ping one of his co-authors like the person he made QuickJS with.

Would probably sth memoreable and positive for him :)

I doubt he’ll get more than a handful.

Very much this. Especially Daniel Stenberg or for Sweden more locally famous coders like Christian Landgren are very approachable on LinkedIn.

Makes for an intresting conversation and you can learn a lot by posting a well thought comment :)

Yeah, GitHub stars is becoming a vanity metric and not indication of quality.

I have been contemplating a rating system for open source software with a mandatory tag for each star. Allows you to filter out perspectives you don’t care about.

> GitHub stars is becoming a vanity metric and not indication of quality

Becoming? :D Since day one, me and other's have called it a vanity metric, and trying to push back on hiring decisions being made over what developers have the most starred repositories/followers (no joke, one place I worked at almost hired one developer over another because of their "total star count" :'( ).

Stars been around for as long as GitHub been around, and people actively shouting to get people to stop caring so much about stars been around for the same time yet.

Have these stars ever been useful at all? For me they've been just a cute noise ever since they were introduced. A rough proxy for project's visibility in a certain specific context, nothing more.

Author here.

Actually wrote the draft on this in January but last week finally got enough time to complete this with proper project links etc.

We are certainly real people, except for one of the faces on our /support page who’s signature we use when replying to particularly aggressive fraudsters (to avoid feeling personally offended).

The service might look easy on the surface, but getting all required infrastructure in place here in Europe is hard and the telecom world is surprisingly complex.

”I am jealous at you guys: backend services still has a future” a coder friend told me today at lunch.

On topic, I obviously don’t think the community train has passed.

Especially on meetups I see a lot of genuine connections between programmers being made. Threads, the app, has recently been the most relevant place for me to casually chat with other programmers.

I don’t vouch for people to spam: but to overcome their imposter syndrome and dare to talk about coding with fellow programmers. Even the legends.

And they often invite for conversations: wether it’s a comment field, pull request or tweet.

Indeed! Got any advice for people who want to go for it and write their first tweet or email?

Yeah, it’s not about spamming people but overcoming the imposter syndrome.

Learning to find this balance of not being annoying is probably easiest by trying to make relevant comments on someones tweet. And the response back will give you an energy boost! :)

These people are much more approachable than people generally believe.

Yep, the biggest blocker for a good conversation is people simply not writing an email or trying to make that call.

Which is why I wrote this.

Is the same at conferences: one of the best things you can do is to fo and talk to the person holding the lecture. They usually appreciate it very much.

You don’t need to be famous to do that.

Most famous people are really busy though. Even people who have given me engaged replies often took a month or more to write back.