aethertap

I use Obsidian heavily on a daily basis, and I love it, but without the plugin ecosystem it would be far less usable. Most of the plugin authors are just doing the work because they have a passion for it, which eventually fades. They have funding links but I think there's too much friction in the process for many people to actually send funds to them. So, I've been trying to come up with a way to make a software product that can meaningfully reward high-quality plugin contributions, but the issue of fairness is hard to sort out.

My best shot at it currently is to have a subscription that allows plugins to be installed, and then just evenly splits each user's subscription fee among the plugins that user has active. There are several ways this could be gamed. For example, you could break what would naturally be a single plugin into several that depend on each other in order to get a bigger slice of the income.

Have you seen or thought of any other models that are really good at this, and hard to game?

I've been trying to find a single source where I can see the current situation regarding quarantine and containment efforts that might effect me without having to dig through tons of news stories. Does anyone have a reliable one-stop source for that kind of information?

Issues with technical interviews for programmer positions come up often here. The latest one made me wonder if it would be possible to come up with a standard interview process that would tick a few boxes:

- Technically deep enough to reveal useful information

- Fair to the applicant (no free labor/conflict of interest issues)

- Time efficient for both the interviewer and the applicant (doesn't take a week of life to interview for a single position)

- Maybe give indications on other important things? (work habits, social interaction, etc)

My off-the-cuff thought was to ask for them to work on a smallish issue on an open source project they haven't contributed to before. After the work has been done, they'd come in to be interviewed about what they did and how it worked out. If this was a standard process, they'd be able to use the same work for multiple interviews, so job hunting wouldn't be such a huge burden. It also gives them a chance to showcase a few skills that I've found important in my own career (navigating a new codebase, integrating and testing a bugfix/enhancement, interacting with team members). It would also have the nice side effect of providing some motivated help for open source projects.

That was just a quick stab at the issue to use as an example, I'm sure it has a number of fatal flaws. The question is, could there be a solution that would actually work?