That's why engineers are, on average, paid more than researchers... And why research is such a nicer job.

Create robust and easy-to-use stuff is tough and you don't get much reward

I've seen a chart where software development complexity grows 3 times on each of these steps. For example:

• implement a business logic: 1 day
• cover with tests: 1 * 3 = 3 days
• write documentation: 1 * 3 * 3 = 9 days
• make it installable by other users: 1 * 3 * 3 * 3 = 27 days

This is basically the problem with "suckless" software summed up.

Documentation is very useful today (to clarify our thoughts on what is useful and what is not, what is in scope and what is not), and for our future selves.

Writing small bits of software made me appreciative of the work teams put on large pieces of infrastructure!

Even the step from one-off script to reusable code is a 1:3–10 rise in complexity, even without distribution. It’s really interesting how problems grow.

I've never worked on an open source project before but what you're describing are all my favorite parts of working on my personal projects so far. lol maybe if I get an actually useful project idea I'll finally become an open source dev

That's nothing. You know what you need. Try figuring out what other people need. They usually don't know what is technically possible, what would be most helpful and how it should work.

But maybe you personally don’t have to write the docs or packaging stuff; if you publish it as open source, others can have a go themselves! :)

I have so many projects that could be cool for someone else, but I just can't be bothered making them usable for others.

Yeah, when I released the alpha of my first open source app, boy I had a lot of work to do when I started getting feedback

I write config files for my own stuff I use FWIW but yeah you're right lol open-source software is much more work. Still it's rewarding though to be able to share your cool software with the world.

Just so do it for you so it’s not a drag

How to compile & deploy

How to operate

If you use something like C# at least source management and packaging are being done for you by the development tools.

But yeah it needs to do something useful and one needs to know how to operate it. That doesn't go away.

For the first and second point however, I've learned that whatever the others don't know today, that'll be my state of lack of knowledge in a few months or years. Anything that isn't a one off script I generally document/comment because I've had some projects when I was young, and couldn't work in them after a few months of break because I didn't understand anything.

That's when I understood, that "others" is just me in a few months.

Packaging and installation are important for released software

I discovered this when I started getting issues reported on my public repo for a personal project. Whoops haha.