Development musings

[TheOldMan]

I have been using your firmware for 3 years now. Your FW is a ton better than Asus stock fw. Have you ever thought of offering training like CodeAcademy does? I take some of their coding training whenever it's offered. I agree router development is huge and beneficial. Thanks for the hard work you've done for all of us Asus Router users.

 

[JohnOCFII]

Perhaps if you post trivial activities which take up your time and have not been
able to attend to them as individual jobs, people who have time can take it up
and lighten your burden and also gives us a sense of contribution to the project.

I'd suggest re-opening the issues section on GitHub. Open issues and tag them as "help wanted." I've seen this work in some of the GitHub projects I follow. You can force a "form" to be used when issues are opened. The form can be as simple as a message that "The GitHub issues page is to track software development. Usage support is best handled by using the SNB Forums. Usage issues posted on GitHub will be closed." or something similar.

 

[3dguru]

I do not know the insight, but why not ASUS hires you and provides you a few other developers, and merge ASUS code as supported/unsupported advanced versions could be selected after installation with terms acceptance? Well just considering if you ever wanted some kind of option of course...

Well, just my 2 cents., I do not know the story behind...

I like your work, and able to have a customizable router...

Cheers,

 

[ChriscomIT]

The max filename length issues for instance - those have existed since the Windows 98 days. Every few months I get a customer who runs into it. Windows has allowed to create a file with a full pathname > 255 characters, but you are unable to access the file until you shorten its path.

Pretty offtopic but Windows 10 anniversary update will fix this bug ;-) however in latest Insider Preview u still have to activate it via regedit.

 

[Deleted member 27741]

Your efforts have improved this firmware immensely. ASUS is clearly making a lot of money off of your ideas, and we all enjoy exponentially better firmware whether it be yours or stock firmware (that has had to catch up with your improvements). We are all in your debt no matter what you choose to do, and we would clearly like to enjoy your continued work but you must come first.

I don't think anyone has suggested it yet, but in addition to a lightened load (be it offloading mips or slowing down releases or both/more) I for one would be GLAD to pay you for each and every release. If you charged a small amount, something like 50 cents for each release I would honestly feel better knowing you were making some much deserved cash for your work. Just a thought. Hell, I would pay you more. You and John deserve it and I think it is time for the community to step up and compensate you properly.

Of course, this strategy has the potential to turn a hobby into a job, but maybe if you lighten the load enough it could be a hobby that makes you some money?

 

[Cake]

If possible take a poll, see what everybody likes. To vote you must donate a minimum amount.
The winning vote gets more of your attention.
I would be curious too. Seems some users want antivirus, protection up the ###, others want a all in one media server, router, still others want privacy and open source only. Others yet want a 2.4Ghz wifi signal that covers 10 square blocks. lol

Maybe split from Asus, go to the most open sourced version and use your wand. Then just update the essentials, patch vulnerabilities every once in a while.

I would donate to get what I want, would the others do the same?

 

[RMerlin]

I don't want to involve money. Money wouldn't provide me more spare time, and it doesn't make the work easier either.

I always refused to make changes based on money, that includes turning down some contracted work offers that were offered over the years. First reason is, I feel that development should be based on a vision and a plan, not on financial arguments.

 

[dlandiss]

There is a lot to be gained by remaining independent of the subject company. That allows impartial decisions based on truth rather than company politics.

 

[Deleted member 27741]

Rmerlin you truly are a gentleman and a scholar.

 

[RogueSpear]

I haven't been around in quite a while between domestic obligations and overseas travel, so I'm sorry if this comes off as a Johnny come lately sort of post. I'm unsure if this has been suggested in one fashion or another - be it this thread or another, but here I go:

This would likely be somewhat of a project itself, but would some sort of standard testing script that generates it's own log file and perhaps, one or more csv files be helpful. I'm thinking of something that could be run from say, a couple of days to a week, in order to generate necessary data. I just don't know if this is a feasible or practical thing, but over the years I've noticed requests for people to test out various components for performance and/or bug issues. And a lot of well intentioned people here, myself included unfortunately, don't always provide the detailed information that could really be helpful. I know that at work if I'm constantly going through endless event logs, I get almost nowhere or even worse, I'm searching for a red herring because of how I interpreted a few log entries. But when I use an event log aggregator / analyzer, things suddenly become much more clear. I know it isn't the perfect analogy, but hopefully you get the idea.

I'd have no problem at all flashing a beta and then running some sort of test suite and submitting the data, but now more than ever (we're expecting our first little one) I don't have the time, and quite frankly the expertise, to be digging around my router half blind. My Linux / Busy Box skills are and will likely remain at the advanced beginner level. I've been nose first into computers in one way or another since about 1984 myself and at this point I've realized this is a young man's game. I'm not going to be jumping up to an advanced level of expertise in anything that I'm not already at.

 

[KevTech]

I remember back in 2012 when Merlin first compiled for the 66u.

http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?id=20120403122346215&board_id=11&model=RT-N66U+(VER.B1)&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

 

[RMerlin]

I re-opened the issue tracker on Github. We'll see if this time around it gets less noise.

 

[ChriscomIT]

I re-opened the issue tracker on Github. We'll see if this time around it gets less noise.

Nice imo its a good decision and a good place to report bugs / issues. Hopefully it will not get spammed and bug reports are detailed.