Farewell from Rusty Russell
git.kernel.org
git.kernel.org
Impressed with:
"disagreed with my approach so much and so continuously that I developed a dread of reading my mail every morning: eventually I wrote a filter to send their mail to a separate mbox".
I'm very sorry to read this. In the early days of Redis this happened to me as well, there were a group of people continuously attacking me and I was horrified by the idea of reading their Twitter replies at some point. However instead of filtering them, I found (without conscious efforts, it just happened) a different solution, I became more and more sentimentally disconnected from the chats focusing solely on the actual arguments, filtering most of the tone and human-level parts. This makes me a sadder person, not able to joy or be sad for things I read on social networks for the most part, however in the pro side there is that I can read the harsh criticisms and find some value, sometimes, without being affected. Moreover, as a secondary adjustment, I no longer reply after a given point if I may start to sound attacking towards another person. This does not mean to accept everything, but just say after N replies: "we disagree but you are cool, I'll do what I think, have a nice day".
I still believe that we can stay in the tech world, not accepting what other people say if we disagree from a technical standpoint, without being assholes.
You can be harsh to ideas, but be nice to people.
This is the mark of someone who has figured out an incredibly valuable truth about interacting with people.
I sympathise with the idea - but I think the problem is, a lot of the time opinions are a predicament, not a choice. Without consciously taking a position on a topic, you're often implicitly accepting various components of it - its logical dependencies, its framing of the problem, and so on.
My gut feeling is that people don't all have opinions ('everyone's a critic') because of widespread foolishness, but rather it's a basic characteristic and consequence of thought - just like you have to make assumptions to make a proof.
I find that unless your taste is very unrefined, you can practice even in your own fully isolated and independent projects, because even my own personal projects pretty much never 100% conform to my own personal taste....
[1] in a practical sense, I'm very skeptical of absolute objectivity.
And it's a two fold thing you have to do as a developer of anything: Don't get emotionally attached to your code, and always make sure it's crystal clear that you have problems with someone else's code. Never let it get personal. If you can't go have a beer with this person after you tear up some of their work, then you're failing as a collaborator IMHO.
Edit: It appears that Rusty now works at Blockstream and is focusing on the Bitcoin Lightning network.
To my fellow maintainers: stay harsh on code and
don't be afraid to say "No" or "Why?"; there really
are more bad ideas than good ones, and complexity
is such a bright candle for us hacker-moths. But
be gentle, kind and forgiving of your peers:
respect from people you respect is really the only
reward that sticks[9].The story of CALU 1999 being funded on Rusty's personal credit card is legendary in the Australian Linux community. Having recently attended my fourth linux.conf.au, as it's now known, I'm very grateful for Rusty's instrumental role in building the Linux and free software community here.
(Also, I'm now lucky enough to work with the legendary group of hackers at OzLabs - the best graduate job that I could hope for in Canberra!)
author Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> 2017-08-15 07:01:08 +0930
committer Jessica Yu <jeyu@kernel.org> 2018-01-15 20:44:08 +0100
But one person disagreed with my approach so much and so continuously
that I developed a dread of reading my mail every morning: eventually
I wrote a filter to send their mail to a separate mbox, which I've
still never read and don't intend to.
This was the same guy who, after writing a comprehensive detailed post about Solaris performance, was trolled by a Sun employee who was in charge of performance - with a post that consisted, in it's entirety, of
> 'have you ever kissed a girl?'
This kind of arrogance is what killed Sun (and Joyent).
https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
When Sun was powerful, he (they?) was on the side of Sun. When political correctness is powerful and a good way to increase sales, he (they?) is on the side of PC and throws a non English speaker under the bus.
A breath of fresh air in the day and age of installing package managers to install another package manager to install an autoloader to load the plugin for the transpiler for the code we haven't started writing yet.[1]
1 - http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/10/a-moment-of-nostalg...
Nothing dramatic I'm afraid!
We were in the same dorm, and he borrowed some of my toothpaste.
Could someone please explain this to those of us that were 5 years old in 1997?
Kids these days don't know the annoyances^W joy of configuring X11 so that startx would work
(just kidding, things work more reliably today and that's how it should be, but someone had to experiment with it first)
If it helps, I didn't actually exist at the time
(I'm younger than the GGP poster here, but I was enough of a nerd in primary school that I got into Linux at about the time that distro installers' XFree86 autoconfigurators got you most of the way but still had to have a manual modeline configuration option in the advanced settings...)
Mandatory xkcd comic: https://www.xkcd.com/963/