When I tell the Windows Terminal team something is simple, I am "misguided"

They were also pretty quick and helpful with answering any question I had. I guess it depends on what team you get ahold of. Or, maybe how you ask the questions. I always try to be polite and patient, which is hard to do when you're in a time crunch.

They really were trying to push azure hard in a situation that didn't require it. It was odd at the time. I chalked it up to the team evangelizing a new feature that they knew was going to rake in money, so they were required to bring it up. I remember it was funny and a little annoying to have to keep saying no... now let's get back on topic.

But, they never insulted me. It was a very professional experience. Sad to hear this kind of thing is happening now.

This goes against Microsoft’s community engagement policies. I hope Leonard reflects on his actions and makes better choices in the future.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_OS/2#Analysis

> It really seems like most of the code in the parser/renderer part of the terminal is unnecessary and just slows things down. What this code needs to do is extremely simple and it seems like it has been massively overcomplicated.

I think they deserved a better response from Microsoft, but I also probably would not have responded favorably to that wording – irrespective of if they were correct.

Casey happens to be right on the technical issue in this case and people are just glossing over all the ways in which he was also wrong.

Now, personally, I believe it was the WT Team's responsibility to let it go as they're representatives of a larger organization and as such how they interact with people reflects back on the organization they work for.

But yeah, no heroes in this story.

Ctrl-F there doesn't show a single "sorry" in the text. Or "Casey" for that matter.

Why is it so difficult to say: "Casey, we are sorry, you were right and we were mistaken.". Instead there is a nebulous ~extended a branch to community and hope to accept our apology~ (paraphrasing) without offering an apology in the first place.

Also, good apologies come with admission of fault and steps you'll take to make sure you don't make the same mistake again.

This response shows how little you value users feedback (and how unafraid of them you are). Probably should leave this kind of thing to your developer relations team...

> We get it, Microsoft sucks, we should all be fired, rah rah rah.

> I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming? The blog post is matter-of-fact, and Casey is right: however, he said himself that it was trivial to do this. Is it not acceptable that we use the same language?

Your "apology" really is anything but. If anything you and your team come off as combative, thin skinned and hostile to outsiders. But, you do you bro.

1. I'm sorry 2. It was my fault 3. How do I make it right?

Someone is upset and venting. This comment comes across to me as "Ugh we already said the right words. Their distress is so inconvenient to me, why isn't it stopping?"

EDIT: Typically in this community we denote when a comment has been edited to change a critical piece of the message...

I'm detecting very little genuine authentic empathy

The idea that vaguely saying sorry to an abstract community should resolve this entire issue is repulsive. Merely stating an apology does not thereby grant you forgiveness.

I had a neighbor who once tore up my yard doing construction. They apologized profusely, but outside of words never made any meaningful recompense. If I complain about the damage am I in the wrong simply because he utter some words of apology?

The tone here sounds like you're more annoyed that Casey was right and wish you could go back to feeling clever.

It's only an apology in the manner of soulless corporate jargon then. A generic statement following a personal/directed insult does not count as an apology.

Edit: also the following

> (Note: I've iteratively edited this post, as it was originally a one-sentence diatribe written in anger. I originally asked, "I just don't know what else he's asking for here. Credit? Us to die screaming?" It was not a good look.)

I think your comment and it's different iterations demonstrated very well how you guys (still) feel about this.

English is indeed not my first language, but I've lived in North America for 25 years and stakeholder communication is part of my job description. "I did something wrong; please accept my apologies" to me is boiler-plate standard, sufficient, acceptable way.

Your blog post goes way past that! It says "We caused the kerfuffle". Even "We were Wrong", explicitly! I for one understand your frustration and probably real question of "What else do you want from us - keel over and die?" - it's just that humanity is not an acceptable feature to show from people HN wants to hate on already.

That's OK though. Their reaction here will simply mean we'll get less sincere humane posts like yours, and more corporate-sanitized meaningless PR, which I'm sure will make those very same people much happier. And yes that's a pointed /s :-)

No, Microsoft doesn't suck. It's a great company. It's some people there that suck, and one just got self-identified.

- You insisted this was a "doctoral research" (your words) and that he was "misguided" (Leonard's words)

- When it turned out he was right, you posted a non-apology (you didn't even name the person you were apologizing to)

- A year later Leonard who claimed it was so hard now writes a blog post that "solution is trivial" and was "suggested by a community member". Once again failing to acknowledge the person who gave you this trivial solution

What more you could've done? What do you think?

Unironically, yes, UNLESS...

- You're willing to take a serious look in the mirror (and understand that the way you reacted to the situation was defensive, passive aggressive and inflammatory rather than direct, constructive and conciliatory)

- You assign credit where credit is due

- You do a good faith post-mortem and come up with some way to make sure this won't happen in the future

Now, if that happens, then obviously you should not be fired; if anything, you should be rewarded as handling difficult situations like this correctly tends to be the true test of one's capabilities as a professional. Unfortunately, it's high stakes, high rewards -- which also means high risks and consequences.

It's not easy to say "We made a mistake. Not only that, but there's no easy 1-shot fix to undo what went wrong. Let's sit down together and discuss, and we'll listen. Then, we'll go and think about that for a while and come back to you with where we align, where we differ; and so far as where we agree, where we think we can improve. What do you say?"

It may not be easy, but it's worth it.

Relationships are built in the muck.

Yeah, that's not an apology. That's something saying you did apologise. It doesn't look like you actually sent an apology, and you never mentioned Casey at all.

If this were a security vulnerability Casey would have gotten a mention (and a Bug Bounty). I guess Microsoft don't care about credit for other stuff.

So you stole his idea and realized a one-liner dismissal was not a "good look" for yourself, so you wrote an "apology"? It's not about him, it's about saving yourself from the blowback. This and the events documented are the closest thing to a psychopathic programmer I've ever seen.

Well, it wasn't a real apology. It was "We hope you accept our apology

When you apologize, you say "I am sorry [insert other words of explantion]." Then you can say "We hope..."

What you did simply refers back to an apology that wasn't actually made. Considering that he was correct in saying the problem was simple, his tone was not actually combative, it accurately characterized the problem. So you belittled him & insulted him, and as you admitted you then failed to give credit where due to him & others. He has a career as well. Wouldn't it be nice for him to be able to pad his Vitae with a win on something like this?

Then your initial response he was, as you said, "not a good look". The edited post is better, but still not very good.

This week's blog post refers to them as a "community member" [of Microsoft]. Such a self aggrandizing term.

Someone reported a bug on github. Your team dismissed them and peppered them with deflective words to pretend that the team is making a safe space for employees that don't care at all.

Your edits are getting closer.

ASK HIM

We've created the most incredible communication platform in human history and no one actually talks to each other, everyone just tries to publicly snipe.

Writing an "apology" for taking credit for someone else's work, without naming the person who did the work, is just adding insult to injury. Actually making amends would involve giving credit, both in your apology and by adding their name to the top of the original announcement if you can still edit it.

Translation: While I'm ostensibly apologizing please note that I'm actually the victim here, everyone please feel sorry for me and my team.

The way to navigate the conversation would have been something closer to this: "I thought it was already doing this, but I'll check again, maybe we misread the doc. Also there's X, Y, and Z to consider that may make what you suggest harder than it seems on the surface".

That all being said, I kind of don't like anybody in this kerfluffle. I think your assessment of his character isn't terribly off the mark and now you're caught in a version of "the worst person you know actually has a point".

Now, we can sit here and discuss whether his approach engendered a response in kind or not, but at some point, someone has to be the duck and let the personal slide off their backs.

> Casey rightly did not acknowledge it except to tell his followers that it was not a real apology

> Casey, I'm sorry. We made a mistake. I made a mistake! We didn't know what we didn't know, and thought we were clever enough to pass for it.

Your edited post starts of with the feeling that you are pissed at Casey, they are dunking on your team yet again. Then you go on to apologize to them.

Jesus fucking crist mate, no post would have been better than this.

Man, you have to take criticism better than that. Remember, we don't know anything about this other than the tweets plus these replies from you and your colleague here on HN. So the tweets honestly didn't seem to describe a particularly bad problem, the only thing that stood out to me was the fake-name-on-discord thing which is yet to be substantiated. I was willing to chalk it all up to an OSS contributor feeling ignored and ranting a little, but the feeling I have now is that there's some pettiness and bickering going both ways.

Good question why insult him for his use if you feel its appropriate language?

Good question why insult him for his use if you feel its appropriate language?

> As the message evolved, that became more and more out-of-place.

The wording didn't "became more" it was inappropriate from the start and instead of acknowledging this you and lhecker have tried walking back every excuse to downplay this. You both don't think it was out of place or inappropriate you are both just upset that you got called out on it.

One is forced to wonder how, in an entire team working on a terminal emulator, no one thought to use the texture atlas. I mean, that's basically how the actual physical terminals the software is emulating worked in the first place. Then, when told about the obvious implementation, the reaction was not to slap one's forehead and say "Of course, it was so obvious!", but instead to tell a decades-experience game engine developer that they didn't understand how rendering works.

Mind boggling.

Just to note that Casey isn't any game developer, but one who is an expert on 2D UI rendering and popularized his own gui rendering type (probably more or less used in some older games but not articulated?): immediate mode rendering:

https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0001

He's basically an expert in this domain with a very popular approach to performant 2D gui rendering.

[0] https://assets.sbnation.com/assets/2907963/microsoftguns.jpg

Just don’t take anything personal. Being defensive / know best is in this industry everywhere at all levels and organizations.

Being humble in general is hard, being humble in code reviews is harder, being humble to Internet comments in any forum… sometimes impossible. Then repeat that with two super genius experts - eek.

You find everyone is usually trying their best if you ever have face to face (except server admins, they are stone-cold psychopaths, stay away).

Would bet you both are helpful and open minded at the end of the day.

I couldn't tell you were being sarcastic and it seems others couldn't as well. I only found out through this comment.

Text is the worst medium for sarcasm since sarcasm is often signaled by vocal inflection or body language, neither of which are present in your post.

I think it's really difficult to convey sarcasm well in text, and what seems obvious to you as a writer might not come across as sarcasm to readers. I certainly didn't understand that as sarcastic right away.

It might be better to address it directly and in a friendly way, like this:

> Like I did, you might be wondering right now why we don't just create our own, much larger lookup table and wrap it around Direct2D. Well, we can’t just tell Direct2D to use our custom cache [...]

It might also help to acknowledge that Casey's feedback and the interaction with them was constructive and instrumental to this improvement being considered and deployed, even if the team ultimately took another approach than the one that Casey suggested.

I couldn't imagine how bad your team would treat team members with inferior authority when your team treat your own users like this.

Non native speaking skill is really no excuse here.

It seems like you managed to optimize Direct2D with your 'glyph cache' pixel shader but that doesn't mean caseys suggestions were pointless.

In practice, I interpreted the text as "There's a simple solution... but we cannot use it", which is a perfectly fine thing to say, in my opinion.

It’s just poor form, why make an excuse in the first place? You can just say this was a mistake and try to be better next time.

It's literally saying "the contributions of people whose work I based my work on is less important than the least useful sentence in describing my work".

Do not let your sarcasm/irony out of the articles, I've enjoyed.

In your reply to Casey you made it sound like you where unaware when you say things like "I'm somewhat surprised that other accelerated terminals aren't already doing this" is OpenGL not accelerated? What am I missing here?

He was too 'overconfident' with his 'opinion'. But it is exactly what has been implemented.

It's basically this scenario:

> "You don't understand, it's very very hard, next to impossible, to create a website where you can leave an email address. i think you should reread all the RFCs and a bunch of programming books. You have no right to say anything, WE are Microsoft, not you, so you have NOOOOOOOOOO idea"

> 1 year later: "We created a website where you can leave an email address. It was actually not that difficult. But look, WE are Microsoft, so let us explain how smart we were to figure it out".

It's not like you will get less credit for mentioning it - you still delivered the solution and that is what counts. But if you mention other people, it opens a few doors:

* They will like you and will be more likely to share further suggestions or code snippets (that will help you build your promotion package).

* The management will see you as a person who knows how to work with people, so you'll get a higher chance to get into the management track.

* Once you discuss a technical solution with somebody, and don't leave them in dust like an asshole, you get basic mutual trust. If you ever lose your job, they might gladly recommend you to their company, or vice versa.

Edit: I ask because if you're taking a pessimistic view of this, here is the rough order of occurrences:

1. You insulted Casey, knowingly or not, intentionally or not, but in public.

2. You join his discord, under a fake name

3. You write this blog post, without credit to Casey (other than "a community member").

I hope you can see how someone could very easily take this as something more sinister than it probably was.

2) Even with evil companies, contributing doesn't always mean helping evil. Companies are, as you pointed out, abstractions. I find much of what Facebook / Meta does to be particularly evil, but they have some very good, ethical projects I'd gladly work on or contribute to.

3) Even so, if an organization were evil, there are different tactics. Microsoft isn't going away. One can affect change from the outside or from the inside. In many cases, the best way to turn evil into good is to engage and contribute.

The author of the blog post is the author of the second comment on GitHub. Also[1]:

> Afterward, the same dev also used a fake name to hang out on our discord and talk about Windows Terminal without telling anyone who he was. I figured it out and confronted them, and they failed to see anything wrong with that behavior. It's a really special team they have there.

[1]: <https://nitter.net/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761>

I'd summarize this more as "Microsoft employees initially disagree with dev's idea, but eventually admit he was right."

If I'm right in my reading, the author of the tweet is wrong to complain about them saying it's "trivial," because they never did.

If I were a Microsoft exec and came through this mess I would say fuck Open Source.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Different strokes for different folks. :)