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Comment by oskarth | Hacker News Reader

> One thing I did not liked was Matt Stancliff talk. He tried to uncover different problems in the Redis development process, and finally proposed the community to replace me as the project leader, with him.

What a complete douchebag. Even Frank Underwood gets other people to nominate him.

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This is an example of someone really mis-using the power of the microphone. I think antirez summed up quite well:

> Technical leadership is a reward for the work you are capable to do, is not asked at conferences

If this was something Matt Stancliff really wanted, trying to stage a revolution of sorts from the stage is not the way to go about it. Prove yourself and rewards will come your way.

Is there any recording of his talk or something? Regardless of his actual points, this sounds like an extremely weird thing to do.

It looks like videos will be published "shortly", I wasn't there but I'd imagine there was some cross over with this post: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/a/redis-db/PxFeA0fH...

The guy is pretty passive aggressive in that thread which makes it hard to take his points seriously.

heh, he actually mentioned me in his post on the thread... I didn't notice it, I'm kinda out of the loop of the community lately.

I actually agree with some of his points on this thread. Getting contributions accepted to redis is notoriously hard, and a few features I've suggested over the years had been rejected.

However, I have the utmost respect to antirez for doing the work that he does, and I think he is an excellent maintainer; his job is not to keep contributors happy but to make redis as good as it can be according to his vision. And while I disagree with some of his decisions, he's doing a great work at that, and I see him becoming more attentive to the community lately.

One thing I took from mythical man month was that having an architect with a clear vision is necessary for success. The architect isn't perfect. He will make mistakes and he will reject good ideas from time to time. But design by committee has the risk of doing development without a clear vision.

And herein lies a key part of the Node/io.js issue.

I think Antirez said it best: "A darwinian selection will work to make sure we have the best Redis possible."

Last time I checked, Charles Darwin didn't take notes about a voting process amongst animals, rather how leaders were "chosen" by leading.

Stephan Jay Gould derided this "best possible" view of Darwinian selection as the Panglossian Paradigm, in his criticism of the adaptationist viewpoint.

The only way it works is by accepting Pangloss's tautological use of "best", that is, everything that exists is the best possible, and whatever we have in the future must also be the best possible.

Truly we live in the best of all possible worlds.

This assumes that only the most optimal decisions, choices, or outcomes will succeed, which is flat out false. We live in a great world, but there are many other possibilities where it could be better if better decisions, choices, our outcomes had taken place.

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