Apparently, exactly 168 days ago, I warned about very similar behavior. Remember when a pull request was submitted with tongue-in-cheek comments and a very lax tone? It was https://github.com/bitly/dablooms/pull/19, to jog your memory. Most people couldn't understand why a select few of us were getting in such a huff about this. As I wrote back then:
> I worry about a risk of imitation of this culture, but missing the crucial underlying detail and explanation that's hidden in vmg's writing. I worry reasoning with this people will be difficult because they have trained themselves to have such arrogance in their work.
This is just a different symptom of the same problem.
The open source community is rapidly changing with things like GitHub, mostly for the better, but people have got to learn to leave their ego's behind. Sadly, now that we have more, and more rapid interaction between people, the more that we risk re-enforcing attitudes like these. There's a feedback loop problem, and we've got to start acting now if we want any hope at fixing it.
This tweet is an example of things already going too far, that much is obvious. But how did it happen? I feel these things can only happen because we let them happen. Jumping in after the fact isn't a solution, we just all need to be a little more confident pointing out when social behavior isn't acceptable.
I'm not asking everyone to become a vigilante, and it doesn't mean that we're all going to get on. The open source community is a sensitive, valuable community, and there's so much passion about it. I'd rather those who get hurt are hurt because they're (politely) informed their attitude is harmful, rather than letting the feedback loop grow.
When you say 'leave your ego behind', you seem to mean "don't say mean things about the code of another, because you're only doing that make yourself feel better (and BTW, you shouldn't assume your code is much better)". Couldn't it equally well mean "don't be insulted when some random guy on the internet says mean things about your code"? Haters gonna hate and all?
FWIW, the first time I saw that pull request it brightened my day. I know I'd love to get a pull request like that personally.
I'm also a WordPress developer (I know, I know), so I read through all the ticket changes every day. By far the best are those from a relatively new contributor that makes jokes and is generally more light-hearted than others.
I'd really like to see the open source community take a step back to smell the roses. We're making awesome stuff and it's free for anyone to use. Why not have fun while we're at it?
To be honest, that pull request was awesome, hilarious, and extremely constructive. The tweets, on the other hand, were mean-spirited and negative.
"Tongue-in-cheek comments and a very lax tone" make our community less sterile and boring. The fear of a sterile and unhappy programming environment personally drove me away from programming, and I elected to study music instead. I will always be grateful to Ruby on Rails, Github and the developer community for helping me to rediscover my love of software engineering, and get back into a career that I love.
> I worry about a risk of imitation of this culture, but missing the crucial underlying detail and explanation that's hidden in vmg's writing. I worry reasoning with this people will be difficult because they have trained themselves to have such arrogance in their work.
This is just a different symptom of the same problem.
The open source community is rapidly changing with things like GitHub, mostly for the better, but people have got to learn to leave their ego's behind. Sadly, now that we have more, and more rapid interaction between people, the more that we risk re-enforcing attitudes like these. There's a feedback loop problem, and we've got to start acting now if we want any hope at fixing it.
This tweet is an example of things already going too far, that much is obvious. But how did it happen? I feel these things can only happen because we let them happen. Jumping in after the fact isn't a solution, we just all need to be a little more confident pointing out when social behavior isn't acceptable.
I'm not asking everyone to become a vigilante, and it doesn't mean that we're all going to get on. The open source community is a sensitive, valuable community, and there's so much passion about it. I'd rather those who get hurt are hurt because they're (politely) informed their attitude is harmful, rather than letting the feedback loop grow.