Federico Mena-Quintero: Fri 2012/Nov/09

A pretty picture

Remember the pattern done with straightedge and compasses that I put on my alcove wall?

I've been adding a smaller level of scale to the decoration, dark purple flowers between the big arches. I like how this gives a visual baseline and ceiling to the whole thing.

This time, instead of outlining everything by hand with compasses, I just placed some tracing paper on top of the pattern on the wall, freehanded the flower, transferred it to cardboard, and used the cut-out template for all the flowers. Much easier!

A Friday rant on Gnome 3, journalists, and power users

First, read Karen's post and the pages to which it links. I'd advise you to take a stiff drink before reading the links.

Then, take another drink or two and go for the cherry on top — the vent-fest of the day on Hacker News. Warning: this will make you feel miserable.

Now, to make you feel better, read Aaron Seigo's excellent post on cults of personality and how they harm free software.

I've been in free software for a long time, and let me tell you: this kind of shit rains regularly. And it is thoroughly demoralizing until you, as a developer, learn to live with it.

People

Just to mention some assorted examples, roughly in chronological order. When Gnome was in the pre-1.0 days and people complained that it was always breaking things (it was!). When Gnome was in the advanced 1.x days and people complained about Eazel and Ximian and Abisource and all the little companies (as if making a living were forbidden in free software). When Gnome was in the early 2.x days and people complained that everything broke (kind of; we changed widget toolkits, what did you expect?), and that the usability nazis were dumbing things down (but apparently to the right level, for the big public-sector deployments chose us for being more usable). When Gnome was in the intermediate 2.x days and there was bitter rivalry between Red Hat and Ximian/Novell. When people raised so much FUD about Mono that they killed enthusiasm for an excellent chance at having a modern development infrastructure, and killed Beagle, the first desktop-wide search for a major desktop system (yes). When Gnome was in the late 2.x days and people complained that it was stagnating compared to KDE 4 (kind of, but maybe we were afraid of the flames!). When Gnome went 3.0 and people complained that everything broke (what did you expect, we changed widget toolkits and the desktop shell!). When the file chooser moved things around, or when it didn't move them enough (cough). More recently, when rockstar kernel hackers got Google+ accounts and finally people could read their non-kernel-related rants outside of the Linux Kernel Mailing List, that wretched hive.

Et-fucking-cetera.

I am ashamed to say that I've been part of Those People from time to time, particularly recently when I had a stretch of spite against the Gnome 3.0 designers. I am deeply sorry about it. I apologized to them during the last GUADEC and everything seemed better after that, but I still feel bad about it.

Let me take a breath. Here is a kitten, because I can't give you Pepto over the net.

Systems of survival

So, you see nominally Regular People complain and bitch and moan about the software you write. You know, the regular, everyday people with blogs and personal domain names and accounts in bug reporting systems, and knowledge of different window managers, and knowledge of the difference between zsh and bash. Regular people.

We developers have evolved different survival mechanisms against their vitriol, different rationalizations and ways of ignoring or of feeling better.

We rationalize that maybe Those People are not so regular after all, that they are either casually or deeply technical people who are so far removed from the Real World that they don't really know how to design and implement things for Really Regular People.

We invent little uplifting phrases like "haters gonna hate" and use them to ignore the roar of the perpetual motion engines that propel shit-spewing ceiling fans.

We dismiss people who "don't contribute on a regular basis", as opposed to us, because what kind of meaningful opinion could they have, anyway.

We think, "good riddance" when someone threatens to stop using Gnome. (And our next thought is probably, poor people in the next project, who are going to suffer this person soon.)

All of those poisonous people are relatively easy to brush away. The crazies. The slashdot hordes, the peanut gallery. We make names for them — we encapsulate them, give them a name, go up one level of abstraction, take a gulp of Pepto, and move that named entity into a mental /dev/null. But they leave some residue.

Journalists

There is another kind of Those People, smaller in number, but subtly more hurtful: the yellow journalists.

Let me digress a bit.

When I was a teenager, I had a (paper) subscription to PC Magazine in Spanish. And my dad generously bought every issue of PC Computing that came out, for me. Aside from pretty good hardware reviews (the yearly laptop drop test!), reasonably good tips on using (proprietary) software, and an incredible amount of advertisements, they had regular columns by The Pundits.

The Pundits back then seemed like well-learned people, at least to me as a teenager. They gave their Valuable Opinions on important and popular software. They somehow got word of the doings and makings of (proprietary) software companies. Eventually you read enough of several regular Pundits that you found out patterns. This guy hates Apple, doesn't really love Microsoft but is stuck with them for PC operating systems, and doesn't like it when word processors don't have an obvious "word count" feature (useful to know if they've met their monthly Pundit quota). This other guy likes to tinker endlessly with his hardware and doesn't seem to use much software. This third guy never makes any sense, but writes good jokes.

When I got into free software, PC Magazine and all those publications became useless to me. I let my subscription expire. The Pundits disappeared from my life.

Years later the Mainstream Web happened, and the Pundits reappeared. I was surprised to see that some of the old names I knew were still writing exactly the same kind of thing, and this time they were very occasionally mentioning Linux and this newfangled thing called "open source".

I thought, man, that's some stamina on their part.

As I have become a more experienced developer, I have acquired a lot of pity for tech journalists that cover proprietary software - they can't know the details of the things they are writing about. They are prevented from doing better than reading the tea leaves, and hoping to get the rare leak out of a proprietary software company. They don't really report news; they are columnists.

But for free software, not being deeply informed sounds irresponsible. You *can* dig for things and find the root cause of changes. You *can* visit wikis, design documents, logged conversations, anything. There are no non-disclosure agreements. Do "open source tech journalists" lurk on mailing lists and IRC channels, do they converse regularly with actual developers, do they actually make an effort to be as well-informed as they could be?

Or are they just bloggers with a job?

There are good tech journalists. They are not hardcore hackers, but they try to understand issues as best as they can. They sometimes even mail you, as a developer, for confirmation on some particularly unclear issue.

And then there's yellow journalism for tech. The hater bloggers with a job. Some of the things they do:

They pick up the latest flamewar, however minor, and make a big deal out of it.

They summarize blog posts and quote things with not enough context. "$last_name said, 'blah blah blah'" is the only content in their columns.

They predict the decline and fall of a software project because there is a flamewar going on.

They build an ongoing, not entirely consistent, self-serving narrative of the soap opera that they want free software to be.

To the inexperienced, thin-skinned hacker, the danger of such "journalists" is that they'll feel criticized by someone who appears to have a modicum of credibility. It's a journalist, so they must know, right?

My humble advice is to ignore most tech journalism altogether. Or if you can't ignore it, as links to stories manage to make their way to you all the time, at least remember to fully engage your bullshit filter before reading them.

Here is a tech yellow journalist gathering material for his next column. Just remember that the next time you see one.

Not a solution, but...

At least within Gnome we have the Code of Conduct, although we haven't always disciplined people who deserve it (myself included).

But outside Gnome, with Those People and the yellow journalists, well, it's a fucking jungle out there. There is not much we can do about them, except grow a thick skin and learn to ignore them — or learn not to be hurt so much when they hit.

It's not that you should completely ignore complainers. It's just that you should run a very, very low pass filter over what they say, and try to pick up the real root cause of their gripes. Maybe there is something that you can fix technically. Maybe they have identified a systemic problem intuitively but they don't have enough knowledge to really be able to verbalize it.

Haters gonna hate and spew shit, but remember that poop can be excellent fertilizer.