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Great footnote from the article: > I'm often amused that people compliment me on things like PuTTY by telling me how much of their time it saved, whereas people compliment me on my puzzle game collection by telling me how much of their time it wasted.
Great footnote from the article: > I'm often amused that people compliment me on things like PuTTY by telling me how much of their time it saved, whereas people compliment me on my puzzle game collection by telling me how much of their time it wasted.
I don't understand that sentence. Why would his puzzle game collection waste anybody's time ? How come people know about it or even care ?
Great footnote from the article: > I'm often amused that people compliment me on things like PuTTY by telling me how much of their time it saved, whereas people compliment me on my puzzle game collection by telling me how much of their time it wasted.
I don't understand that sentence. Why would his puzzle game collection waste anybody's time ? How come people know about it or even care ?
Here they are playable online on Tatham's site: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
And here's the Android version: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzles/
What an excellent reminder of how easy and effective it can be to not be a jerk. I think there are plenty of people who could take some advice from this.
"But I've always been able to deal with this by pointedly reminding the most demanding people that I'm not at their beck and call. Most of those companies who mistake me for a contracted vendor are prepared to recognise their mistake once I point it out, and the more self-aware ones even apologise. I've not even found it necessary to be especially rude: a plain statement of the facts of life normally does the job. If one of them is rude to me, then the quintessentially British approach of a faint frown and a tone of mild reproof (or its email analogue) generally gets good results – probably a lot better than mouthing off like a sweary 13-year-old in return."
It is easier if you are a native English speaker, because you have a wide range of expressions at your disposal to express disdain or irritation without going nuclear.
It is also easier if you are the single author and not fighting with others in the same code base.
So I don't think easy in general to react maturely, especially if you have made large contributions to a shared code base and some pushy person comes along and makes demands (sometimes the impolite person is another contributor, which makes things worse).
EDIT: Perhaps you meant that the person making requests should not be a jerk, in which case of course I fully agree.
The main point being that, with the log4j issue (and others before that), the thing that's struck me when maintainers complain about not being appreciated or that they are working as hard as they can, unpaid, is that maintainers are under no obligation to respond at all, and that you can't control how other people will react.
As someone who's dealt with anxiety for a long time (and as a former opensource primary maintainer), I can most definitely commiserate with feeling burdened by the expectations of others, but one of the best things I learned from therapy is that you can't control others emotions, you can only attempt to understand why you react as you do in certain situations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand that sentence. Why would his puzzle game collection waste anybody's time ? How come people know about it or even care ?
The point of a puzzle game is a pastime - often considered to be “wasting” time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of a puzzle game is a pastime - often considered to be “wasting” time.
But why would his puzzle game collection waste someone else's time ? He's the one collecting the games or doing the puzzles so why would it waste anybody else's time but his ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of a puzzle game is a pastime - often considered to be “wasting” time.
But why would his puzzle game collection waste someone else's time ? He's the one collecting the games or doing the puzzles so why would it waste anybody else's time but his ?
This sort of thing should be required reading by everyone who interacts with open source software. So many folks come in with a chip on their shoulder, missing the forest for the trees. If every developer modeled themselves after Tatham's attitude, we probably wouldn't be having most of these conversations around open source right now. And issue trackers might be a more peaceful place. edit: fixed the author!