Contributing

 Family, General, Rants  1 Response »
Oct 292008
 

Tim has a post where he advises developers to con­trib­ute to open source pro­jects so that hir­ing man­agers will look favour­ably on them. I have some prob­lems with this, as do many of the com­menters on his post. 

First off, I agree that con­trib­ut­ing to open source pro­jects is admir­able and to be encour­aged. There are, how­ever, a num­ber of developers who work for com­pan­ies with employ­ment con­tracts that say, more or less, any­thing vaguely code-related that you come up with while employed by us is ours, not yours. Which means con­trib­ut­ing any code to any out­side pro­ject is liable to cause prob­lems, or at least a cer­tain num­ber of hurdles. There are oth­er ways of con­trib­ut­ing to any com­munity that are argu­ably just as valu­able, such as tak­ing part in organ­ising events such as loc­al con­fer­ences, volun­teer­ing at loc­al centres that teach people how to use com­puters, assist­ing users on web for­ums, or teach­ing at loc­al com­munity col­leges. Con­cen­trat­ing on writ­ing code for open source pro­jects seems restricting.

The second issue is that it’s dis­crim­in­at­ory against those who simply don’t have the time. Work­ing single par­ents suf­fer par­tic­u­larly from this issue, but any work­ing par­ents of school-age or young­er chil­dren have the prob­lem to some extent. By the time you’ve picked the chil­dren up from school or day care, fed them and the rest of the fam­ily, cleaned up, taken them off to sports/music/whatever, helped with home­work, and done the laun­dry or whatever oth­er chores are neces­sary for that day, all you really have energy for is to unwind and relax. Espe­cially if you sus­pect that the tod­dler will sleep as badly as pre­vi­ous nights this week, wak­ing you up at mid­night, 4 am, and 6 am. When you have to be awake for the day job, as that’s the one that’s cur­rently pay­ing the bills, stay­ing awake into the wee hours isn’t an option for those who need more than just a few hours sleep a night to func­tion prop­erly. No mat­ter how pas­sion­ate they are about coding.

In my case, the pro­ject I’m work­ing on for my day job is the one I think about in spare hours at night and at week­ends. If I were writ­ing code, I’d be writ­ing code for that pro­ject in pref­er­ence to an unre­lated open source pro­ject. I don’t think that atti­tude should be pen­al­ised by hir­ing man­agers either. 

Surreal and Real

 General  1 Response »
Oct 272008
 

The news has been almost uni­formly bad, these last couple of months. What had been com­plaints of too much money chas­ing too few good assets has now turned into the rout of too little money being avail­able to buy any assets, prov­ing yet again that there is no intrins­ic value to any­thing oth­er than what someone will pay for it. Ice­land, Ukraine, and Hun­gary are being bailed out by the IMF, Japan­ese banks are being restruc­tured again, and people are anxiously draw­ing par­al­lels with the great depres­sion and con­vin­cing them­selves that this set of cir­cum­stances is dif­fer­ent enough for safety. 

And in the mean­time, the sun is shin­ing, while the autumn leaves are fall­ing and make sat­is­fy­ing crisp sounds when you walk on them. I showed off my latest pro­ject at a Sun-intern­al con­fer­ence last week, got lots of good feed­back, and am hav­ing a lot of fun work­ing with a great team of people. It almost seems sur­real, this exper­i­ence of real work and life placed against the back­drop of what’s brought on the news as often as you can stand to watch or listen to it.

We cer­tainly do live in inter­est­ing times.

Advice to Politicians

 General  2 Responses »
Oct 032008
 

With both the Cana­dian and the U.S. elec­tion cam­paigns in full swing, I figured I’d toss my few cents worth into the fray in the form of some advice to politi­cians, or those run­ning their cam­paign. I fully expect it all to be ignored.

For the Cana­dians: If your team has lots of exper­i­ence, make the most of it. Let some of those people expec­ted to play a major role in gov­ern­ment, should your side win, speak out on rel­ev­ant issues. The sys­tem of “shad­ow” roles in the UK works well to my mind, and would work well in Canada (tough to tell how it would work in the US). Of course, it does assume that there are people run­ning for office who are cap­able of becom­ing cab­in­et min­is­ters and cap­able of dis­cuss­ing policy cogently in pub­lic (and if the oth­er side does­n’t, what bet­ter way of show­ing that?)

Show respect to the oth­er side (this is sorely lack­ing in the US cam­paign). Each of the four major can­did­ates in the US cam­paign has shown them­selves com­pet­ent enough to build and win a cam­paign to get them where they are today. I can­’t ima­gine it’s all that easy to become sen­at­or or gov­ernor in any state, which means all four have at least some degree of intel­li­gence, per­spica­city, and capa­city for hard work (you can fight over how much all you want). Wheth­er someone is like­able or trust­worthy, or has the right set of policies, is a dif­fer­ent set of ques­tions that does­n’t obvi­ate the need for respect. Isn’t this some­thing most people should have been taught as tod­dlers, or in kindergarten?

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