6 ms·

Software Totemism

79 points by rumcajz 11y ago

olalonde 11y ago
I'm not familiar with what lead to this post but lots of projects on GH do feel like social clubs. It would be interesting if GH had a feature that, when enabled, would make all comments on a project's PR/issue tracker anonymous so that they can be considered purely on their technical merit.
- jordigh 11y ago
  You can still recognise people behind the words. I can usually tell who wrote a particular line of code within the projects I work with. It is disingenous to pretend that writing software is a pure robotic activity that can be separated from its humanity.
  - plonh 11y ago
    There used to be a concept called "professionalism" where people didn't let their personal cultural biases crowd out contributors, and people applied their humanity problem at hand at work, and engaged in unrelated conversations on breaks and after work, not disrupting people who are working on the project.
raymondh 11y ago
Brief and well written article giving insights into how group dynamics shapes software development.
mtrn 11y ago
I recently finished three small projects in the sense, that there are no essential features, that I want to add in the near future. It is refreshing and I hope can level up the not really trivial analysis effort needed to actually define the limits of a project and yet be useful. I wish this kind of "limited projects" engineering skill would be easier to learn.
- sdegutis 11y ago
  I've written two major projects: a window manager, and a fuzzy matcher. The window manager inherently requires a lot of configuration because everyone wants window managers to work differently, and even the same person will want to change how they use their window manager. So I've written about a dozen implementations of this; the most popular one one just wraps system calls as Lua functions, but it's also the most difficult to maintain because of the complexity of wrapping system callbacks with Lua callbacks and tracking them and allowing live code reloading etc. The fuzzy matcher was written in one day, and I use it every single week day. It just uses stdin and stdout, and takes very few options. I haven't compiled it since I wrote it, and it's working beautifully. So all in all I'd say the UNIX philosophy is a win.
  - nvader 11y ago
    I'm interested in learning more about the fuzzy matcher you wrote. What kind of problems does it solve for you?
teddyh 11y ago
I agree immensely with this. I recently attended DebConf 15, (the conference for Debian), and in an introductory session some long-time attendees were asked to express why they attended the conference. What they said were things like “This is where all my friends are.” and I even heard someone say “Debian is my family.”. This is emphatically not why I go to any conferences. I go to conferences in order to advance the state of the field by listening to talks and getting to personally talk to people also working to advance the field, in this case the Debian GNU/Linux operating system distribution. I did get a lot of that done, but this spirit of chummy familiarity was pervasive. Every problem of getting people to cooperate and collaborate more was approached as a problem of not enough socializing. But I don’t want to socialize with lots of random people. I want to make Debian more awesome, not shoot the breeze with random people with wine and cheese (yes, DebConf has a Wine and Cheese event in addition to the large social outing). Beyond having a title and summary for talks (and some rather narrowly scoped BoF sessions), there were no concerted efforts to get people in the same field of interest to get to speaking about common topics and solving common problems. I voiced a complaint to someone about this, that in order to find anyone who was interested in the topics I wanted to discuss I would have had to basically randomly wander around and ask every person I met about what they did, which would have taken a lot of time and energy. But the person I talked to saw it as a good thing to essentially force me to socialize with people even though pure socializing was not my goal. Optimizing groups to be more social to the detriment of all else is not what you want to do if your group has any other overriding reason to exist beyond being a pure social club, since you exclude people who would rather work towards the group’s proclaimed goal than being social and chatting with friends.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  You're doing conferences wrong, then. The entire point of conferences is the interpersonal networking. Online materials are far better way to disseminate information, the speaking sessions are literally a waste of time, just an excuse to get people in the same hotel together.
  - teddyh 11y ago
    I can certainly do networking, but there’s a difference with that and pure socializing. When you network, you want to know that the people you’re about to talk to have some reasonable chance of being interested in your topics. In pure socializing, it doesn’t matter, you just mash as many different people together as possible and it’s all good. When I network, I want to know that this group, here, at this time or in this room or at this table, is actually interested in a specific topic which I wish to discuss. I can’t do that with a conference of hundreds of people most of which are not interested in the topics I want to discuss. A conference should not be simply an opportunity to socialize. If that’s how you do conferences, then you’re doing them wrong.
mpdehaan2 11y ago
Hmm, complicated. I don't get the wanting to be anti-social bit, but I do get the part about projects that are sometimes too much about the social bit. Or rather, the stress that can create. I felt some of this at times, namely the idea of a project became that it must absorb all contributions, and trying to not offend people while trying to mediate that. This is exactly what a project shouldn't do, and in many cases, it's a giant challenge. OTOH, much of what spawned good OSS was people working together across company boundaries, and that means letting up a bit to let other people get their ideas in, even if those ideas aren't the ideas you neccessarily feel are the most important. It's a hard balance. I do like socializing with people I meet through OSS projects, but it can be hard to close the door and say "this code isn't good enough" and "I'm not interested in this" without being percieved as anti-social, or greatly overcommunicating to avoid percieved slights. I do agree with one thing I did read about 0mq though, which was it wants to merge things first, and break things. I prefer more to see software that is designed and strictly looked after. The social element is definitely not first, but it sound be fun. The problem is, with a lot of people in the game and not monetarily invested (this is free, etc), people can get their feelings hitched to the project more than they ordinarily should, if it was a business transaction -- they feel their price for spreading things or contributing should be that the big social element takes over and everybody gets their code in... which is anti-quality in the long run. Again, balance -- and really only you get to feel this when things start getting really busy. I do believe software can be finished though. If you're just continuing it to keep the community around, I think that's when you don't have a purpose. But that doesn't really happen unless you're doing it for fun (like a game) - and if so, great! But yeah, the first goal of OSS isn't just to collaborate for the sake thereof. It should be for the purpose, and you can still enjoy the heck out of the collaboration part.
- rumcajz 11y ago
  I think that UNIX-y "do one thing" projects kind of solve the problem. It's easy to reject a contribution as being out of scope: "This little program prints out contents of a file. Your patch that sends it via email is nice, but you should rather make it a separate project built on top of the existing one."
plonh 11y ago
Suckless.org disproves the authors thesis. Heck, UNIX itself disproves the thesis. A project can grow to include more compatible components, without needlessly cluttering each component. Finishing one program is not the end of all software development.
drewcrawford 11y ago
I've been involved at various times with both Martin and Pieter on the projects that motivated this article. The dichotomy here sounds compelling, but I think it hasn't any basis in reality at all. Let's look at the data. nanomsg ("the technical endeavor") is, objectively, a project with declining activity, and little of any import has happened in 2015. [0] libzmq (the "social club") merges some 20 patches/week. [1] Now, maybe this is because nanomsg is "done", and has simply already achieved its status as a "small component that does one thing and does it well" where nothing else needs to be added, while libzmq faces "strong pressure to add one more option, one more feature". Except that nanomsg is now in its fourth year of unstable beta, and even its own mailing list is riddled with statements that things are so bad don't even bother to file bugs [2], features are "horribly broken" [3], and you should use a different project instead [4]. From my own experience deploying nanomsg in large environments, this criticism (from core developers!) is absolutely true. One cannot look at these projects and fairly conclude that there is any tradeoff at all between "software as a social club" and "software as a technical endeavor". In reality libzmq is both, while nanomsg cannot even succeed at one. libzmq may be a social club, but it's a social club that ships. Don't get me wrong, libzmq has plenty of problems, technical and otherwise. I am no champion of it. And it was totally plausible, in 2012, that the philosophy enshrined in nanomsg would produce a better library. I believed that. What is wrong is now – now that we have the data – to ignore it and pretend that doubling down on a failing strategy is a good idea. What is wrong is to gloss the serious technical inferiorities of nanomsg as a "personality difference", or that the reason it is in a perpetually unusable state is because "we focus on the code". For nanomsg to be healthy, it needs to do a real postmortem. Admit things aren't working. Think about why. Change the philosophy to something that isn't proven to be broken. Kill some of the sacred cows. Instead, puff pieces like this are written, that tell stories that "feel true" to developers instead of addressing the real facts at any point. The software can never get healthy when this is the approach. [0] https://github.com/nanomsg/nanomsg/graphs/contributors https://github.com/nanomsg/nanomsg/graphs/contributors [1] https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/graphs/contributors https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/graphs/contributors [2] http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/inproc-bugs,1 http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/inproc-bugs,1 [3] http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/v07beta-released http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/v07beta-released [4] http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/release-of-nanomsg06beta,9 http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/release-of-nanomsg06be...
something123 11y ago
I think this is part of a larger issue of people making programming their lives. Our profession encourages obsessiveness more than most - and making your work your life is something people seek out! (just look at startup culture) I find it makes finding professionalism a lot harder. Most companies expect you to be friends with your coworkers/boss/etc. and then leverage that to exploit their workforce. I like the artist alternative he proposes. With github you can now take ownership of your work/contributions. You can go into an open source project and make a contribution and then never touch that software again - yet your accomplishment is something that's tracked and stays with you
ilaksh 11y ago
The traditional socializing gets in the way. Making protocol working groups and manually implementing them. Or meeting at conferences to decide things. The modern approach to contrast is a semantically versioned registry like npm. The next step is to do something similar with web assembly that can handle many programming languages.
digi_owl 11y ago
In other words the geeks has taken over the domains of the nerds? Something i get the feeling started with the web going commercial, and people that was more interested in presentation and bullshitting than technical aspects smelled money and potential fame. And it has been going down hill ever since...
Greymoon 11y ago
help me
Greymoon 11y ago
thanks

79 points by rumcajz 11y ago

I'm not familiar with what lead to this post but lots of projects on GH do feel like social clubs. It would be interesting if GH had a feature that, when enabled, would make all comments on a project's PR/issue tracker anonymous so that they can be considered purely on their technical merit.

jordigh 11y ago
You can still recognise people behind the words. I can usually tell who wrote a particular line of code within the projects I work with. It is disingenous to pretend that writing software is a pure robotic activity that can be separated from its humanity.
- plonh 11y ago
  There used to be a concept called "professionalism" where people didn't let their personal cultural biases crowd out contributors, and people applied their humanity problem at hand at work, and engaged in unrelated conversations on breaks and after work, not disrupting people who are working on the project.

raymondh 11y ago

Brief and well written article giving insights into how group dynamics shapes software development.

mtrn 11y ago

I recently finished three small projects in the sense, that there are no essential features, that I want to add in the near future. It is refreshing and I hope can level up the not really trivial analysis effort needed to actually define the limits of a project and yet be useful. I wish this kind of "limited projects" engineering skill would be easier to learn.

sdegutis 11y ago
I've written two major projects: a window manager, and a fuzzy matcher. The window manager inherently requires a lot of configuration because everyone wants window managers to work differently, and even the same person will want to change how they use their window manager. So I've written about a dozen implementations of this; the most popular one one just wraps system calls as Lua functions, but it's also the most difficult to maintain because of the complexity of wrapping system callbacks with Lua callbacks and tracking them and allowing live code reloading etc. The fuzzy matcher was written in one day, and I use it every single week day. It just uses stdin and stdout, and takes very few options. I haven't compiled it since I wrote it, and it's working beautifully. So all in all I'd say the UNIX philosophy is a win.
- nvader 11y ago
  I'm interested in learning more about the fuzzy matcher you wrote. What kind of problems does it solve for you?

teddyh 11y ago

I agree immensely with this. I recently attended DebConf 15, (the conference for Debian), and in an introductory session some long-time attendees were asked to express why they attended the conference. What they said were things like “This is where all my friends are.” and I even heard someone say “Debian is my family.”. This is emphatically not why I go to any conferences. I go to conferences in order to advance the state of the field by listening to talks and getting to personally talk to people also working to advance the field, in this case the Debian GNU/Linux operating system distribution. I did get a lot of that done, but this spirit of chummy familiarity was pervasive. Every problem of getting people to cooperate and collaborate more was approached as a problem of not enough socializing. But I don’t want to socialize with lots of random people. I want to make Debian more awesome, not shoot the breeze with random people with wine and cheese (yes, DebConf has a Wine and Cheese event in addition to the large social outing). Beyond having a title and summary for talks (and some rather narrowly scoped BoF sessions), there were no concerted efforts to get people in the same field of interest to get to speaking about common topics and solving common problems. I voiced a complaint to someone about this, that in order to find anyone who was interested in the topics I wanted to discuss I would have had to basically randomly wander around and ask every person I met about what they did, which would have taken a lot of time and energy. But the person I talked to saw it as a good thing to essentially force me to socialize with people even though pure socializing was not my goal. Optimizing groups to be more social to the detriment of all else is not what you want to do if your group has any other overriding reason to exist beyond being a pure social club, since you exclude people who would rather work towards the group’s proclaimed goal than being social and chatting with friends.

moron4hire 11y ago
You're doing conferences wrong, then. The entire point of conferences is the interpersonal networking. Online materials are far better way to disseminate information, the speaking sessions are literally a waste of time, just an excuse to get people in the same hotel together.
- teddyh 11y ago
  I can certainly do networking, but there’s a difference with that and pure socializing. When you network, you want to know that the people you’re about to talk to have some reasonable chance of being interested in your topics. In pure socializing, it doesn’t matter, you just mash as many different people together as possible and it’s all good. When I network, I want to know that this group, here, at this time or in this room or at this table, is actually interested in a specific topic which I wish to discuss. I can’t do that with a conference of hundreds of people most of which are not interested in the topics I want to discuss. A conference should not be simply an opportunity to socialize. If that’s how you do conferences, then you’re doing them wrong.

mpdehaan2 11y ago

Hmm, complicated. I don't get the wanting to be anti-social bit, but I do get the part about projects that are sometimes too much about the social bit. Or rather, the stress that can create. I felt some of this at times, namely the idea of a project became that it must absorb all contributions, and trying to not offend people while trying to mediate that. This is exactly what a project shouldn't do, and in many cases, it's a giant challenge. OTOH, much of what spawned good OSS was people working together across company boundaries, and that means letting up a bit to let other people get their ideas in, even if those ideas aren't the ideas you neccessarily feel are the most important. It's a hard balance. I do like socializing with people I meet through OSS projects, but it can be hard to close the door and say "this code isn't good enough" and "I'm not interested in this" without being percieved as anti-social, or greatly overcommunicating to avoid percieved slights. I do agree with one thing I did read about 0mq though, which was it wants to merge things first, and break things. I prefer more to see software that is designed and strictly looked after. The social element is definitely not first, but it sound be fun. The problem is, with a lot of people in the game and not monetarily invested (this is free, etc), people can get their feelings hitched to the project more than they ordinarily should, if it was a business transaction -- they feel their price for spreading things or contributing should be that the big social element takes over and everybody gets their code in... which is anti-quality in the long run. Again, balance -- and really only you get to feel this when things start getting really busy. I do believe software can be finished though. If you're just continuing it to keep the community around, I think that's when you don't have a purpose. But that doesn't really happen unless you're doing it for fun (like a game) - and if so, great! But yeah, the first goal of OSS isn't just to collaborate for the sake thereof. It should be for the purpose, and you can still enjoy the heck out of the collaboration part.

rumcajz 11y ago
I think that UNIX-y "do one thing" projects kind of solve the problem. It's easy to reject a contribution as being out of scope: "This little program prints out contents of a file. Your patch that sends it via email is nice, but you should rather make it a separate project built on top of the existing one."

plonh 11y ago

Suckless.org disproves the authors thesis. Heck, UNIX itself disproves the thesis. A project can grow to include more compatible components, without needlessly cluttering each component. Finishing one program is not the end of all software development.

drewcrawford 11y ago

I've been involved at various times with both Martin and Pieter on the projects that motivated this article. The dichotomy here sounds compelling, but I think it hasn't any basis in reality at all. Let's look at the data. nanomsg ("the technical endeavor") is, objectively, a project with declining activity, and little of any import has happened in 2015. [0] libzmq (the "social club") merges some 20 patches/week. [1] Now, maybe this is because nanomsg is "done", and has simply already achieved its status as a "small component that does one thing and does it well" where nothing else needs to be added, while libzmq faces "strong pressure to add one more option, one more feature". Except that nanomsg is now in its fourth year of unstable beta, and even its own mailing list is riddled with statements that things are so bad don't even bother to file bugs [2], features are "horribly broken" [3], and you should use a different project instead [4]. From my own experience deploying nanomsg in large environments, this criticism (from core developers!) is absolutely true. One cannot look at these projects and fairly conclude that there is any tradeoff at all between "software as a social club" and "software as a technical endeavor". In reality libzmq is both, while nanomsg cannot even succeed at one. libzmq may be a social club, but it's a social club that ships. Don't get me wrong, libzmq has plenty of problems, technical and otherwise. I am no champion of it. And it was totally plausible, in 2012, that the philosophy enshrined in nanomsg would produce a better library. I believed that. What is wrong is now – now that we have the data – to ignore it and pretend that doubling down on a failing strategy is a good idea. What is wrong is to gloss the serious technical inferiorities of nanomsg as a "personality difference", or that the reason it is in a perpetually unusable state is because "we focus on the code". For nanomsg to be healthy, it needs to do a real postmortem. Admit things aren't working. Think about why. Change the philosophy to something that isn't proven to be broken. Kill some of the sacred cows. Instead, puff pieces like this are written, that tell stories that "feel true" to developers instead of addressing the real facts at any point. The software can never get healthy when this is the approach. [0] https://github.com/nanomsg/nanomsg/graphs/contributors https://github.com/nanomsg/nanomsg/graphs/contributors [1] https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/graphs/contributors https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq/graphs/contributors [2] http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/inproc-bugs,1 http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/inproc-bugs,1 [3] http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/v07beta-released http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/v07beta-released [4] http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/release-of-nanomsg06beta,9 http://www.freelists.org/post/nanomsg/release-of-nanomsg06be...

something123 11y ago

I think this is part of a larger issue of people making programming their lives. Our profession encourages obsessiveness more than most - and making your work your life is something people seek out! (just look at startup culture) I find it makes finding professionalism a lot harder. Most companies expect you to be friends with your coworkers/boss/etc. and then leverage that to exploit their workforce. I like the artist alternative he proposes. With github you can now take ownership of your work/contributions. You can go into an open source project and make a contribution and then never touch that software again - yet your accomplishment is something that's tracked and stays with you

ilaksh 11y ago

The traditional socializing gets in the way. Making protocol working groups and manually implementing them. Or meeting at conferences to decide things. The modern approach to contrast is a semantically versioned registry like npm. The next step is to do something similar with web assembly that can handle many programming languages.

digi_owl 11y ago

In other words the geeks has taken over the domains of the nerds? Something i get the feeling started with the web going commercial, and people that was more interested in presentation and bullshitting than technical aspects smelled money and potential fame. And it has been going down hill ever since...

Greymoon 11y ago

help me

Greymoon 11y ago

thanks