Meet the Hackers

This past week, I've started to get back into photography a bit more (thanks, Nina!) and started taking my camera into the office with me every day to remind myself to take photos. As a result, I've taken a bunch of photographs of my co-workers in the office.

Would you like to meet the hackers?

The Founders

Most of you would probably recognize the infamous Miguel de Icaza, Xamarin's CTO:

Next up is our very own Steve Jobs, Nat Friedman, our CEO and the man who reminds us to pay attention to the details:

Another person many of you will recognize is our very own COO, Joseph Hill:

MonoDevelop Team

Well, okay, I've only got a photo of the famous Michael Hutchinson, but he's a very important player in the development of MonoDevelop.

QA Team

Next up, we have the QA team. They do their best to make sure that we, the developers, didn't break anything. When they aren't testing a specific application before a launch, they hammer away at our products and try to find weak spots in our code (but we still love them anyway!)

This is PJ, and as you can see, he's demonstrating how to QA popcorn corn cobs:

(Did it pass the test, PJ?)

Next up is Lindsey. She's been working on writing automated tests to make it less likely for releases to include regressions. Let's hope she's successful!

Release Team

Alex Corrado is the man behind the curtain. He's our head Release Team engineer and also the brilliant mastermind that started CXXI, the Mono C++ interop project that we hope to give him time to finish someday soon.

Web Team

The newest addition to our ranks (just this week, in fact!), but long-time contributor to the Mono project, is Bojan Rajković. You can see we've already put him to work (he is no doubt puzzling over some ASP.NET code on his screen).

Documentation Team

Nina is the only Cambridge resident on our Docs Team. Specifically, she hacks on our Documentation Portal. She's also the one who has encouraged me to get back into taking photographs, so she'll have to put up with me using her as a guinea pig the most. Here she is taunting me with her hot cup of Chaider:

Using Git

Now that Mono has moved to GitHub, a number of contributors (including myself) have been somewhat lost, not knowing how to properly use Git. So today, I'm recommending a book to help all the lost souls out there get comfortable with using Git.

As many long-time programmers probably know, O'Reilly books are top notch. Most probably also would not be surprised that O'Reilly has a book covering Git: Version Control with Git: Powerful Tools and Techniques for Collaborative Software Development.

Don't let the bat scare you.

Re: Red Hat, 16%. Canonical, 1%.

While some people are busy complaining that Canonical doesn't contribute as much as others, I'd like for everyone to take a step back and ask themselves, "what would Gunny say?"

I'll tell you what he'd say. He'd say,

Hmm, that's interesting. Do you know what makes me sad? YOU DO! Maybe we should chug on over to mamby-pamby land where maybe we can find some self-confidence for you, you jack-wagon! Want a tissue?

After he finished ripping someone a new one, he'd point out that in that very same GNOME Census slide deck, I am ranked #8 in the top contributors list and I haven't contributed much of anything to any of the core GNOME components in about 5 years.

Yeah, that's right you cry babies, I put all y'all to shame.

On a more serious note, for better or worse, we all knew what we were getting into when we decided to take up the Free Software baton and start running with it. This is just how Free Software works. Don't like it? Cry me a river.

tl;dr

Update: It seems my post here has been misinterpreted. Allow me to try and rectify this. I'm not pissed off at Greg for voicing his opinion. We all do it. I'm just making a mockery of the whole situation because I was itching to trollcat and because I wanted to pat myself on the back for being #8 on the individual contributors list in terms of commits (as meaningless as that is). Also because I was up late last night and saw that Geico commercial with R. Lee Ermey which just cracks me up every time I see it.

Reflecting on 10 Years at Ximian

IMG_1047, originally uploaded by jstedfast.

Today marks my 10th anniversary since I was hired at Helix Code to work on Evolution.

In that time I've gotten to work closely with and learn from some of the most talented developers in the Free Software community including Michael Zucchi, Miguel de Icaza, Federico Mena-Quintero, Chris Toshok, Larry Ewing, Michael Meeks, Dan Winship, Radek Doulik, Joe Shaw, Vlad Vukićević, Dave Camp, Dan Mills, and many others (too many to name!).

Back in the early days of Helix Code/Ximian, we all worked tirelessly to put together the very best GNOME distribution we could and make Evolution the very best groupware client we could.

We had big dreams and I like to think we succeeded. GNOME has become mainstream and the Linux Desktop can most definitely be measured as a success.

Of course, we couldn't have done it without all the help and hard work from the entire GNOME community.

Today, a younger generation of hackers are taking up the reigns to make GNOME awesome with things like the Paper Cuts project by David Siegel's team at Canonical and the work being done by Red Hat on the new GNOME-Shell.

I'm still working with a couple of my old Evolution teammates like Larry Ewing and Chris Toshok on the Moonlight project in the hopes of making it possible for Linux Desktop users to view Silverlight content on the web. We've been making great progress with implementing Silverlight 3.0 and 4.0 features in svn and I've got some accomplishments on that front that I should really blog about but I've just been so busy.

Much love to all you GNOMEies and thanks for all the support and love over the past decade!

Trolls

Thanks go out to Stormy Peters and Jo Shields for tweeting a link to Seth Godin's blog post entitled: Trolls. Had they not tweeted it, I likely would have missed these marvelous words of wisdom:

Lots of things about work are hard. Dealing with trolls is one of them. Trolls are critics who gain perverse pleasure in relentlessly tearing you and your ideas down. Here's the thing(s):

1. trolls will always be trolling
2. critics rarely create
3. they live in a tiny echo chamber, ignored by everyone except the trolled and the other trolls
4. professionals (that's you) get paid to ignore them. It's part of your job.

"Can't please everyone," isn't just an aphorism, it's the secret of being remarkable.

Thanks, Seth. I needed to be reminded of this fact.

And yea, Team Mono is remarkable ;-)

The Faux-pen Source Fundamentalists

I was just reading Linux-Mag's interview with Linus Torvalds with regards to Microsoft's latest GPL'd contributions to the Linux kernel.

In it, I found this fabulous quote from Linus which I think echoes David "Lefty" Schlesinger's latest blog posting about the The Real FLOSS Community and the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists":

I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.

There are ‘extremists’ in the free software world, but that’s one major reason why I don’t call what I do ‘free software’ any more. I don’t want to be associated with the people for whom it’s about exclusion and hatred.”

It is good to see such prominent FLOSS contributors speaking out against the "Faux-pen Source Fundamentalists" that go around attacking the real FLOSS community members, even going so far as trying to get FLOSS developers/contributors fired.

These zealots may think they are "helping" the FLOSS community, but they are only having a negative effect. A destructive effect.

These people are not interested in improving Linux, they are only interested in stroking their own egos. They want power more than anything else. Power over other people. Power to destroy anyone or anything that does not do what they demand.

These people claim that they are protecting our Freedoms, but they are only trying to become dictators. They have no interest in Freedom unless it is their own version of Freedom, where they reign as supreme dictator and where anyone who disagrees with them is labeled as a "shill" or otherwise demonized.

As Linus puts it, these people are about "exclusion and hatred."

This is not Freedom.

Re: Let's All Say It Together.

I wasn't at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit 2009, so I'm learning about this second hand from people like David Schlesinger, Natin Yellin and a number of people I know personally who attended the conference. It is important for us to respect all of our peers no matter their skin color, their religion or other beliefs, their gender, or any other factor. And that goes for respecting people outside of our community as well.

Because of this, I am casting my vote:

STOP sexism by Casey West. License:

"I want the [...] open source [...] communities [I participate in] to be a dignified, respectful, inclusive, and welcoming place. … We’ve all been witnesses to off-color jokes, misogynistic back channel chatter, questionable imagery and unnecessary, trolling comments. I pledge to do better to stand up and call this behavior out when I see it in conferences, online and other public settings. I don’t expect it to go away but I’m not going to tacitly condone it any longer."

(From Nick via Luis via David)
Update: As Natan Yellin has commented below, he was not actually at the conference - it was my mistake in thinking he was.

Follow me on twitter

Over the past few months I'm having an even harder time motivating myself to actually make blog posts due to the convenience of microblogging on twitter.com, so this is just a note to say that if you are interested in the things I do or say, you might want to consider following me on twitter.

Re: It's Time for a FOSS Community Code of Conduct

Bruce Byfield's article, It's Time for a FOSS Community Code of Conduct, has sadly made me aware that this particular problem is more widespread than I thought.

To Aaron Saigo & the rest of the KDE team: just keep rocking, dudes. Eventually these donkeys will either give up or be committed to mental institutions (or better yet, they'll cross paths with someone just like them and get what's coming around).

To the people out there attacking developers/projects:

Like I blogged a few years ago, rampant fanboyism is fine so long as you can keep it positive. You aren't doing the project you support any favors when you badmouth the other projects.

For example, GNOME devs aren't pleased when they see GNOME fanboys attack KDE all over forums or on news sites.

I'm sure the KDE devs feel the same way.

Bruce Byfield on Conspiracy Theorists

Bruce Byfield has made a recent post entitled Conspiracy theorists and free software.

Bruce, I absolutely agree with you.