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Distribution quote of the week
Enthusiasm is a shockingly rare resource, anywhere. The reason enthusiasm is a rare resource is because it’s fragile; I’ve seen potentially-great ideas abandoned because the initial response was a liturgy of reasons why it won’t work. It’s not the criticism which kills, it’s the scorn.
-- Rusty RussellSo when someone emails or approaches you with something they’re excited about, please reply thinking “What can I do to help?. Often I limit my commitment to an encouraging and thoughtful response: a perfectly acceptable minimum. You might want to go further and offer pointers or advice, but take care to fan that delicate flutter of enthusiasm without extinguishing it. Other forces will usually take care of that soon enough, but let it not be you. (Log in to post comments)
Distribution quote of the week Posted Oct 4, 2012 8:41 UTC (Thu) by oever (subscriber, #987) [Link]
This is an amazingly true quote. Enthusiasm is essential for the creation of high quality or innovative code. As soon as it is gone, either the person that lost it abandons the project or that person will start writing band-aid style code that minimally passes the requirements.
Trusting people to come up with good work, but monitoring their output and helping where needed, can help to keep someone in the flow. It also helps to make people feel they are part of the team and that they actually get something for their efforts.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Oct 4, 2012 13:08 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
I love this quote. This is so true. Every time I talk about my pet backup project, all I hear is: 'there are already dozens of existing ones that do X and Y', 'get a life' or 'just use tool Z and that's all you need.' Sometimes I even get 'you would need years to reach the level to do this.'
I have ended up telling people that I was doing it for fun, because I like programming and it allows me to learn new things. While the latter is true indeed, I secretly consider my own project to be unique in its set of features and a different answer to the problem, and I love it.
So if you have an itch, just scratch it and ignore those bad comments. Often you will realize they come from people who themselves miss the skills, will and most of all enthusiasm! You have it? Keep it up!
Distribution quote of the week Posted Oct 4, 2012 15:37 UTC (Thu) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]
Distribution quote of the week Posted Oct 6, 2012 7:20 UTC (Sat) by rusty (✭ supporter ✭, #26) [Link]
> Perhaps this: http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=236 is a good example of those "Other forces".
That is a masterful troll. Well done, sir!
Cheers,
Distribution quote of the week Posted Oct 8, 2012 20:42 UTC (Mon) by cworth (subscriber, #27653) [Link]
Well said, Rusty.
Here's one of my favorite examples of a response that hits all the right "encouraging and thoughtful" notes, (while also not promising any help that wouldn't be possible:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/03/i-think-i-no-how-to-...
-Carl
Distribution quote of the week Posted Oct 9, 2012 3:29 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] It's all about balance. Newbies (and in particular, kids, who are, by definition, newbies in everything) can shout nonsense because they just don't know any better. They may learn and become valuable members of the community. Unfortunately there are a lot of guys who just refuse to learn and present their insane, non-working ideas year after year. These just waste everyone's time. It's hard to distinguish these two cases - especially over e-mail. But to encourage second group is to encourage pointless waste of time! And thus, even if one particular individual is always better served by "encouraging and thoughtful" notes it does not mean that it's always the right thing to do. P.S. And there are yet another subtle differences: some ideas are insane in principle, but some just need the right foundation. Raytracing on GPU was unfeasible for many years because it only makes sense when you can send many parallel requests to different addresses in memory - and latest generations of GPU are finally moving in this direction.
Distribution quote of the week Posted Oct 10, 2012 16:09 UTC (Wed) by duffy (guest, #31787) [Link]
I love this; thank you Rusty.
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