Re: "what it's like" to be old debian maintainer
Jérémy Lal <jerry@edagames.com> writes:
> i'm wondering what happens when you spent hours and years dealing with
> debian... is it something you don't regreat ?
No regrets for time spent working on Debian, from my perspective as a
few-years-maintainer and a many-years-contributor.
Debian has been such an enormous benefit in my personal and professional
life that I'm driven to give back in some manner. The skills I have
grown as a result are partly technical, but mostly social and
psychological: how to deal with distributed teams, large and small, of
independent-minded folks and motivate each other to work for mutual
benefit despite conflicting objectives, without resort to coercion.
Those skills, once gained, transcend just the Debian project in my
experience. I am much better able to work with people of varying
backgrounds and interests, and to get to the nub of an issue to attempt
to resolve it, than before I began working in the Debian project.
The key, IME, to not having regrets for time spent, is to ensure that
“failure” is followed up to actively turn it into a positive lesson (for
oneself and others, even observers outside the incident) for how to do
better in future. This, in turn, requires humility and the difficult
discipline to actively investigate the possibility that one's own habits
and behaviours need improvement, while simultaneously having the
discipline not to lose self-esteem as a result.
When it works out like that, failure becomes a good result. I'm
certainly not perfect at this — as I said above, it's a psychological
skill that needs to be worked at — but it did become a whole lot easier
to accept after I learned the disciplines of behaviour-driven
development :-)
--
\ “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make |
`\ you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” —Ralph |
_o__) Waldo Emerson |
Ben Finney
Reply to: