Greetings. I want to “answer” to you as I feel you deserve an answer for my previous post.
I won’t start this post with a terrible analogy. I will use swear words throughout though.
I will, however, start it with an apology. The apology is for my most successful post yet. I am honestly sorry for anyone that was offended by the language of the post. Let me explain my thoughts, and I hope we can resolve our differences.
It was positively successful. It drove a lot of traffic to my blog which is what all bloggers truly want: to be noticed. To have people leaving comments. To have an effect on the world around them. If you want to really, really hurt a blogger: stop reading what they write. Your “un-attention” is blogger Kryptonite. To those who have commented positively on not only this post, but any other post on this blog, thank you. You give me the motivation to continue writing.
Then there was the negative reaction that I did see coming, but did nothing to prevent it. I welcomed it. Simply put: negative reactions are more noticed than positive reactions of the same strength.
I will dip into my history as a supermarket checkout attendant again here temporarily. I would receive thanks from the customers who I served regularly. I thought I was good at my job. The people whom I worked with thought I was good at my job. But when a customer complained that I packed something incorrectly, that’s when the shit hit the fan. I would be brought into the manager’s office and we would have a discussion about ensuring that all customers are happy. This is impractical. We are all humans, and therefore we make mistakes, or take offense to something when there was never any given. It only takes a small negative thing to set off a large enough reaction that you’ll tell you friends about it, where as it would take a huge positive thing for a similar-sized reaction to occur. Never, ever, was I called into the manager’s office for him to compliment me on any of the exceptional things I did. He was an asshole.
As a programmer, I attempt to see the logic in everything. I can understand that, for example, when I press the “a” key on my keyboard, that an “a” is going to appear on the screen, always. It’s just logical. This is why I sometimes get frustrated with human behaviour, as it is illogical. My intention for the post was to get people interested in working on the core of Ruby on Rails rather than the ecosystem around it. You cannot have a stable ecosystem without a stable core. Yes, you are correct. I was arrogant in my post. But I implore you to think of it from my side of the fence. I am trying to convey a point. To get some motion going. Do you honestly think my post would have generated that much traffic had I been saying things such as “Hey guys, there’s 900 open tickets in Ruby on Rails. Would you mind, you know, taking some time out of your very, very busy schedules and fixing it”? I think not. Before you go reaching for that comment form, read that again.
I think not.
The operative words, of course, being “I think”. You know this. I don’t need to explain this to you. I am not stating it as fact that the post would not have been successful had I used positive terminology rather than the words I used. It is simply my interpretation. You have yours, and I have mine. I willingly used terminology that was offensive to evoke a large enough response in order to get some more eyes on Rails tickets.
I want to thank those of you who reacted negatively to this post, too. Why? You guys are the ones who generated the media coverage. You got it very highly ranked on the Ruby subreddit, Hacker News and many other technology media sites. You are the people who I want to talk to the most. You are the ones who have great ideas of how I could better go about conveying my point, and I have talked with some of you, such as Eric Florenzano. Eric was the writer of the aforementioned “Axe body spray” tweet. I politely asked him if I could email him, and he said yes and so I’ve posted the transcript if you would like to have a read. This is the kind of back-and-forth I am really looking forward to having with you all.
Then finally, my favourite response of all from this post was from a guy called Matthew Joiner (yes, I did my research too ;)) who was the only person out of all 10,000-and-something unique visitors to my blog to track down my email address and write me an email. Matthew starts off his email like this:
No one special sending you a random email, I know how people hate it, but I also am not really into commenting on blog posts, so I hope this doesn't annoy you too much.
When I read this, I was annoyed. Annoyed because he thought I would be annoyed! Why would sending me an email, annoy me? I want you to notice me. The one way you can inform me that you’ve noticed something that I’ve done is to email me. You can also buy me cider in real life (FYI, favourites so far are Magners and Aspley and Scrumpy Jack). I digress. You can come up to me at any of the Ruby/Rails meetups I go to and shake my hand and say “I really liked that.” It’s my fuel. I want to be noticed. Maybe I’ll post about the “why”s of it later, but I’m sure you can guess those.
Matthew was the only person to send me an email which instantly disqualifies him from the “no one special” category forever. He has gone out of his way to track down my email and tell me what he thought. Nobody else did. So I wrote him a reply effectively thanking him, and discussing a couple of things. A 1500-word reply. You can find the transcript from this email here. He mentioned my email was nowhere on the site, but now it is in the sidebar. This is the most direct-line of contact you can have with me just short of my mobile number.
This is also the kind of back-and-forth I want to have with you all. I want you to ask me questions about Rails 3, and in return I get something from you automatically, which is the feeling of satisfaction of being noticed. Then if I help you, further satisfaction that I’ve improved your life somehow.
Finally, when a lot of you start asking questions, then I have more material to write down for a book I’m thinking of writing. Yup, you heard it here: I’m going to take on writing a book. This is why I want you all working on Rails and the community, because I simply will not have the time to sit in the IRC channel or on Stack Overflow to help you out anymore. Somebody else needs to step up and “be me” temporarily if I am to complete this book by the end of the year. I want your feedback on this! So contact me on twitter or e-mail me with ideas of what you think should go in a book about Rails.
So let me finish on a positive note. Since that post last weekend, over one hundred Rails tickets have been marked off the list, be it them being marked as invalid and then all the way up to patches being submitted and a lot of people getting things done. That’s an amazing amount of effort and it is these types of people the community needs more of. If you want to nominate somebody for the Ruby Hero award, do not nominate me (ok, you can if you want). Nominate the collective of people making the community a better place. I am not the only person doing this. I fear for that situation. I do not want to be the go-to guy for all of your issues as that is the community’s job. But, in order to build a knowledgeable community, those with the knowledge need to be out there spreading it, rather than sitting in their “ivory towers”.
Side-note: I’d like to think I know for a fact that this post won’t gain the level of recognition that the original did. That’s fine with me. If you could go about proving me wrong, please do: I enjoy being wrong.
All I ask is that I want you to help one person a day with Ruby or Rails. Be it a co-worker, a friend, or a complete stranger. Just go out there and do something. C’mon, you can do it. It’s an awesome feeling.