The Goldfish Chronicles

This is a favourite phrase of mine nowadays - I used it so often at SourceLabs that it was practically on my t-shirt. “Activity begets activity”. It’s a very simple idea, and hardly original. If you want something to happen, if you want community to build, then start doing something.

It’s inertia right? The classic “I’m just one person, why me?”. Communities have inertia. One person starts doing something, then it gets easier for others to. One other joins in, it gets even easier. We’ve all seen the movie in which someone steps up, picks up a stone, walks over and plants it down. They walk back, pick up another, and plant it down next to the first. Others join in and the pile of stone turns into a wall. Classic Hollywood junk.

As with most lies, it’s based on truth. That first person in fact has to build 25% of the first wall before someone else steps up and helps. I suspect part of it is based on success and people’s different levels of optimism and pessimism. When you start your activity, it begins the process of turning pessimists into optimists, seeding hope. So it’s not magic, it takes work, but ACTIVITY BEGETS ACTIVITY.

Another lie. A summarization of the truth. Activity does not beget activity - community awareness of activity begets activity. That means you have to make sure that people are seeing you being active. Many of the Open Source projects out there are designed to maximize on community awareness of activity - though it’s often for defensive purposes to make sure that people aren’t able to slip bad things in.

I’ve recently got myself moving on Commons Lang issues again after a couple of months lying low and it surprises me that the number of issue reports is going up. Minor bugs, improvement ideas, but it’s all activity, and the really cool thing, the end of the night “I love you” moment, is that the activity you beget begets back. You maintain your energy because of the activity. Another way to look at this case is that the activity of patches being applied imparts hope on the community that patches are being applied and more are posted. Commons CLI 2.0 is an additional point to that; a quote from the user list today says “It seems to me that the CLI 2 committers are not currently active. So it is hard to work on it. Is there anything we can do except for waiting?”. Hope is missing.

Reflecting on all this - I realize this is one of those ‘this is why!’ statements for being part of a community. Whether or not the the input from others is a lot or a little, that activity energizes our own efforts and makes our job easier. Makes the work fun.

This weekend we’ve got the final of the Rugby world cup going on, South Africa vs England. The obvious favourites are South Africa given that they trounced England 36-0 in the early stages, but that trouncing may work to their disadvantage.

It’s the only time in the tournament that South Africa have played one of the established top-eight teams. Their knockout progression saw them get by Fiji and then Argentina. On paper, that would suggest they are hitting the final a fair bit short of full speed. England on the other hand have fought past Australia, and then a French team who had beaten the Kiwis.

I’m not enough of a Rugby fan to know if it’ll make a difference (or just how well the Fijian and Argentinian teams did in their big games against South Africa as no Rugby on TV for me), but here’s hoping that South Africa aren’t quite ready for a gritty, boring defensive game

Google’s, Yahoo’s, HP’s, Covalent’s, Tetsuya’s, Two Sigma Investments’ bitch.

In other news - I just finished reading Pratchett’s new book “Making Money”, whose main character ‘Moist von Lipwig’ reminds me of Richard Branson, and I can report that it is better than the reviews I’ve seen suggest. It’s definitely “Going Postal II”, but there are a whole bunch of laughs - especially Vetinari and Drumknott’s conversations. My only negative remark is that the end felt a bit cobbled together, the laughs diminished and the story didn’t quite step up and fill their boots.

No really, good news. As if a new ‘and now for something completely different’ job in the last month wasn’t enough, and needing to put more time into planning a conference talk, and having fun with my 3-year old every chance I get; we’ve been running along the ultrasound and frequent dr appt path. Yes, we are with child again.

We found out while we were in the UK on vacation  at my parents. Due date is April-ish, and we are filled with much hope. Little blip is growing away, giving Carrie some weird cravings (she is so proud to finally get cravings) and exhausting her (both N + C are asleep as Sunday evening rolls in).

I went to my first Amazon fishbowl the other day - these are internal events with singers or authors discussing their works for an hour at lunch. Think brown bag, but with content creators not coders.

This one was with sci-fi author Charles Stross - and despite prevaricating a bit (I had work to do), I ended up going down and enjoyed it immensely. Mr Stross read from his new book, Halting State; a 2nd-person mystery novel, set a few years in the future, and then answered questions. I really enjoyed the reading, and it all ended well when I was one of the winners of a raffle to get a free copy of the book (subsequently signed).

Many thanks to Bjorn at SourceLabs for poking me to go - he’s a big Stross fan and knew about the Amazon event before I did as he was in contact with the author for another event he was doing.

This was an interesting watch, from Berkeley’s recent course dump on YouTube:

IP + Search

It’s by the EFF’s Jason Schultz.

Guess it’s time to mention this. I’ve spent the last week in a completely different job, a manager at Amazon.com. Least I will be a manager once I hire a few people Mostly I’m meeting people and figuring things out at the moment.

Here’s the post from jobs@apache.org a little while back:

Amazon.com is seeking a talented engineering manager and talented engineers passionate about Open Source!

The Open Source Engineering team has the company-wide directive to own major Open Source packages across Amazon.com including the Apache Web Server, the Tomcat Servlet Container, and the Jetty Web Server.

You will be empowered to design and implement policy, procedure, and tools that will enable Amazon to stay abreast of the rapid ongoing development of third-party open source projects. You should be passionate about Open Source, building great teams, engineering excellence and strong developer community relationship-building.

Your leadership will have a significant impact on Amazon's software engineering community.

S’gonna be fun

Came across a very cool site which annotates Pratchett’s books with explanations for some of the phrases. It’s interesting reading through to see the ones I missed.

I was searching for my favourite quote (from Reaper Man):

“LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?”