The Goldfish Chronicles

Andy has some interesting things to say about life at Apache. I agree with him somewhat and am dissapointed in some things he’s been told. Such as not to blog about Apache.

Andy is a member of the ASF, so maybe part of his being a member means he has to be an amployee and not discuss his work on his blog. Fortunately I’m not, so I can say what I like.

There is definitely a lot of disagreement between the people on the lists at the ASF, just as there are in all walks of life. An issue the ASF has is a very hands-off management approach to solving disagreements, so much so that often decisions just aren’t made and things are allowed to quietly being anarchic. Take the website for example, it’s a mess. Any company with such a website would garner snide remarks. Apache’s site is huge, it has radically different looks and feels, with one old l&f and two or three new l&f’s.

Another disagreement close to my heart at the moment is in Commons Lang. Discussions on the Commons list between Commons developers are split on whether Lang should continue to grow, or whether new things like math, time, reflection sub-packages should be their own projects. The chief disagreement is over the functor sub-package.

Ultimately, Apache is about personalities. There are definitely some strong ones there. Andy himself has been quite a firebrand. He likes new ideas, and he believes in the Kevin Costnerism of “If you build it, they will come”. This works sometimes, but other times you get slammed. Another big personality is Jon Scott Stevens. A guy with a lot of useful things to say, but with an argumentative streak a mile wide. I think the most respect goes to Costin Manolache, though possibly because I equate him with a friend of mine who muds with the name of Corvin. Costin also argues hard, but I’m often surprised each time to read his fervent rants and realise that they make complete sense.
Yet another is Jason van Zyl, the head of the Maven project. Another who argues aggressively and portrays a strong character onto the lists. That strength has helped Maven retain its focus I think. That might be one of the problems with Commons Lang, it lacks any owners, just occasional maintainers.

There are many more. Many quite quiet coders who are moving things along on their own. Other loud voices who use bandwidth up with their arguments. Dion Gillard’s constant cvs commit messages, living in Australia must help supply time for coding. Or maybe it’s a summer/winter thing, in winter we code less? Though to be honest, I’d have thought I’d code less in summer. Unless it’s tied to moods/morale.

Will be interesting to see what happens to Andy next.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 29th, 2003 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.