TMI: Summit and beyond
Oct. 7th, 2013 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timThe last five days have been one full day of travel, preceded by three full days of Mozilla Summit in Toronto, preceded by another full day of travel. It's been quite a time, with not much sleep involved, but (for me) a surprising amount of code getting written and interesting sessions being attended and pure fun being had (karaoke night Friday and dance party Sunday -- if any of the organizers were reading, both of those were really good ideas). Actually, watching "Code Rush" -- a documentary made in 2000 about the very early history of Mozilla -- with Mozilla folks was quite an experience as well. You can watch it for free online; it's only about an hour, and I encourage you to if you have any interest at all in where we came from. (Passive sexism and other kinds of isms aside.)
So far as sessions, one of the highlights was Jack's talk on the Servo strategy on Saturday -- featuring about 30 minutes of lecture followed by a full 80 minutes of Q&A. The questions were the most focused, on-topic, respectful set of questions I've heard after any talk I've been to in recent memory (and it wasn't just because Jack prepared a list of suggested questions to ask in advance!) The other highlight for me was the excellent "Designing your project for participation" session with David Eaves, Emma Irwin, and Jess Klein on Sunday. One of the reasons why this session was so great was that it was mostly small-group discussion, so everybody got to be more engaged than they might have been if most of the time had been sitting and listening. I came away with a better understanding that a lot of different people are thinking about how to make the volunteer experience better in their specific project, and there are lessons to learn about that that are transferable. For example: volunteers are much more likely to keep participating if they get a prompt review for their first bug; and, it might actually be okay to ask volunteers to commit to finishing a particular task by a deadline.
During downtime, I got a few pull requests in, some of which even landed. One of the bigger ones, though, was #9732, for making automatically checked-out source files read-only and overhauling where rustpkg keeps temporary files. (That one hasn't been reviewed yet.) #9736, making it easier to get started with rustpkg by not requiring a workspace to be created (it will build files in the current directory if there's a crate file with the right name) is also important to me -- alas, it bounced on the Linux bot, like so many of my pull requests have been doing lately, so I'll have to investigate that when I'm back on the office network and able to log in to that bot tomorrow. Finally, I was excited to be able to fix #9756, an error-message-quality bug that's been biting me a lot lately, while I was on the plane back to San Francisco, and surprised that the fix was so easy!
Finally, I request that anyone reading this who's part of the Rust community read Lindsey Kuper's blog post about the IRC channel and how we should be treating each other. Lindsey notes, and I agree, that the incident that she describes is an anomaly in an otherwise very respectful and decorous IRC channel. However, as the Rust community grows, it's my job, and the job of the other core Rust team members, to keep it that way. I know that communities don't stay healthy by themselves -- every community, no matter how small, exists within a kyriarchy that rewards everybody for exercising unearned power and privilege. Stopping people from following those patterns of non-consensual domination and submission -- whether in such a (seemingly) small way as inappropriately calling attention to another person's gender on IRC, or in larger ways like sexual assault at conferences -- requires active effort. I can't change the world as a whole on my own, but I do have a lot of influence over a very small part of the world -- the same is true of most other human beings. So, I'm still thinking about how to put in that effort for Rust. The same is true for community processes as for code: patches welcome.
So far as sessions, one of the highlights was Jack's talk on the Servo strategy on Saturday -- featuring about 30 minutes of lecture followed by a full 80 minutes of Q&A. The questions were the most focused, on-topic, respectful set of questions I've heard after any talk I've been to in recent memory (and it wasn't just because Jack prepared a list of suggested questions to ask in advance!) The other highlight for me was the excellent "Designing your project for participation" session with David Eaves, Emma Irwin, and Jess Klein on Sunday. One of the reasons why this session was so great was that it was mostly small-group discussion, so everybody got to be more engaged than they might have been if most of the time had been sitting and listening. I came away with a better understanding that a lot of different people are thinking about how to make the volunteer experience better in their specific project, and there are lessons to learn about that that are transferable. For example: volunteers are much more likely to keep participating if they get a prompt review for their first bug; and, it might actually be okay to ask volunteers to commit to finishing a particular task by a deadline.
During downtime, I got a few pull requests in, some of which even landed. One of the bigger ones, though, was #9732, for making automatically checked-out source files read-only and overhauling where rustpkg keeps temporary files. (That one hasn't been reviewed yet.) #9736, making it easier to get started with rustpkg by not requiring a workspace to be created (it will build files in the current directory if there's a crate file with the right name) is also important to me -- alas, it bounced on the Linux bot, like so many of my pull requests have been doing lately, so I'll have to investigate that when I'm back on the office network and able to log in to that bot tomorrow. Finally, I was excited to be able to fix #9756, an error-message-quality bug that's been biting me a lot lately, while I was on the plane back to San Francisco, and surprised that the fix was so easy!
Finally, I request that anyone reading this who's part of the Rust community read Lindsey Kuper's blog post about the IRC channel and how we should be treating each other. Lindsey notes, and I agree, that the incident that she describes is an anomaly in an otherwise very respectful and decorous IRC channel. However, as the Rust community grows, it's my job, and the job of the other core Rust team members, to keep it that way. I know that communities don't stay healthy by themselves -- every community, no matter how small, exists within a kyriarchy that rewards everybody for exercising unearned power and privilege. Stopping people from following those patterns of non-consensual domination and submission -- whether in such a (seemingly) small way as inappropriately calling attention to another person's gender on IRC, or in larger ways like sexual assault at conferences -- requires active effort. I can't change the world as a whole on my own, but I do have a lot of influence over a very small part of the world -- the same is true of most other human beings. So, I'm still thinking about how to put in that effort for Rust. The same is true for community processes as for code: patches welcome.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-10 02:02 am (UTC)