
Farewell from Rusty Russell - relyio
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=ed875ea1fcc6c34ea232610c3041d0978e327bbe
======
antirez
I loved the work Rusty performed so much! He started to work actively at Linux
firewalling about at the same time as I became a Linux user and sysadmin, like
more than 20 years ago, and I used what he made regularly and always found his
work to have a sane UI to the admin: simple to use yet quite powerful stuff.
In general kernel hackers are really a bunch of unicorns that are very focused
on the code they are writing and the problems to solve, and I've the feeling
that while in the 90s they were deeply recognized for their work, now instead
in some way their work is a bit in the shadow... with much hype going into
places where it's not deserved. But apparently most of them want just to code
at low level, don't be annoyed, and get a salary. The essence of the old times
programmer basically.

Impressed with:

"disagreed with my approach so much and so continuously that I developed a
dread of reading my mail every morning: eventually I wrote a filter to send
their mail to a separate mbox".

I'm very sorry to read this. In the early days of Redis this happened to me as
well, there were a group of people continuously attacking me and I was
horrified by the idea of reading their Twitter replies at some point. However
instead of filtering them, I found (without conscious efforts, it just
happened) a different solution, I became more and more sentimentally
disconnected from the chats focusing solely on the actual arguments, filtering
most of the tone and human-level parts. This makes me a sadder person, not
able to joy or be sad for things I read on social networks for the most part,
however in the pro side there is that I can read the harsh criticisms and find
some value, sometimes, without being affected. Moreover, as a secondary
adjustment, I no longer reply after a given point if I may start to sound
attacking towards another person. This does not mean to accept everything, but
just say after N replies: "we disagree but you are cool, I'll do what I think,
have a nice day".

I still believe that we can stay in the tech world, not accepting what other
people say if we disagree from a technical standpoint, without being assholes.

~~~
sbarre
I took away an interesting thought from the post and from your reply:

You can be harsh to ideas, but be nice to people.

~~~
antirez
Exactly. Moreover programming is not building a bridge, so sometimes _a lot_
of arguments have no final solution or truth, and are up to the personal
tastes/vision. In that case, to debate till the end of the day is quite futile
once it is clear that the two arguments cannot meet in any way. In that case,
better to say "thanks for the exchange" before it becomes too harsh. There is
no need to win arguments.

~~~
AstralStorm
When over a thousand people work on a single project and tens to hundreds on a
single submodule, there can be no real "personal taste" entering the equation
or there will be trouble.

~~~
jerf
If nothing else, someone picks the code style, even if that code style is
"anybody do what they want". Personal taste can not be removed from the
equation, so you need people who can work with a project even if it doesn't
entirely meet their taste. And I just mean that as one irrefutable example to
prove the point; it is far from the only one.

I find that unless your taste is very unrefined, you can practice even in your
own fully isolated and independent projects, because even my own personal
projects pretty much never 100% conform to my own personal taste....

------
tejasmanohar
For those who don't know, Rusty built _iptables_ along with many of its
underlying technologies and predecessors. Most devops/sysadmin people interact
with his work directly, and all of us do indirectly. So long!

Edit: It appears that Rusty now works at Blockstream and is focusing on the
Bitcoin Lightning network.

~~~
otoburb
Rusty Russell is a fairly unique name, but for some reason I never connected
the dots when seeing his name crop up on the bitcoin & lightning mailing
lists. Thank you for the memory jog.

~~~
tejasmanohar
Woah, me neither! That's awesome. I've read _many_ of his Medium posts without
connecting the two.

------
johnflan
Nice closing

    
    
      To my fellow maintainers: stay harsh on code and
      don't be afraid to say "No" or "Why?"; there really
      are more bad ideas than good ones, and complexity
      is such a bright candle for us hacker-moths.  But
      be gentle, kind and forgiving of your peers:
      respect from people you respect is really the only 
      reward that sticks[9].

------
ajdlinux
"I flew myself around Australia visiting every LUG to convince them to come to
the first Australian Linux conference."

The story of CALU 1999 being funded on Rusty's personal credit card is
legendary in the Australian Linux community. Having recently attended my
fourth linux.conf.au, as it's now known, I'm very grateful for Rusty's
instrumental role in building the Linux and free software community here.

(Also, I'm now lucky enough to work with the legendary group of hackers at
OzLabs - the best graduate job that I could hope for in Canberra!)

------
weinzierl

        author	Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>	2017-08-15 07:01:08 +0930
        committer	Jessica Yu <jeyu@kernel.org>	2018-01-15 20:44:08 +0100
    

That’s a long time between the time it was written and the time it was
committed.

~~~
pestaa
It was a heavy merge request in some aspects.

------
taspeotis

        But one person disagreed with my approach so much and so continuously
        that I developed a dread of reading my mail every morning: eventually
        I wrote a filter to send their mail to a separate mbox, which I've
        still never read and don't intend to.
    

Such a disappointing situation to see, and potentially so demotivating. Glad
it didn’t halt his contributions.

~~~
mschaef
Agree that it's disappointing... but I'm very glad to see that he came up with
a good way to deal with it. /dev/null (or its rough equivalent) has its uses.

------
def-
Interesting to read his qualms about the cryptocurrency field:
[https://medium.com/@rusty_lightning/the-corrosion-of-
ethics-...](https://medium.com/@rusty_lightning/the-corrosion-of-ethics-in-
cryptocurrencies-f7ba77e9dfc3)

------
nailer
> I listened in awe as this homeless-looking guy described porting Linux to
> the Ultrasparc, and then described how he then proceeded to beat Solaris on
> _every single_ lmbench microbenchmark.[2]

This was the same guy who, after writing a comprehensive detailed post about
Solaris performance, was trolled by a Sun employee who was in charge of
performance - with a post that consisted, in it's entirety, of

> 'have you ever kissed a girl?'

This kind of arrogance is what killed Sun (and Joyent).

~~~
Maken
So, do you happen to know who was that guy and have any link about his work?
Now I'm really interested.

~~~
Fnoord
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cantrill](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Cantrill)

~~~
nailer
Wrong guy. That's the troll from Sun. David Miller is the SPARC Linux guy.

~~~
Fnoord
GP could've meant either.

------
pjf
IMHO, Rusty Russell is the guy who made Linux so popular choice for software
firewalls. Thanks Rusty & all netfilter team!

------
geirfreysson
"Actually, bitcoin is a nice reward too; it's like crystalized machine sweat!"
Crystalized machine sweat - very good.

------
bjt2n3904
> To my fellow maintainers: stay harsh on code and don't be afraid to say "No"
> or "Why?"; there really are more bad ideas than good ones, and complexity is
> such a bright candle for us hacker-moths.

A breath of fresh air in the day and age of installing package managers to
install another package manager to install an autoloader to load the plugin
for the transpiler for the code we haven't started writing yet.[1]

1 - [http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/10/a-moment-of-
nostalg...](http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/10/a-moment-of-nostalgia/)

------
ksec
Why is he leaving? Am I suppose to know this? Googled a few times and nothing
useful came out.

~~~
RustyRussell
I started working on Bitcoin three years ago, and finally finished handing
over my kernel responsibilities.

Nothing dramatic I'm afraid!

~~~
dredmorbius
Who was the "homeless-looking" guy? Alan Cox?

------
mmcallister
I met Rusty at Linux Conference Australia 2017 (In Hobart)

We were in the same dorm, and he borrowed some of my toothpaste.

~~~
RustyRussell
I'll return it at Auckland next year, I promise!

------
amingilani
> I went to 1997 USENIX, my first conference.

Could someone please explain this to those of us that were 5 years old in
1997?

~~~
atsaloli
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USENIX_Annual_Technical_Conf...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USENIX_Annual_Technical_Conference)

~~~
raverbashing
The parent comment and an answer as a mobile link are making me feel old

Kids these days don't know the annoyances^W joy of configuring X11 so that
startx would work

(just kidding, things work more reliably today and that's how it should be,
but someone had to experiment with it first)

~~~
ajdlinux
Don't screw up your modelines lest you blow up your monitor!

(I'm younger than the GGP poster here, but I was enough of a nerd in primary
school that I got into Linux at about the time that distro installers' XFree86
autoconfigurators got you most of the way but still had to have a manual
modeline configuration option in the advanced settings...)

~~~
dfox
For a long time I believed that the warning about blowing up monitors by using
wrong video mode was nonsense, until I had blown one (12" mono CRT,
1024x768@60 caused quite loud bang)

------
sidcool
One of the unsung heroes of kernels. Good luck Rusty.

------
kinleyd
What a nice sign off! I enjoyed reading every bit of it.

~~~
tebugst
same here !!!

------
DINKDINK
Rusty’s work is an amazing legacy. Very happy he’s working on developing
Lightning Network on bitcoin for a few years now.

------
jschlst
Thanks for all your linux work. Glad you are doing well. Dont become a
comedian, as I never got your jokes. J

------
tebugst
Woow !!! Journey of 20 years. I get bored maintaining 1 year of code. Hats off
to you Sir !!!

------
lukego
What a guy!

------
mattbillenstein
Getting a 502?

~~~
shakna
GitHub mirror:
[https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ed875ea1fcc6c34ea23...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/ed875ea1fcc6c34ea232610c3041d0978e327bbe)

