One meta pattern I’ve noticed: If team members can’t talk straight with one another, the team can’t make good collective decisions.
Mealy mouthed walls-of-texts are just as unhelpful as one sentence dismissals. Sooner or later, the silent miscommunication will manifest itself and impact the product directly.
Needless to say, the health of a project relies upon the health of its politics.
A lot of reasonably successful open-source projects (eg almost the whole npm namespace) is rife with some breed of toxicity and nevertheless does "fine" (for some value of fine - if you never look at it and ignore the security breaches) in terms of the technical merit.
I don’t think it’s just open-source projects: a great deal of all projects end up rife with some toxicity or another, and normally they do alright in the end. Human beings are a problem: we have emotions, we have feelings, we have needs, we’re not hyper-rational automata. But we mostly muddle through alright.
I don’t know if we can avoid this. What I think we can avoid are blow-ups, or at the least calm them back down again. We have to use our hearts, not just our heads, to say and mean, ‘yes, I acknowledge your feelings, which are valid.’ In the case of Go & dep, I think Sam Boyer feels let down because he’d been so proud of the idea that his tool dep would become the official tool. Rationally he acknowledged that it was the official experiment (maybe he even acknowledged that was an official experiment — I forget), but emotionally I believe that he thought that it’d become the official tool. To see it replaced is a colossal letdown.
We can honour him and his investment of time & energy while at the same time acknowledging that the tool he created isn’t the right tool long-term. This is something the net is terrible for: it’d be far better to break the news, in person, over dinner or drinks. There’s no good way to do it, of course, but sharing physical space helps.
Mealy mouthed walls-of-texts are just as unhelpful as one sentence dismissals. Sooner or later, the silent miscommunication will manifest itself and impact the product directly.
Needless to say, the health of a project relies upon the health of its politics.