Re: The <whatever> developer syndrome

On Friday 03 Oct 2003 12:09 am, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
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> On Thursday 02 October 2003 04:54, Jason Wood wrote:
> > try HOBBYIST
> >
> > Well, can't find definition of hobbyist, but a hobby is :
> >
> > An activity or interest pursued outside one's regular occupation and
> > engaged in primarily for pleasure.
> >
> > This is still most certainly the case for most programmers who work on
> > KDE.
>
> hobbyist has about as bad a turn to it as does "amateur", which originally
> meant "lover" but now means "non-professional". seeing as most KDE
> developers are either professional programmers or students training in
> related fields, perhaps "avocational enthusiast developer". but not
> hobbyist.

I always did wonder about when one stopped being "amateur" and became 
"proffesional" instead - in the end I figured it was when you started earning 
money at something :-)

I'm not going to have a war of words here, pick a word or three which means 
"something one does in their spare time for fun" and I will be happy :-) 
Whilst most open source developers have their own agendas as to why they are 
developing the things that they are, I think the overwhelming majority would 
not do it if it was not pleasurable.

> as for people[1] who feel compelled to needlessly criticize others
> regularly, openly and without providing constructive, realistic
> solutions/thoughts, they are one of the sorts of people i prefer to simply
> avoid in life: the sort who will tear down any structure no matter how
> beautiful simply to satisfy their own insecurity.

To be fair, I think that there is a catergory of people who simply do not 
quite understand what is and isn't accepted behaviour in open source 
development, the usual breach of etiquette being to try and impose their own 
personal view of the project on everyone else in the project. And when they 
find that people do not take kindly to this, they vent their frustrations in 
colorful ways.

Most people either figure it out for themselves and settle in after a while, 
or give up and leave in a bad mood :-)

> on the flip side, i've found that when i do something positive in the
> direction i wish things would go, it results in far more good than any
> amount of bitching i could do would result in. and when i do feel like
> bitching overly much, it's usually time to go get some fresh air.

Absolutely! The only person you can really trust to get things done is 
yourself, and unless you make the effort, well, why should you expect anyone 
else to? ;-)

> [1] i'm not speaking of you here, Jason =)

I realized that :-)

Cheers,
Jason

-- 
Jason Wood
Homepage : www.uchian.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk


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