I feel like I m taking a big personal risk writing this, even though I know the internet is large and probably no-one will read this
.
So, dear reader, please be gentle.
As we grow as people, as developers, as professionals some lessons are are hard to learn (e.g. you have to keep trying and trying to learn the task), and some are hard to experience (they might still be hard to learn, but just being there is hard itself ) I want to talk about a particular lesson I started learning in late 2008/early 2009 while I was at
Canonical sadly one of those that was hard to experience.
At the time I was one of the core developers on Bazaar, and I was feeling pretty happy about our progress, how bzr was developing, features, community etc. There was a bunch of pressure on to succeed in the marketplace, but that was ok, challenges bring out the stubborn in me
. There was one glitch though we d been having a bunch of contentious code reviews, and my manager (
Martin Pool) was chatting to me about them.
I was as far as I could tell doing precisely the right thing from a peer review perspective: I was safeguarding the project, preventing changes that didn t fit properly, or that reduced key aspects- performance, usability from landing until they were fixed.
However, the folk on the other side of the review were feeling frustrated, that nothing they could do would fix it, and generally very unhappy. Reviews and design discussions would grind to a halt, and they felt I was the cause. [They were right].
And here was the thing I simply couldn t understand the issue. I was doing my job; I wasn t angry at the people submitting code; I wasn t hostile; I wasn t attacking them (but I was being shall we say frank about the work being submitted). I remember saying to Martin one day look, I just don t get it can you show me what I said wrong? and he couldn t.
Canonical has a 360 review system every 6 months / year (it changed over time) you review your peers, subordinate(s) and manager(s), and they review you. Imagine my surprise I was used to getting very positive reports with some constructive suggestions when I scored low on a bunch of the inter-personal metrics in the review. Martin explained that it was the reviews thing folk were genuinely unhappy, even as they commended me on my technical merits. Further to that, he said that I really needed to stop worrying about technical improvement and focus on this inter-personal stuff.
Two really important things happened around this time. Firstly,
Steve Alexander, who was one of my managers-once-removed at the time, reached out to me and suggested I read a book
Getting out of the box and that we might have a chat about the issue after I had read it. I did so, and we chatted. That book gave me a language and viewpoint for thinking about the problem. It didn t solve it, but it meant that I got it , which I hadn t before.
So then the second thing happened we had a company all hands and I got to chat with
Claire Davis (head of HR at Canonical at the time) about what was going on. To this day the sheer embarrassment I felt when she told me that the broad perception of me amongst other teams managers was and I paraphrase a longer, more nuance conversation here technically fantastic but very scary to have on the team will disrupt and cause trouble .
So, at this point about 6 months had passed, I knew what I wanted I wanted folk to want to work with me, to find my presence beneficial and positive on both technical and team aspects. I already knew then that what I seek is technical challenges: I crave novelty, new challenges, new problems. Once things become easy, it call all too easily slip into tedium. So at that time my reasoning was somewhat selfish: how was I to get challenges if no-one wanted to work with me except in extremis?
I spent the next year working on myself as much as specific projects: learning more and more about how to play well with others.
In June 2010 I got a performance review I could be proud of again I was in no way perfect, but I d made massive strides. This journey had also made huge improvements to my personal life a lot of stress between Lynne and I had gone away. Shortly after that I was invited to apply for a new role within Canonical as Technical Architect for
Launchpad and
Francis Lacoste told me that it was only due to my improved ability to play well with others that I was even considered. I literally could not have done the job 18 months before. I got the job, and I think I did pretty well in fact I was awarded an internal Spotlight on Success award for what we (it was a whole Launchpad team team effort) achieved while I was in that role.
So, what did I change/learn? There s just a couple of key changes I needed to make in myself, but a) they aren t sticky: if I get overly tired, ye old terrible Robert can leak out, and b) there s actually a /lot/ of learnable skills in this area, much of which is derived lots of practice and critical self review is a good thing. The main thing I learnt was that I was Selfish. Yes capital S. For instance, in a discussion about adding working tree filter to bzr, I would focus on the impact/risk on me-and-things-I-directly-care-about: would it make my life harder, would it make bzr slower, was there anything that could go wrong. And I would spend only a little time thinking about what the proposer needed: they needed support and assistance making their idea reach the standards the bzr community had agreed on. The net effect of my behaviours was that I was a class A asshole when it came to getting proposals into a code base.
The key things I had to change were:
- I need to think about the needs of the person I m speaking to *and not my own*. [Thats not to say you should ignore your needs, but you shouldn't dwell on them: if they are critical, your brain will prompt you].
- There s always a reason people do things: if it doesn t make sense, ask them! [The crucial conversations books have some useful modelling here on how and why people do things, and on how-and-why conversations and confrontations go bad and how to fix them.]
Ok so this is all interesting and so forth, but why the blog post?
Firstly, I want to thank four folk who were particularly instrumental in helping me learn this lesson: Martin, Steve, Claire and of course my wife Lynne I owe you all an unmeasurable debt for your support and assistance.
Secondly, I realised today that while I ve apologised one on one to particular folk who I knew I d made life hard for, I d never really made a widespread apology. So here it is: I spent many years as an ass, and while I didn t mean to be one, intent doesn t actually count here actions do. I m sorry for making your life hell in the past, and I hope I m doing better now.
Lastly, if I m an ass to you now, I m sorry, I m probably regressing to old habits because I m too tired something I try to avoid, but it s not always possible. Please tell me, and I will go get some sleep then come and apologise to you, and try to do better in future.
Less-assily-yrs,
Rob
So I recently mentioned that I stopped myself from registering all the domains, but I did aquire rsync.io.
Today I'll be moving my last few backups over to using it.
In terms of backups I'm pretty well covered; I have dumps of databases and I have filesystem dumps too. The only niggles are the "random" directories I want to backup from my home desktop.
My home desktop is too large to backup completely, but I do want to archive some of it:
I ve been investigating the generation of 
The following post is a verbatim copy of 
Continuing my nomadic experiment, I have just arrived in Buenos Aires. My plan is to live here for 3 months, working and enjoying the city like I never did before: I always lived in the suburbs and only came to the city to work or study.
After a few days seeing my immediate family and some close friends, today I finally went out, taking advantage of a beautiful spring day. And my first stop is the National Library.
However, the GNOME Software application-center prefers applications shipping more metadata, and punishes the others, so shipping an AppData file makes sense for higher lising in GS. This is a policy decision by GNOME, KDE can make it s own ones here.
Shipping AppData files makes sense, in general, because it enhances the metadata distributed with your application. It is also the file-format used by 
I'm getting the hang of the more or less daily RC bug fixing again. below
you find what I did this week.
as a side note: as you can see, quite a few of the patches are taken from
ubuntu; it's great that someone over there already took the time to come up
with a fix; thanks! not so great is that only one of them was in the
BTS. guys, you have already been better at forwarding your patches to the
debian BTS, please try to get back into this good habit :)
This last Thursday I was able again to lure a good friend of mine into presenting an interesting topic to my students at my Operating Systems class: Sandino Araico, a very well known and very well regarded local security guru, presented several issues regarding memory management. I asked him to present the issues on buffer overflows, as well as possible mitigaion strategies, but of course, to present that topic, he had to walk all over the map of memory management.
On a related note, I got my eye on libfso-glib + fso-gsmd, samba + -samba4, mono and haskell. By my count, each of the four groups will (once they migrate) bring at least 4 RC bug fixes with them to testing.
Besides that, we still have ~97 RC bugs in the autoremoval queue[2], so we could be looking at 600 RC bugs in a week or two.
Please keep up the steady flow of RC bug fixes; but also, please make sure your packages will actually migrate. If you need help interpreting the excuses page, do not hesistate to ask I will not bite.
If you want to help, please consider having a look at the 
Since my current PGP key is a 1024 bits DSA key generated in 1998, I decided that it is time to replace it with a stronger one: there are legitimate concerns that breaking 1024 bits DSA is well within the reach of major governments.
I have been holding out for the last year waiting for GnuPG 2.1, which will support elliptic curves cryptography, but I recently concluded that adopting ECC now would not be a good idea: 
