The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

If I tell you that you’ll get better at doing something if you do it repeatedly you’ll probably stare at me with a look of obviousness, but even then the correlation made above still feels a bit surprising to a lot of people. Why is that so?

I have a guess. In our society we tend to believe that art and innovation is something for the gifted, rather than the product of hard work. Just think of any great famous painter or musician and you’ll likely have in your mind the concept of a uniquely gifted genius, rather than someone that worked uniquely hard after a goal.

Perhaps that’s why we tend to forget long learned lessons. Some 23 years ago Frederick Brooks already pointed out in The Mythical Man-month that we should plan to throw away the first version of the software, because it most likely will be a poorly designed prototype that provides insight into the problem for the actual production version. Even then, it’s still rare to see the practice intentionally in use nowadays.

You’d certainly laugh if I told you how many mailing lists, blogs, and IRC channels I try to follow (won’t include IM networks here as I don’t really read them asynchronously). What I look for is pretty obvious: I want to exchange volume for quality.

The first thing I’m doing is unsubscribing from all high-traffic lists I’m part of. The reason is clear: one hundred messages a day can’t possibly be all interesting. I’m not saying there are no interesting posts among these, of course. But with such a vibrant community of followers, a few smart readers usually bring up the most interesting discussions in more selective formats. I’ll track these instead.

For the same reason, I’m unsubscribing from most feed aggregators. Planet and similars are a great way to subscribe to many feeds quickly, but let’s face it.. how many posts in an aggregator with lots of feeds are interesting to a single individual? While getting off from them, I’m selectively peaking the feeds that interest me and subscribing to each.

Then, for the not-so-high volume sources, I’m checking the last 5 posts or so (or days, for IRC channels). Anything that hasn’t had information worth tracking will be phased out too. Interesting topics eventually will find their way to the sources I’ll still follow.

I want to read less, to read more. I want to go faster through the queue of pending books, and also follow a wider variety of topics with less pain.

My brother Diogo is in town! Good to see him after so much time.

pycon…

PyCon 2007 was fantastic. It was great to meet everyone there, and we had two awesome sprinting weeks around it.

confluence…

I’ve recently visited a confluence with a good friend of mine. Kayaks, paddling, walking, driving, swimming, aslphalt, sand, water, grass.. it was awesome.

svn2bzr…

It looks like Bazaar tags are now really coming, so I’m doing some work on svn2bzr again. Hopefully this time I’ll really migrate some projects over.

editmoin…

Version 1.9 of editmoin was released.

smart…

Some work in Smart is coming in the upcoming weeks.

projects…

Hopefully I’ll be able to speak more openly about (some of the) interesting things I’ve been working on in the near future.

The new blog is based on WordPress, and brings a few new features that I was missing in LiveJournal. I of course missed control over the environment, but most importantly, I was missing tag-specific RSS feeds, so that people can keep track of topic they have interest in, rather than every topic that interests me. For instance, to keep track of Python-specific posts, one may link to:

http://blog.labix.org/tag/python/feed

The new toy makes me feel motivated to post news about interesting things I’ve been working with lately (some cool stuff is coming, but some of it will unfortunately take a bit longer to become public), and perhaps even some past work I forgot to keep track of.

I’ve also installed a WordPress plugin to crosspost entries to LiveJournal, so that new entries are still seen there. Please, update your links or remind someone to do so if possible, as this will eventually be disabled.

Five years ago and a few months I changed my life completely, moving to a different city, looking for challenges to be bitten, looking for experience, and for smart people that could make me learn more and faster. At that time, I wasn’t sure if Conectiva would fulfill what I was looking for, but even then I decided that it was worth trying. Now it’s easy to look back and see that it was exactly what I was after. Conectiva presented me many challenges, and taught me many lessons, in an environment that was highly constructive and included an amazing amount of freedom.

In the background, during those five years, Conectiva has run into many different states of stability. While this situation was bad in many senses, like occasionally taking friends away without notice, it was also good, teaching me to work facing adversity, bringing new friends, and strengthening relations of those who were still there.

Finally, a few months ago, Conectiva was acquired by Mandrakesoft, and became Mandriva. Again, this was bad in a few senses. It’d mean losing our definitive control over a Linux distribution, and the power to decide upon new strategies in an absolute way. But, it was also good, as it’d bring many new challenges, new skillful friends, and would teach us to live in a broader environment.

Now, while it was my original intention to keep working in that environment, I recently had the opportunity to meet personally part of the team behind Canonical, had an overview about the projects they’re currently working on, and was invited to join the team.

So, the result of this is that once more, I’m moving. Since August 31st, I’m officially working for Canonical. As was the case five years ago, I’m not sure if this is the right decision. What I do know, however, is that my objectives are still the same: I’m looking for challenges to be bitten, experience, and for smart people that make me learn more and faster. While my previous environment certainly had those qualities, right now Canonical seems to be able to offer challenges which are closer to my personal line of interest.

If you’re worried about what this means for the projects I currently maintain, don’t be. As was the case when I worked for Conectiva, it’s still my objective to make they work on all Linux distributions.

As a final note, I want to thank everyone at Conectiva (and Mandriva) for the excellent time I had while working with you, and special thanks to Cavassin who was my direct manager and gave me freedom and trust. I also want to thank my new (and old) friends at Canonical, for the chance of being with you.

Sincerely,

–
Gustavo Niemeyer

Our future development efforts will center around bridging
the gap between Debian APT and the APT variants that have
emerged in the RPM world, as well as adding support for
emerging efforts to standardize software repository formats.

There is only one APT “variant” which works with RPM. It’s named APT-RPM, and was developed at Conectiva. Of course Progeny knows that, since they certainly remember where their code came from.

It’s really sad to see a company like that, with Ian Murdock behind it, not giving credit to a project which was forked from a Debian software, and that gave back to the original project so much. Perhaps the only way to fight against that kind of behavior is working even harder to produce good software.

Hey, Progeny, want some new ideas to reinvent.