I don't know why anyone is criticising Mark for participating on the use-list.
I must confess I struggle to see the criticism - Colin made a rather wry observation in an amusing way (for me at least, as I said previously, text based communication is a huge source of ambiguity at times).
I am quite the other way round, and am criticising all the other developers at RunRev for NOT participating: this is at least part of the problem I have addressed elsewhere.
One very important thing to remember is that communication of any sort takes a great deal of time, and if it is something you perhaps feel you are not particularly good at then you are probably not going to engage in it very often preferring to focus on things that you feel make the biggest difference. In terms of Software Engineering, then the thing that you would normally take as making the most difference is the actual engineering itself. After all, things that work, work well and do what is required tend to speak for themselves (assuming they have adequate documentation - perhaps a discussion for another thread ;)).
Software Engineering, as a discipline, tends to require a great deal of focus on very specific projects and problems (as do most other disciplines) - which is the primarily attractive thing to many people who choose to do it as a profession. Those that are the better communicators tend to end up being the (good) managers, architects and evangelists, however this in no way demeans or detracts from the fact that you do need the (largely hidden) 'gurus' who sit behind the scenes actually solving and implementing the problems that present themselves. (We have a few of these now and they've managed to do things in recent history that, whilst I understand in principal the ideas involved, perhaps wouldn't have been able to do myself especially in the time they managed to do them in).
This is especially true in a commercial context - time is money, time is required to produce a product.
RunRev keep banging on about a "community": well, Mark is demonstrating that he wants to be part of that community!
Just because it might not be directly visible due to large amounts of communication, I do feel part of the community as do (I would hope) all my engineers.
To try and make a parallel, how much thought do you give to the thousands of engineers (in a given country) that keep you water, electricity, gas, telephone, broadband and all the other services we are accustomed to in the modern world running on a daily basis? Just because you don't directly hear from them does not mean that they aren't there, on your side, trying to ensure that everything works and working towards ensuring they do continue to do so in the future.
As in all things, there is a balance to be struck between doing and talking - I must confess I tend towards the doing rather than the talking and it is a constant contention even for me in any resource-constrained environment (which is, unfortunately, the world we live in - whether commercial, charity or any other realm you happen to exist in).
-- Mark Waddingham ~ [email protected] ~ http://www.livecode.com/ LiveCode: Everyone can create apps _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
