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October

Monday 22nd

"To Z, or not to Z: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to stick with Zope?"

I really wanted a chance to say that during a meeting--or at least on a mailing list--when tensions were still high about whether or not we were going to switch to Lloyd/NZ.  But before I got a chance, Ethan dropped the F-bomb on the dev list, which resulted in our heart-to-heart meeting. And I was impressed. Not feeling much at stake in Lloyd personally, I was curious how the palpable and office-weirdifying tension would resolve itself, and I was delighted to see it do so in what seemed to me the only possible right way: in an environment of total transparency and open-ended dialogue. The gloves were off, but so were the cloaks, and by the end of the meeting I was convinced that SlinkP's first day was a redemptive one for TOPP.

So I was slightly disappointed by today's meeting when I began to suspect that, like the first meeting about NZ, it wasn't exactly what it claimed to be about, in this sense: while Nick opened by addressing the question of the priority of Sputnik as a general concern (which at the time I was unaware of being something people were grumbling about), it quickly became a meeting about a very specific issue, the question of whether or not Lloyd/NZ--

(What the hell is it called, now? NZ was too controversial, and Lloyd is too boring, I hear people complain. Until it's decided, I'm going to call it Lloynz)

-- where was I?

The meeting turned out to be a meeting about Lloynz. And what disappoints me about the meeting isn't that it was about Lloynz, or that it went on for too long, but that reflecting back on it I think that the people who seemed to be speaking out most forcefully in that discussion (Rob, Novalis, Jackie, Cholmes, Nick, Whit) all knew that it would be a meeting about Lloynz before it happened, and came prepared for it as such.

My feelings about this are still pretty positive: I think everyone was acting with the best of intentions. And I think it's a credit to TOPP how quickly the gloves and cloaks came off this time around. But I still feel like things could have been done better, because the initial impulse of whoever set the agendas for that meeting seemed to be to abstract over the actual point of concern and place the discussion in some point in space detached from the real personalities at play. The effect on me was that it made management appear, for lack of a less provocative word, shadowy. Without wanting to project my attitude onto him, I was very grateful for Doug's astute observation that as developers we are very much out in the open, but management sometimes acts in obscurity, and that the asymetry might be at the root of Novalis' lack of trust. Nick's receptivity to Doug's suggestion of management stating its iteration activity and goals demonstrated to me that this obscurity is accidental, so I'm sureit won't be a big deal in the future. But it does seem to me to be something to watch out for.

Or such is this n00b's opinion. I want to apologize if I've misrepresented anyone in this entry. I'm trying to practice what I preach and stick to the particulars of the situation as I observed it as opposed to retreating to more general and less assailable claims than the ones I actually have in mind.

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