Jérémy Lal <je...@edagames.com> writes: > i'm wondering what happens when you spent hours and years dealing with > debian... is it something you don't regreat ?
No regrets for time spent working on Debian, from my perspective as a few-years-maintainer and a many-years-contributor. Debian has been such an enormous benefit in my personal and professional life that I'm driven to give back in some manner. The skills I have grown as a result are partly technical, but mostly social and psychological: how to deal with distributed teams, large and small, of independent-minded folks and motivate each other to work for mutual benefit despite conflicting objectives, without resort to coercion. Those skills, once gained, transcend just the Debian project in my experience. I am much better able to work with people of varying backgrounds and interests, and to get to the nub of an issue to attempt to resolve it, than before I began working in the Debian project. The key, IME, to not having regrets for time spent, is to ensure that “failure” is followed up to actively turn it into a positive lesson (for oneself and others, even observers outside the incident) for how to do better in future. This, in turn, requires humility and the difficult discipline to actively investigate the possibility that one's own habits and behaviours need improvement, while simultaneously having the discipline not to lose self-esteem as a result. When it works out like that, failure becomes a good result. I'm certainly not perfect at this — as I said above, it's a psychological skill that needs to be worked at — but it did become a whole lot easier to accept after I learned the disciplines of behaviour-driven development :-) -- \ “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make | `\ you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” —Ralph | _o__) Waldo Emerson | Ben Finney -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87mxxzr8iv....@benfinney.id.au