On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 4:43 PM, Ratnadeep Debnath <[email protected]> wrote:
> @Shakthi Kannan:
>
> If the Makefile is ok, I would like to know what I have to do next.
> Please give me a roadmap for "fedx". I have got around a week's
> holiday. That's why I would like to devote more time on the project.


First, a very Happy Diwali to one and all. With due respect for all
the great work you folks are doing I would like to make a few
comments. General ones more related to self development from my own
experiences and what I see here as a trend too.

Initially, a child needs someone to hold his (gender neutral) hand and
guide him in a particular direction. Spoon feeding is OK at the
beginning, but one must slowly start learning to work independently.
One of the great skills that a hacker has. "Ability to manage
oneself".

http://www.hockin.org/~thockin/hacker.html (See 0.2)

I faced a big problem when I moved abroad for my higher education and
research. You are on your own here. You are given a goal of a project
(very very high level) and you need to find your pathway. I found it
miserably hard for the first 3-4 months as I had no clue what on earth
was I supposed to do. How to reach a particular target. How to
quantify my progress. How do I set my own milestones and check them.

Both in my academic research and my google summer of code project, I
am having/had the best mentors. They said "give your plan and roadmap,
how you plan to approach it, define your milestones". At that point
all I knew was what is the end goal / requirement. No idea whatsoever
how/what resources/knowledge are required. I was initially hesitant.
But managed to get some schedule and my mentors "helped" me correct my
planning. In some cases, they left me to experience the hard way what
was wrong with my planning. Yes, you will go awefully off-reality. But
thats way of learning things.

I am now quite confident of managing myself better and motivated to
get my hands dirty with a problem that seems interesting right away.
Thats a huge take away I got from Free Software and believe me it adds
tremendous value to your skill set.

So if you are still reading this email, why am I telling all this here?

I see off-late SK setting up tasks and people finishing them. Yes, it
was nice initially and necessary too. But now, what I would expect is
the reverse way. Set your tasks yourself, inform the list and get
feedback. Show us what "YOU" can do. Take initiative. "YOU" set the
roadmap. "YOU" set your milestones. "YOU" come up with a design
proposal. Announce it to the list. Yes you might be awfully wrong. But
thats part of the learning. So start taking initiative and dont wait
for SK to point you in a particular direction.

@SK - Sorry. Had to tell it. You seem to be spoon feeding a lot :)

Hope I made some sense. And thanks for reading the email till here.

Regards,
Aanjhan
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