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Assholes are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk).

Tom Raftery

350 subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 3 people: 2 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2014 to 2023.
  • Presented by Donnie Berkholz, analyst at RedMonk
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

5.6K views14 years ago3 recommendations

Tools and practiceCareers and interviewsCode review and teamworkOpen sourceThe tech industry

Donnie Berkholz argues that toxic and abusive contributors damage open source communities and explains why projects must actively remove them.

Redmonk's Donnie Berkholz gave this talk at Monki Gras: Assholes are Ruining Your Project.

Why it's here

3 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as a classic talk on managing open source communities and dealing with toxic contributors.

SeanTAllenon Lobsters • Recommends

Assholes are Ruining Your Project
12View on Lobsters

justincormackon Hacker News • Recommends

On “The GNU C Library version 2.19 is now available”

The glibc team are great people to work with; I managed to get a patch into this release which had been point blank refused by Ulrich Drepper when he was maintainer, and they were incredibly helpful and the process was really easy. So get your fixes in - glibc is becoming much more standards compliant. Assholes will ruin your project1, you need to get rid of them, whether it is open source or not. 1 link to this video
View on Hacker News

Modified3019on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Don't Use Discord as a Forum”

Good call. A good video related to this: "Assholes Are Ruining Your Project. Donnie Berkholz (RedMonk)" link to this video
View on Hacker News

JoshTripletton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth”

…o that same cycle. The opposite environment, with many skilled people who are fun to work with, will tend to reject jerks regardless of skill. I've also noticed that such an environment tends to have a much higher degree of mentorship and collaboration, in addition to being more fun to work in, and boosting energy rather than draining it. See also link to this video and link .…
View on Hacker News

jlokieron Hacker News • Mentions

On “On Being a Free Software Maintainer”

…place is a net win. Even if it only took 1 hour, that's still used up all the time I was going to use on other productive things, the "real work". I am in awe of maintainers who seem to reply to an onslaught of demanding questioners, and somehow satisfy them. For me, these are relevant: "Assholes are Killing Your Project" (Donnie Berkholz) link link to this video…
View on Hacker News

Beltalowdaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Sourcehut will blacklist the Go module mirror”

…ese kind of things in the first place. Most people just disengage and don't come back. The best I know of is "Assholes are Ruining Your Project"1 from a few years back. It would be interesting to check similar numbers for Go and other projects. I'm not sure if it's easy to get these kind of numbers from e.g. Slack or Reddit though. 1: link / link to this video > total exile is a big hammer that should be used more judiciously. It wasn't the first time he was banned, but I'm not privy to the exact details on this. Was total "total exile" proportional? I don't know: obviously I didn't see everything. I just wanted to say he didn't "just" get banned over a minor thing, but after many years of proble…
View on Hacker News