Leaving the team

[Alexandre Mutel]

 

I’m taking the decision to leave SlimDX team and to not work on the v2 anymore. I will release a copy of my work on my own, on a different open source project, with a different scope, different target. SlimDX v2 won’t suffer from this concurrency, as I don’t have the same target than you, and I don’t pretend to.

 

I would like to enjoy programming, and for the past few days, I have been too much worried about all those discussions, decisions for some of them I didn’t agree... trying to give arguments, without any success... but things were in fact settled, whatever the arguments I was able to give. And It’s just the beginning. I know lots of issues that would not fit your rules habit, and I know already the answer and the decision for them.

 

This is clearly a disappointment in the way all this is conduct inside SlimDX team.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Josh Petrie]

I'm sorry to hear that.

I'm a little concerned that you may have taken these discussions a little too personally -- you really should understand that we've been running this project like this for nearly four years now, and we have tended to have exactly the same kind of discussions with each other. The only real difference is that we had those discussions on IRC, which was more convenient for us, rather than this mailing list, which is now more convenient owing to the number of developers involved in different timezones. 

I'm sorry you found our development process so intractable, although I'm not really sure what you were expecting from a project that has been going as long as this one has and with you coming on as one of the newest contributors. It takes time to establish oneself in a new project, just as it takes time to establish oneself in a new job, and I feel like you simply reacted too personally to our established conventions.

If you don't want to reconsider, though, good luck on your project!

-- jmp

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[Alexandre Mutel]

Well, It looks like its personal, but you gave the response in the templating prototype. Promit, Mike and you are the technical leaders for this project, and It’s too much frustration when I have done 99% of the technical work so far on the v2 project, to be relegated to a simple developer, without taking part in the last decision. Plus indeed the fact that you are running SlimDX project for four years now, with lots of habits, you are probably friends, so It should have been probably hard for anyone like me that use to be a technical leader as well at my work and in my computer hobbies. I guess that If I was in your position, I would probably face the same situation than you.

 

I would like to move on now, as I did this project in order to use it for other enjoyable projects. It’s time for me to enjoy a little bit more about this.

 

Although, I will be curious and keep an interest (of course, outside the SlimDX devel list and svn that I will quit tomorrow) on the work you will to do to on the v2 branch.

[Richard]

In article <A0CA9043EAB44440B7FEA8C992AB1BD4@HomePC>,
"Alexandre Mutel" <alexand...@yahoo.fr> writes:

> [...] Plus indeed the fact that you are running SlimDX project for four

> years now, with lots of habits, you are probably friends, so It should
> have been probably hard for anyone like me that use to be a technical
> leader as well at my work and in my computer hobbies. I guess that If I
> was in your position, I would probably face the same situation than you.

I'll offer my own perspective on this, since I too am a relatively new
contributor to SlimDX.

I've been writing software for 30 years (shit! I'm old!). I have
been technical lead on any number of projects, both in work and
hobby situations.

When I approached the SlimDX team about contributing wrappers for the
remainder of D2D (actually I think it was all done when I started) and
DirectWrite, my approach was: "hey, this is your project, so tell me
how you like things done." Of course I have my own personal
preferences on all kinds of things, but if they run contrary to
whatever the SlimDX team has decided to do, I'll do things their way.

First, I defer to them because its their project and they've already
decided how they want to do things and its better to be consistent
with the rest of the code base than to have some weird appendage
sticking out and looking ugly and odd. Second, as a matter of
teamwork, its better to "go with the flow" on matters of style,
naming, indentation, etc. If there was something functional or
objectively inferior to a recommended way of doing things, then I
would bring that up as a matter of discussion. However, if in the end
they didn't see things the way I saw them, I'd defer back to the team.

For me, this is just the "golden rule": treat others as you would want
to be treated yourself. If I had created SlimDX for several years and
someone showed up and started telling me how to do things I would find
that annoying. Since I would find this annoying as a project creator,
I try not to be annoying as a late project contributor.

Having said that, there are definately some open source projects where
I've decided not to contribute at all because the project owners were
more interested in preserving their status/turf as project owners than
they were interested in accepting contributions from others. That's
fine with me, I've got plenty of open source projects on which I could
spend my time.

Speaking only for myself, I've had only good experiences with the SlimDX
team.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/>

Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

[@lx]

> For me, this is just the "golden rule": treat others as you would want
> to be treated yourself.  If I had created SlimDX for several years and
> someone showed up and started telling me how to do things I would find
> that annoying.  Since I would find this annoying as a project creator,
> I try not to be annoying as a late project contributor.

I agree. I have already participated to other well established
projects, where I was just a developer and I was fine with that, As I
was just fixing things, adding some new small features to their
project.

Here It's a slightly different case, as I came with a complete
solution (not complete in term of "rock solid", but as a real proof of
concept) for the whole next v2 API. Even if SlimDX project was well
established, I was naively expecting to be part of decision for the v2
branch. I have realized that It would not the case, a bit too late...
and now I understand it.

Anyway, I hope that you don't have the feeling that I was just here to
annoy the SlimDX team with my objections. I have spent a substantial
amount of my time to bring my work here and to integrate it in the v2
branch. This work is now in your hands and I wish you fructify it,
change it, whatever, SlimDX 2 will go on! :)