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0 pointsInsideOutSanta6mo ago0 comments

One thing I've learned over 40 years of working in software development is that it is often more effective to collaborate productively with others than to be right. Maybe Linus's rules for what can be merged at what point are bad, but you're not going to change his mind.

So even if you were right all along, the outcome is that people are screwed because bcachefs is no longer maintained in the kernel.

Every day, I ask myself, do I want to be right, or do I want to be effective?

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koverstreet6mo ago

That attitude is how you get ahead as an individual at the expense of our whole field.

That's how you end up with decisionmaking that's nothing more than popularity contests and no one even bothering to do the analysis on which option is technically better.

That way leads the death of leadership.

If you want to accomplish something as challenging as a filesystem, you do it by consistently making the right call and sticking to it, over and over and over.

And if you keep doing that, eventually you end up with the most active filesystem community around, and the ability to flip even the kernel community the bird when their weaponized incompetence becomes too much :)

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