A nice way to wake up

I’m the lead author and maintainer of java-gnome, an Open Source project that enables Java developers to write native GNOME applications using the GTK user interface toolkit. Like any such effort, it’s a huge amount of work, much of which goes on unseen. So there are few better ways of starting off your morning than finding a message like this in your Inbox:

I just want to thank you for this great API to GTK.

It feels entirely natural in Java, is very comfortable and very approachable. The names and APIs are as you’d think them up when you’d draw a widget set API in your mind, thus they are easy to find, too. They also work as expected (as least so far, I am still new).¹ The API documentation for each class has a nice prose introduction text, which is very helpful and saves most “tutorials”. I also appreciate that it points out just the right level of footangles to be aware of.

All in all a really great piece of work. When you talked about “quality” on your website, I was suspect, as that’s most of the time just words, but you really deliver quality. You show an good example of what quality means in the context of an API.

Sun should take a good example from you and many in the open-source world, too. Such brightness and care is rare.

Hey, thanks!

Quality versus Barrier to Entry

Regardless of the underlying economic circumstances, most Open Source projects are labours of love. But they can go one of two ways.

One tendency is to just accept anything, and hope that “someone” will fix it later. This approach has the beneift of a low barrier to entry, making it easy for people to contribute. But it can result in a muddle; code that is not yet up to scratch but whose authors have moved on to other things. The only time that Open Source fails to live up to its promise (as a software development methodology) is when someone starts something and doesn’t finish it. A situation nobody wants, but it is easy to have this inflicted upon your project if you accept incomplete contributions from other people — it can be hard to incent them to come back and finish the job.

The other way is to maintain a high standard, putting emphasis on internal consistency and clarity and asking people to rise to that level. While setting a high bar does put some people off, the contributions from those who invest the effort to rise to the occasion tend to be really good.

I tend to favour the second way. If your initiative is worth working on at all, then it is the kind of thing you work hard at making perfect because it deserves nothing less. You’re not going to let it down, and you don’t want anyone else to either.

Anyway, it’s all a lot of work. Sometimes I hate it. But when you receive a note like this from someone who appreciates the effort you’ve put in, it really does make your day — and makes you feel that result of staying clearly focused has been worth it.

AfC

¹ I pointed out to him in my reply that there was still plenty of time for him to trip over something :)

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