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| Bill Hunt |
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So here's what I don't get
Right now, I'm thinking that there's more to the Greater Internet F**kwad Theory than meets they eye. For those not familiar with said theory, go thou and be enlightened. Or at the least, there's some alternative variation which to date has not been explored or considered.
Or maybe it has, and I'm just not aware of it. That's happened before.
Oh, and my apologies in advance. It seems like every time I'm actually motivated to write, it's usually to gripe about something, and this is no exception. In point of fact, my main inspiration (if you can call it that) for this post was a ticket opened on the CakePHP Trac site. This ticket was, at worst, really just stupid, and at best, laughably wrong-headed. After this, I promise I'll write something meaningful, educational and productive, but for now, on with the show. P.S. I have specifically not gone to the trouble of fixing the comment system, because for the time being, this is my soapbox, not yours. If you have something to say, email me.
So, I'm not going to name names or divulge specifics, but I recently closed an enhancement ticket which I really just thought was lame. No, 'lame' just doesn't cover it. This enhancement was profoundly lame, on several levels. Given the nature of it, it seems pretty clear to me that the originator of said enhancement is still "in the green" when it comes to the whole CakePHP thing, or to quote the vernacular, he's a n00b. For the sake of this person, I hope I'm not wrong in my assessment of their experience, because otherwise that's just bad.
Now, let's be clear, I've said it before and I'll say it again: being a n00b is okay, everybody's a n00b at some point. Case in point: the other day I was having trouble compiling PHP 5.3 with MySQL support under Mac OS 10.5. Now, did I open a ticket on php.net asking them to re-include the MySQL header files in the PHP distro? Of course not! I knew I was probably being an idiot and screwing up on something simple. Which, I discovered after a few short hours of research and Terminal-tinkering, was more or less the case.
My point, folks, is this: when you attach your name to something in a public forum, like a blog post, a comment, a mailing list, or a ticket system, you open yourself up to looking like an idiot. Especially if you haven't done your research.
So here's where the introductory paragraph ties in: acting like a f**kwad is a sub-set of what I like to call Being Stupid. However, if you take away the anonymity (a central tenet of our aforementioned theory), people still do a pretty good job of being stupid. So maybe all it really takes is an audience. Granted, people can be awfully stupid in the safety and comfort of their own homes, but nobody's around to notice.
So, the sum of my thoughts boil down to this rhetorical question (since it's rhetorical, I don't expect you to answer me directly, but feel free to discuss amongst yourselves): why is it that people feel comfortable looking stupid on the internet, and do we need a new theory to explain this phenomenon?
In closing, let me just say that there's no doubt in my mind that most of the people who post tickets to Trac are intelligent, well-meaning people, who often enough actually do us the courtesy of going out of their way to perform a little research, rather than blindly firing off a bug report with little to no detail. However, and this is what really gets me, people try to really go out of their way by submitting patches. The irony is, this is often less helpful than no patch at all, because 9 times out of 10, I end up looking in the wrong direction because of it. Most of the time, I have to completely disregard the patch. Every once in a while, I can use maybe half of it, and maybe once out of every 10 times, I can drop it in as-is.
Why is this? Because people just don't get it. Now, the list of people who know the internals of Cake better than I do is somewhere between short and empty, naturally. Maybe it's just me, but given that that's the case, why would people with little to no Cake experience be so presumptive as to submit me a patch? Isn't that sort of like telling me how to do my job? And yet, even though they're wrong 9 times out of 10, they continue to do it. It boggles the mind.
Okay, in closing for real this time, if you really want to help out, then submit patches against the test suite. For those of you with a modicum of experience in one part or another of the CakePHP core, then don't be shy: patch away. Just don't expect me to take your patch seriously unless you've also included a test case for it. This is 2008 people, if you "don't know how to write a test," then get with the program. If you don't know what the program is, I know someone you can ask.
Oh, right, also... I should probably mention here that a while ago, I was hired by OmniTI, and the views expressed here do not reflect blah blah blah, you know, the usual.
