“Looks like I pissed off the internet”

Posted: 09/08/2012 | Author: | Filed under: personal stuff, thoughts | 2 Comments

A friend messages me: “is that you on the picture? I found this on Hacker News”

„Haha, hey, that’s me indeed!” … „Wait, wtf”

TL;DR: I don’t fancy being used as a Bad Example and an advertisement for your Brilliant Startup. Also, using somebody’s picture without permission and censoring his comment is Not Very Nice.

After readinng the article linked above I left the following comment below:

> You guys need help getting dressed in the morning so you don’t leave the house in a Hackathon shirt and cargo pants.
Oh, how convincing: fetch my picture from the hackathon and tell me to not dress as if I was dressing for a hackathon. Nice.
As somebody pointed out already, it may be nice to ask for someone’s permission before publishing a picture in this context, especially since the original website, from where I believe you took that picture from, has my name is written down below the image. Oh by the way, ISTR it had a watermark as well, just outside the frame you included; it’s very nice of you to not credit the photographer who values his work.
As far as I like the idea of helping geeks (please, no “nerds”. Respecting each other is not _that_ hard) to dress better, your “advertisment” is not particularly sophisticated. I hope that the rest your ideas are more interesting than this one.
For some reason the comment didn’t make it through moderation. Whoops. So I took the liberty to respond to the post on my own blog.
Now that I read this I think I could’ve reacted in a less angry way (although it was still not „the internet angry”, as a friend of mine pointed out), but the points stand.
So, a little backstory: On the Perl 6 hackathon in Oslo there was a picture taken with all the participants, myself included. A strictly programming event, who would be surprised that people would be wearing t-shirts from previous conferences? Apparently somebody would, and thus will use us as an example of guys who „need help”.
That’s not very nice.
Disregarding the legal aspects of publishing a picture of people, after carefully removing the watermark, and portraying them as anti-social and helpless, I find it hard to imagine how an advertising of this sort could appeal to the very same people you’re targeting with your post. Apparently, reading the comments which did make it through moderation, some people included on the pictures actually liked the idea, so it may just be that I know nothing about marketing. My bad.
A few hours after posting the article to hacker news, @jordynclee posted on her twitter: “Looks like I pissed off the internet”. Woo, how did that happen? Mayhaps insulting people whose photos you use without their permission is not the best idea of all?
Now, dear @jordynclee, I’ll continue on listening to opinions of people who respect other people, and keep on doing business which doesn’t involve ridiculing others to achieve my goals. Thank you for your constructive criticism.

OS couples

Posted: 08/04/2011 | Author: | Filed under: personal stuff, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Being sent the following comic strip by a friend of mine

Original comic

how could I possibly resist adjusting it just a tiny bit to suit my actual situation? :)

Modified version of the above comic

Big thanks for the author of the original comic!  See http://www.stickycomics.com/where-did-you-meet/ for more funny stuff.

A trip to Holland

Posted: 15/03/2011 | Author: | Filed under: personal stuff | Leave a comment

On the Netherlands Perl Workshop, where I’ve met some fellow Poles, I was asked: „so, why Perl? Why not Python or Ruby?”. That always takes me a while to answer. When we speak about languages, there is probably no good reason. Although I have very little experience besides Perl, all of them seem nice to me, pleasant to read and write, with lots of ready-to-use modules. What makes Perl special? The only sensemaking thing that comes to my mind, is the community. Among all the languages I’ve ever used, none was able to make me go to a pub once in a month just to talk about nerdy stuff. None made me travel to another country, to spend a few days with people I knew only from their IRC nicks and gravatars. But but, to start from the beginning…

To be honest, being invited just out of the blue to come to Netherlands to a workshop and a hackathon was quite a suprise to me. Someone I barely know invites me to come to his place a few hunded kilometers away, to meet a few other people I barely know and hack together. Suprising, exciting, awesome. The Perl community suprises me once again, in a whole new way. Didn’t think much, had to ensure a few close relatives that I’ll be alright and flew.

Oh, what can I say to not turn it into „I’ll now describe my 3-day-long-holidays, please prepare your pillows”. People were as awesome as expected. The workshop was nice, yet I have an impression that the most interesting talks were the ones about Perl 6, from the people I came to the workshop with. But I may be biased, as half of the talks were in Dutch, one of the languages I don’t speak at all :) Some at-slides-looking, some Perl6 hacking occured. Met a few nice people, even two from Poland, which I didn’t quite expect. Shot a few pictures, got an awesome t-shirt. I wonder what YAPC::EU will be like, besides being few times bigger.

The most remembered thing is the hackathon at Martin’s place afterwards. Interesting how just sitting in a room laughing from the same jokes can bring productivity to the levels I haven’t seen before :) Maybe I should figure out some way to cheat my brain and make it think I’m on a hackathon of some sort. Besides hacking, we went to a small trip for me to see some outdoor Holland.

Besides the whole weekend being an awesome experience itself, I think it just pushed my Perl community awareness on a whole new level. Now it’s not only Perl Mongers meetings once in a month, but traveling across Europe to meet new people and see new places. There wouldn’t be so much awesomeness if there weren’t these awesome people. Thank you guys, that were the best holidays I’ve had recently.