Friday, February 10, 2006

Recommended blog: AYE conference

If you're like me, you've never attended Jerry Weinberg's AYE conferences, but you'd like to at least read nuggets of wisdom from the people who organize them. Well, you can do that by subscribing to the AYE conference blog. Here's one wisdom nugget, courtesy of Jerry Weinberg himself, who quotes some Japanese proverbs:

"We learn little from victory, much from defeat.

So, do not think in terms of Win or Lose, because you cannot always win.
Think instead of Learn, for Win or Lose, you can always learn."

BTW, AYE stands for Amplifying Your Effectiveness.

Update

I had the chance of observing the truth of this proverb while cleaning up the mess caused by my post on using setuptools when you don't have root access. The swift and decisive defeat I suffered by incurring the wrath of the author of setuptools (see PJE's comments to that post) contributed a lot to my understanding on how you're really supposed to use setuptools. Lose, but learn -- I'm OK with that, even when I'm subjected to some unnecessary vile language IMO.

2 comments:

PJE said...

Grig, *you* didn't incur my wrath, the consequences of your earlier post did. There's a *big* difference between the two, but I apologize for being less than tactful in my response.

The comments from other people on that post were indicating that the post was making things worse because of people's perception about what you said. I've been working very long and hard during the last couple of days to get the problems Joe reported fixed, and my stress and upset came through in my comment.

It was not directed at you, though, and if you read it closely you'll see that I phrased everything in terms of critiquing the situation and the perception it was creating -- not you or your ideas. Admittedly, I see how it would be very easy to take what I said as being directly critical of you, and I'm sorry I didn't take more time to edit for that. To a certain extent, I thought you'd have already updated the post just from reading my first comment on it, so I was anxious to convey how important it was that people use the actual instructions, at least until I got it all to work smoothly out of the box with a normal virtual-host PYTHONPATH setup. (Which the SVN version now does.)

Anyway, again, my wrath was not at all directed at you, and I'm sorry that I didn't edit more to make sure that fact was as clear to you as it was to me. :)

PJE said...

Oh, and I almost forgot: thank you *very* much for updating the post to link to the docs. I appreciate that a lot.

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