I loved the work Rusty performed so much! He started to work actively at Linux firewalling about at the same time as I became a Linux user and sysadmin, like more than 20 years ago, and I used what he made regularly and always found his work to have a sane UI to the admin: simple to use yet quite powerful stuff. In general kernel hackers are really a bunch of unicorns that are very focused on the code they are writing and the problems to solve, and I've the feeling that while in the 90s they were deeply recognized for their work, now instead in some way their work is a bit in the shadow... with much hype going into places where it's not deserved. But apparently most of them want just to code at low level, don't be annoyed, and get a salary. The essence of the old times programmer basically.<p>Impressed with:<p>"disagreed with my approach so much and so continuously that I developed a dread of reading my mail every morning: eventually I wrote a filter to send their mail to a separate mbox".<p>I'm very sorry to read this. In the early days of Redis this happened to me as well, there were a group of people continuously attacking me and I was horrified by the idea of reading their Twitter replies at some point. However instead of filtering them, I found (without conscious efforts, it just happened) a different solution, I became more and more sentimentally disconnected from the chats focusing solely on the actual arguments, filtering most of the tone and human-level parts. This makes me a sadder person, not able to joy or be sad for things I read on social networks for the most part, however in the pro side there is that I can read the harsh criticisms and find some value, sometimes, without being affected. Moreover, as a secondary adjustment, I no longer reply after a given point if I may start to sound attacking towards another person. This does not mean to accept everything, but just say after N replies: "we disagree but you are cool, I'll do what I think, have a nice day".<p>I still believe that we can stay in the tech world, not accepting what other people say if we disagree from a technical standpoint, without being assholes.
For those who don't know, Rusty built <i>iptables</i> along with many of its underlying technologies and predecessors. Most devops/sysadmin people interact with his work directly, and all of us do indirectly. So long!<p>Edit: It appears that Rusty now works at Blockstream and is focusing on the Bitcoin Lightning network.
Nice closing<p><pre><code> To my fellow maintainers: stay harsh on code and
don't be afraid to say "No" or "Why?"; there really
are more bad ideas than good ones, and complexity
is such a bright candle for us hacker-moths. But
be gentle, kind and forgiving of your peers:
respect from people you respect is really the only
reward that sticks[9].</code></pre>
"I flew myself around Australia visiting every LUG to convince them to come to the first Australian Linux conference."<p>The story of CALU 1999 being funded on Rusty's personal credit card is legendary in the Australian Linux community. Having recently attended my fourth linux.conf.au, as it's now known, I'm very grateful for Rusty's instrumental role in building the Linux and free software community here.<p>(Also, I'm now lucky enough to work with the legendary group of hackers at OzLabs - the best graduate job that I could hope for in Canberra!)
<p><pre><code> author Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au> 2017-08-15 07:01:08 +0930
committer Jessica Yu <jeyu@kernel.org> 2018-01-15 20:44:08 +0100
</code></pre>
That’s a long time between the time it was written and the time it was committed.
<p><pre><code> But one person disagreed with my approach so much and so continuously
that I developed a dread of reading my mail every morning: eventually
I wrote a filter to send their mail to a separate mbox, which I've
still never read and don't intend to.
</code></pre>
Such a disappointing situation to see, and potentially so demotivating. Glad it didn’t halt his contributions.
Interesting to read his qualms about the cryptocurrency field: <a href="https://medium.com/@rusty_lightning/the-corrosion-of-ethics-in-cryptocurrencies-f7ba77e9dfc3" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@rusty_lightning/the-corrosion-of-ethics-...</a>
> I listened in awe as this homeless-looking guy described porting Linux to the Ultrasparc, and then described how he then proceeded to beat Solaris on <i>every single</i> lmbench microbenchmark.[2]<p>This was the same guy who, after writing a comprehensive detailed post about Solaris performance, was trolled by a Sun employee who was in charge of performance - with a post that consisted, in it's entirety, of<p>> 'have you ever kissed a girl?'<p>This kind of arrogance is what killed Sun (and Joyent).
> To my fellow maintainers: stay harsh on code and don't be afraid to say "No" or "Why?"; there really are more bad ideas than good ones, and complexity is such a bright candle for us hacker-moths.<p>A breath of fresh air in the day and age of installing package managers to install another package manager to install an autoloader to load the plugin for the transpiler for the code we haven't started writing yet.[1]<p>1 - <a href="http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/10/a-moment-of-nostalgia/" rel="nofollow">http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/05/10/a-moment-of-nostalg...</a>