I recently read a post by someone lamenting the thanklessness a programmer gets. I once worked in IT where services are really considered a utility. No one calls the utility company unless there is a problem. Have you ever called your electric, phone, or gas company to thank them for the great service? I didn’t think so. This was my response:

Sounds like a bad environment. For a long time now, I’ve worked on teams where we are our own worse critic and where I’ve received more thank you emails than criticizing emails. That said, I don’t consider error reports to be criticizing emails. They are just that, a report of something which went wrong. Things always go wrong, not just in programming. In business and in life, something will always go wrong. How you respond to the wrong doing can largely influence your happiness as a human being.

Sometimes mind shift has to happen to really make this effective. Things like http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?EgolessProgramming can help you remember that you are not your code. Error reports mean that someone care about what you created and wants to help you make it better. That is awesome. I’d love much but maybe not too much of that kind of feedback.

git svn terrible trouble

I use git svn.

I recently somehow (I do not recall) put git svn into a strange state.

The symptom was that from master, git svn info would show a branch to which I once committed instead of trunk. I could not figure this out. My solution was to rm -rf .git/svn/ ; git svn fetch -r latesttrunkrev to let git svn recreate the refs. Then all worked.

Now git svn info from master tells me trunk, like I expect it to.