Groovy folks, time to start agreeing

I wrote about the drama unfolding in the Groovy project a month ago.

I left that topic for a while, but I was pleased to find out today that the question is no longer whether they need to move to a foundation, but rather which foundation it should be. There’s an email thread that has 188 messages and counting, going for more than 2 weeks, where the community is trying to figure out where to go.

I feel a bit of deja-vu, and I feel like I know exactly what’s going on. And no, I don’t mean the Jenkins drama, though we were in a relatable situation. Instead, I was thinking when I and my wife bought a house 5 years ago.

So there were two houses we really liked. The white house and the beige house. Like any informed buyer would do, my wife and I start disecting pros and cons. The white house felt a lot brighter and airy than the beige house, but the beige house has a bigger backyard. The white house is closer to a hospital, which might mean more noise. The beige house has a big tree nearby, and the gutter might fill up. List like that went on and on.

Now, the thing is, at a certain point, a list like this gets more confusing than helpful. I can add up all the pros and cons, but it doesn’t help me getting any closer to the decision making. In fact I’m no longer sure if the white house I wanted was really such a good idea. After all, it has no less than a dozen things listed under “cons”. I can see that my wife is getting just as confused as I am. The conversation starts to go in circles. I was lucky enough that our parents were living in the other side of the Pacific ocean, so we kept this conversation to ourselves. Otherwise, I’m sure it would have been even worse. They mean well, but sometimes too many opinions are more harmful than helpful.

In 1am in one of those long nights, I finally realized that agreeing on something, anything, is more important than figuring out the absolute best house out of two. So like every husband would do, I started trying to talk myself out of the white house I originally wanted, and speak about things I liked about the beige house that my wife originally wanted. I tried to downplay the concerns she had about the beige house.

Even though I started doing this consciously, the strange thing is that I started getting convinced by my own arguments that I didn’t fully believe in. Sure, the beige house doesn’t have the attic room that’s going to be my LEGO room, but I can get a brighter office and maybe I should keep my LEGO there so that I can occupy myself if meetings get boring. And in the end, we bought the beige house and we still live there mostly happily.

I feel like it’s time for Groovy guys to start doing this “let’s agree, whatever it is” dance. Judging from the conversations, I think they’ve figured out that they can live in any of these three foundations. The trick is not to get caught up on all the gory details, because there will be always something you don’t like. Yes, voting might be burdensome. Yes, losing @author tag might be annoying. Yes, infra migration would be painful. But you’ll be all right, and you’ll get used to it sooner than you think.

It’s time for people in the community to give the project leaders a blank check. I think we should be able to all trust them that they have the best interest of the project in mind.

And more importantly, it’s time for the project leaders to start converging. You guys need to sense where your consensus is heading to, and try to talk yourself into it. Try to create an echo chamber.

Engineers aren’t the best people to do this, but you guys really need to do this, because the clock is ticking. The difference between foundations is relatively small, but the difference between moving forward and procrastinating is huge. It’s a part of the leadership responsibility to form a consensus and then turn around and sell that to everyone, so that everyone feels better about what’s being done.

Remember, there’s really no wrong answer. Just different correct answers.

comments powered by Disqus