[zenojevski]

This is not at all negative.

Imagine parent telling some underground rebel group that their revolution would be more successful if they organized it with Jira.

Meanwhile, this concern is so far away from the rebels, who are doing just fine with pen and paper, and are more concerned with basic needs like surviving undetected.

People are of course excited by this initiative, and wish to contribute how they know. Except what they have is hammers, and there are no nails to be seen.

It looks like you are helping, but you are only diluting the focus from what's important to what's easy to mindlessly talk about in a forum.

It looks like people are trying to organize how to organize, instead of actually organizing anything. It's like the difference between being a writer and a word processing expert.

[_ea1k]

I think you have a point, but unfortunately I didn't get it from your first comment as well. It read as a pretty negative comment.

It sounds like the point that you are making is reasonable, though, and unfortunately one that I see play out with a lot of FOSS projects as well. I remember a talk one time where a project lead essentially made the point that every new talk is met with a lot of "I'll setup CI for you" and "I'll setup JIRA for you", but that none of the people who say those things end up contributing code or issues.

For some reason there is a natural desire among some to organize the organizing before the thing to be organized really exists.

[zenojevski]

Note: I was not the original poster: his comment simply rang very true to me; "lean" is being a motif in my work, as the complexity of precious time and resource management increases.

Contributions are all well-intentioned, but they cost resources, especially if you're not great at ruthlessly filtering out, or don't want to, for any reason; they generate a lot of heat where this energy can't be used.

Also well-intentioned contributors will set up grandiose structures, with no intention other than "to help", but no actual will to carry the actual work out. This usually turns out a wasteland after a while, which is not so much a problem until you realize you have to support it; or worst, it over-shadows the original, leaner-but-actually-productive intent.

> For some reason there is a natural desire among some to organize the organizing before the thing to be organized really exists.

I think this is why we have so many engines which have no games written for it :D

[_ea1k]

It is amazing how closely this matches my experiences. I've been on projects where we were forced to accept "gifted" code that was a tremendous difficulty to actual maintain and fix to a maintainable state. Of course, the whole time lots of people wondered why it couldn't just be merged without testing or anything.

It is very easy for software contributions to create lots of friction and your analogy to heat and energy loss is really great, IMO.

[twirlip]

Indeed, I try to avoid such good-intentioned bikeshedding by providing anecdotal solutions and listing tools I found helpful. That way, someone with a similar issue may find something useful or provide better advice to me.

[joe_momma]

Not true, you are wrong. Better organization leads to a focus that can solve problems at a greater scale and with easier access to solutions. Your metaphor sucks as well.

[zenojevski]

First, you need something to organize.

You can't optimize what's not there.