Given how much criticism one specific, relatively minor aspect of this post has been getting from a lot of people—myself included—I feel like I should explicitly state that:
1) This post is awesome, and having a public postmortem of a project like this is really really valuable
2) While I stand by all of the criticism which I have not explicitly retracted, I want to be clear that my criticism was focused on a very minor part of the post, and, as I already stated in point #1, this post is awesome overall and I upvoted it
3) Many of the reactions that Duncan got on his original post were totally out of proportion, and many orders of magnitude worse than anything he said in this post
4) The fact that so much of the discussion here is focusing on this relatively minor issue is probably a reflection of the fact that there wasn’t anything more substantial to disagree with in this post; so it feels to me like that a minor issue is getting a disproportionate amount of weight in contrast to this post’s merits, and I feel slightly bad for having been one of the people to pile on Duncan and making his experience of reading the comments more punishing than it should be, given how good this post was overall.
(Someone may feel that the share of critical comments isn’t that large, and that most of the top-level comments are about something else. This is true. Still, usually negative comments are experienced by the author as much more strongly than positive comments, so I’m taking that into account when I feel like there’s been a somewhat disproportionate amount of attention on the criticisms. That said, I don’t feel like anyone who contributed to them did anything wrong—after all, I contributed to them myself. Rather, I want to just clearly indicate that I think this was a great post overall, and that I really that the amount of criticism-about-a-minor-thing won’t leave a bad taste in Duncan’s mouth overall.)
I endorse this, while still considering it important that criticism be given if warranted. As always, and unfortunately, there is less to say to someone on an issue where we already agree.
Given how much criticism one specific, relatively minor aspect of this post has been getting from a lot of people—myself included—I feel like I should explicitly state that:
1) This post is awesome, and having a public postmortem of a project like this is really really valuable
2) While I stand by all of the criticism which I have not explicitly retracted, I want to be clear that my criticism was focused on a very minor part of the post, and, as I already stated in point #1, this post is awesome overall and I upvoted it
3) Many of the reactions that Duncan got on his original post were totally out of proportion, and many orders of magnitude worse than anything he said in this post
4) The fact that so much of the discussion here is focusing on this relatively minor issue is probably a reflection of the fact that there wasn’t anything more substantial to disagree with in this post; so it feels to me like that a minor issue is getting a disproportionate amount of weight in contrast to this post’s merits, and I feel slightly bad for having been one of the people to pile on Duncan and making his experience of reading the comments more punishing than it should be, given how good this post was overall.
(Someone may feel that the share of critical comments isn’t that large, and that most of the top-level comments are about something else. This is true. Still, usually negative comments are experienced by the author as much more strongly than positive comments, so I’m taking that into account when I feel like there’s been a somewhat disproportionate amount of attention on the criticisms. That said, I don’t feel like anyone who contributed to them did anything wrong—after all, I contributed to them myself. Rather, I want to just clearly indicate that I think this was a great post overall, and that I really that the amount of criticism-about-a-minor-thing won’t leave a bad taste in Duncan’s mouth overall.)
I endorse this, while still considering it important that criticism be given if warranted. As always, and unfortunately, there is less to say to someone on an issue where we already agree.