[Pw_forum] advice from Stefano Baroni

[Nicola Marzari]

Dear All,


please read very carefully the piece of advice below - in particular,
if you are an experienced user of QE, it would be a worthy endeavour
if you were to give back to this community by providing advice
to the forum (too many are silent, in my opinion).

For all the QE-developers: I've heard it too many times that experienced 
people do not post for fear of being unpleasantly chastised. This, as 
well, should not happen - and it would be great to recognize that 
written words always sound harsher than you think.

Can we all make an effort ? Pretty please,


				nicola


> Dear Hui Wang, dear All:
> 
> I am extremely glad that the youngest among you find expert advice on 
> this forum about such basic issues as discussed in this thread. You 
> should be advised, though, that the human resources of the QE 
> developers' team are extremely limited, and none of them gets any 
> rewards for the their work other than the knowledge thay they are 
> providing a (great) service to the community. 
> 
> You will have noticed that most of feedback comes from a very small 
> number of members of this forum, and guess what? from the 3-4 
> individuals who do most of the development, maintanance, planning for 
> future improvements. A simple application of a simple conservation law 
> should suggest that every second they spend to answer trivial questions 
> is a second less spent for more technical work that does require their 
> expert contribution.
> 
> I think that all of us can give a bit more to this community. To start with:
> 
> 1) For the youngest - Do not think that a free resource (the advice you 
> can obtain on this forum) is unlimited. Use it sparingly and 
> judiciously, after making YOURSELF a serious effort to answer your 
> question. Remember that there is no better teacher than oneself. It may 
> be painful to teach / learn from oneself, but a self-taught thing is 
> learnt forever (not to mention your local mentors, senior colleagues, etc)
> 
> 2) For the not-so-young - Many of the questions asked on this forum are general 
 > enough to be answered by any knowledgeable senior graduate student / 
young postdoc.
> Please, give back to this community by keeping the discussion alive without forcing 
 > the same 3-4 people to give all the advice that is requested here.
> 
> 3) For the bravest. Join the developers' efforts by volunteering some of 
> your time and help fix bugs / implement new features / start new 
> projects based on QE.
> 
> For the time being, enjoy being with us as much as we enjoy being with you.
> 
> Stefano B

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Prof Nicola Marzari   Department of Materials Science and Engineering
13-5066   MIT   77 Massachusetts Avenue   Cambridge MA 02139-4307 USA
tel 617.4522758 fax 2586534 marzari at mit.edu http://quasiamore.mit.edu