Librarianon

the big drama in town right now is somebody cut down two trees (!!) at the rotary park, possibly for firewood or maybe just for mischief on halloween

but maybe also it's beavers?

someone who works at the VA is going over to do "bite analysis" tomorrow

and they have claimed another trophy

((EDIT TO ADD: The original reason for writing this was completely subsumed by what happened afterwards as a consequence of the poor decisions in how I wrote it. More details here.))

(This is mostly just a blog post, me sort of rambling about an experience I had today but it feels topical to both the cohost experience, which admittedly I do really, really like this website and want to use it more, and tech in general.)

I've been having a years long grumble now when it comes to problems involving software or websites or the like. When I do manage to get solutions to these problems (important to note they usually just go unresolved instead and I just need to learn to Deal) I cannot help but feel the tone used by those providing the instruction is one of condescension, of "Oh this is so obvious how do you not get it?" It's kind of the same tone used by FOSS's worst advocates.

And earlier today when getting some help with cohost dev (the default color theme of the website does actively hurt my eyes to the extent I use it less than I'd like to) I think some of what the problem is got revealed to me. See as I was following a guide to a theme picker that I'd been linked, first of all the way it was set out, all very neat and pretty and clever, I didn't realize it was a guide at all. It said it was, but I saw no instructions. What I thought were bullets in a list turned out to be collapsible items. I have no idea how OP did this or who decided what symbol preceded each item you could click on to expand it, but from how I see and interpret visual data, it was a poor choice. After following the guide, I was once again left in a scenario where I was unable to actually do the thing it was suggesting. Upon installing the theme, the code for it all loaded up and a nice, friendly dialogue box with some options popped up as well, including the theme picker. Nice, right?

No, not nice. You fool, it said to me, You complete and utter imbecile, you cretin and Luddite, this is not the dialogue box you're looking for. I still don't know why that dialogue didn't do anything. The best I can tell it was just a little sandbox to show off that the script was functioning as intended. No, I needed to close the window that had opened in response to the install and know to instead go to the extension itself and open the theme manager, where it would launch the identical dialogue box but now it would work.

At some point during this process, something dawned on me, an issue that I feel like science education has already started confronting right as the Internet started to spread, as anti-vax bullshit with disgraced and license-to-practice-medicine-revoked former physician Andrew Wakefield got rolling, as the promises the 80s and 90s made to scientific advancement started failing: This shit is really complicated, and the state of modern science is advanced to the point that someone who isn't completely steeped in it is probably not going to be able to keep up. The ability to communicate scientific principals became critical. It wasn't just enough to do research and document it, but it was demonstrated time and again that if someone who isn't actively involved in STEM can't understand the basic premise of your work, you aren't done yet. And it feels like software and especially web folx just...never got the memo? I can think of one programmer who, when she takes the time to explain this stuff to me, both actively is checking along the way and challenging her own assumptions to make sure I'm following, and is also really careful with her tone and word choice so as to keep it from feeling demeaning or condescending. She's the exception. Probably because she's a hypnodomme and knows how extremely important word choice is. But in general when trying to get this sort of info even from friends it so often comes off as just, "Hey do this very simple thing, dumbass."

I don't know. I think about this and how opaque the Internet has gotten, how complicated software is, and I think about how shit like cryptocurrencies, NFTs, "AI" generated art and stories and such are becoming so widespread, and I feel that these do not exist in isolation from one another. I've got some unspecified and undiagnosed learning disability that includes making processing text difficult, and these tutorials meant to Help very rarely do. But I've got a B.S. in E.E. and have some vague understanding of what's actually happening. I can't imagine how lost someone with no STEM skills would be, how vulnerable to misinformation and hype and outright lies they would be.

I am decidedly an outsider looking in. I've tried coding and it's never worked out for me (but see above, I could have just gotten really shit instruction). But maybe, like physicists and chemists and civil engineers, more programmers and webdevs need to take a moment and realize they're actively losing the people they're trying to help and work with, and take some time to practice better communicating the concepts of their craft to the laity.

I think a person's knowledge that There Are Precisely Two Programmers On Staff and what that means in terms of the cultivation & evolution of a live social network does a pretty reliable job of informing how said person might react to what they consider an important site feature taking a long time to manifest. This site's userbase has a very high density of people who understand computers, technology, and long-term collaborative projects, and as such to people who don't have that experience it might seem like @staff receive a very high degree of "blind faith" (or whatever you'd like to call it) and that criticisms of @staff's priorities are met with a (relatively) great amount of backlash and rebuttal.

To understand why this is, let's take a look at what there being Only Two Programmers means:

• To begin with, understand this is not to discount the contributions of the two non-programmer members of @staff (who do site visuals/design and support management, respectively). Indeed, their contributions are every inch as vital as their colleagues, and the site would not look, feel, or function as well as it currently does without them.
• However, it must be understood that There Are Only Two Programmers. I know I'm saying it a lot but it is very very important that people who read this understand that There Are Only Two People On @staff Who Can Make Changes To The Site's Codebase And Thus Implement New Features. Just two of them! Just enough for a game of tennis! One, and then the other, and that's it.
• It is vitally important that a project like this have at LEAST two programmers, because when one programmer writes code that they intend to publish to the codebase, they must have another programmer check their work, or perform a "code review". Publishing untested code to a live project as complex as Cohost is a very, very, very bad idea, no matter how good a programmer you think you are. Mistakes still make it through even with review, but they are far, far less common.
• Cohost has two programmers. Only two of them! Did you forget?
• The ironclad necessity of performing code review means that the programmers can never truly take time completely off. Even when one is technically on vacation, they must still review the other's code before it can be published, or else risk introducing site-breaking behavior and endangering the livelihoods of all 4 members of @staff.
• Gee whiz! That sounds very tiring and stressful!
• There will be times when, due to sickness or other unforeseeable emergencies, a programmer will not be able to perform code review. This means that any features either programmer is working on will be delayed - one because they cannot work, and another because their work cannot be reviewed.
• I haven't even mentioned that the work that the programmers are doing would be difficult and time-consuming even absent the ever-present spectre of code review. Creating a feature-rich website that works, let alone works WELL, across a wide variety of devices and browsers is very, very difficult work. It requires constant maintenance - bugs that they didn't catch crop up constantly, tools that they use change, outside factors might hammer the site and the programmers need to respond to all of it. The two programmers who are responsible for creating new website behaviors are the same two programmers who are responsible for site maintenance. When programmer time is being spent maintaining the website, it is not being spent building new features. And with somewhere north of 100k users, the website needs a LOT of maintenance.
• The site's two programmers are not JUST programmers. They don't get to simply write code all day and then clock out. They are, along with the two non-programmer members of @staff, responsible for the site's communications, community management, accountancy, project management, and so on. Writing update posts, balancing the books, meeting with other @staff members, securing funding - all of this also represents time that the programmers must necessarily spend NOT writing new features for the website.
• In order to seek sustainability and reduce the amount of debt they take on, @staff do not pay themselves especially well for the work that they do. Senior-level developers with analogous skillsets and analogous levels of responsibility would make somewhere from 40,000-80,000 USD/year more than what @staff are currently making (depending on location).
• To sum up: the site's programmers (the two of them) are taking a significant pay cut to do the extremely difficult work of building and maintaining a porn-friendly, leftist-friendly, fascist-hostile social media website that does not serve ads, harvest data, or cook your brain with metrics within the framework of a worker's collective, work that they cannot ever truly take time off from unless rendered effectively disabled by circumstances beyond their control.
• If one of the two (2) programmers becomes too sick to work for an extended period, gets burnt out and has to quit, or is hit by a bus, development of new website features will come to a complete stop and indeed the future of the website will be in jeopardy.
• It is not possible for a sympathetic, enthusiastic end user of Cohost to protect the two programmers who work on this website from becoming sick, or from being injured, or from dying.
• It IS possible for a sympathetic, enthusiastic end user of Cohost to do their small part to protect the two programmers from burnout by running interference on petulant, ill-informed, will-to-carry-on-sapping complaints from users who consider it appropriate to hold said two (1+1) programmers to the same feature delivery standards as billion-dollar multinational tech conglomerates (many of whom's products do not even match Cohost's full existing feature-set). So, many of them do!

This is not a "don't ever complain or criticize" post, and if you choose to read it as such you are a dolt. This is a "there are two programmers on the Cohost staff" post. Criticize all you want, but allow your criticism to be informed by the fact that there are two individual human programmers working on this website - if you don't, then don't be surprised when you get an earful from people who understand exactly what that means.