There's a balance that has to be struck between complete transparency and presenting a united front to our customers. There are very few things that happen behind truly closed doors, but it's a lot more efficient to do the bulk of our development behind a curtain, at least. For one, it helps reduce the feeling of exposure for new devs and provides a judgement-free sandbox where they can experiment, make mistakes, and get feedback without having every user on the site looking at them. It also helps provide some separation from the users who've forgotten their password, and people who need real-time assistance with development. IRC seems to strike a nice balance, in that you definitely need to seek it out to find it, but it is also super easy to find. It's one of the things that, in the past, we have had good feedback about.
IRC is an old protocol with a severely declining userbase, it needs to be downloaded to one's computer to be usable (though I understand there's a way to connect online through freenode.net, but I'm not sure if the functionality is the same) and it has an image problem: it came about in the days of BBoards as an offshoot of them and has the appearance of being for older and/or more highly tech-inclined users (and I'm "older" myself so there's no need to read anything too special into that statement). Nothing wrong with any of that but it might be scaring off people who didn't get online until the early 2000's or later, simply by looking or seeming harder/more fussy/more exclusive than it actually is (OK; it has that effect on me even without even throwing in the exclusive feel of the whole thing). Just my two cents on that.
I'm quoting what you said on that to pick up where I left off, though, not to really comment so much on IRC's pros and cons directly. Since I think its cons might outweigh its pros for the rest of us here who are not officially volunteering or working on DW just yet, my idea (the one I had to abandon when I said I could write more last night but I had to go) is that either instead of or else in addition to IRC we create baby_dev, so that if it's embarrassing for people to ask questions "in public" about coding or how backend DW works then keep this new community closed membership and not publicly viewable, like most official DW communities are, anyhow, and have available one or more active admins who can answer baby dev's questions within it; reserve IRC for actual dev chat while letting baby devs learn and grow in the new community with the established dev's support (and if this suggestion is actually more appropriate for dw_suggestions I'll gladly post it there, too).
I understand we have dev communities all over the place but I don't think potential baby devs like me either a) know they're already open for that sort of help and support and/or b) even if they do think that might be so, they're afraid to just throw themselves out there within them. For this idea to work, established dev support would have to be strong; questions posted within it would have to get answered fairly quickly and everyone supporting the community would have to be pretty obviously stoked about working on DW and helping others to grow in that same sort of role, otherwise I think potential devs might again think they're not wanted or simply lose interest in it.
You mentioned having some issues with changelog being an untranslatable mass of jargon.
Not exactly, but yeah, sometimes. Seeing TT mentioned completely threw me for a loop, which I can still recall because not much else has had that effect on me. I had a vague idea of Foundation being CSS-related to begin with (and, in fact, I still do, but it's just a vague concept). Luckily I've followed changelog for almost 10 years, counting the four years I followed it on LJ, so I know what some of our backend code looks like and what it does where and I stare at my own s2 enough to have some idea of what's being discussed the rest of the time. Most people don't stare at their s2, though, so I'm really rather strange in that way. For most people on DW I'm sure changelog makes about as much sense as reading through ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Backwards.
I 110% agree with you, which is why I'm REALLY happy that Dreamwidth does code tours. They came into being as a direct response to the "what the heck is that supposed to mean????" and/or blank-eyed stares that seem to happen whenever changelog is used. They break down the dev side of things so that non-devs (or newer devs, or non-dev staff) can see what's going on.
I agree the Code Tours are awesome and I always love reading them to see what's new and catch the latest. My quibble is we don't post every change within them and even when we post darn near all of them, they often aren't explained too well, depending on who's doing the tour (and this is in no way meant as a slight against anyone who has ever done code tours, since sometimes it's just the way it is). I would love if we had an archive (in wiki form? not sure where I'm going with that, exactly) of changes written in completely human understandable form just to aid in the process of understanding this site's history and what's been added, subtracted, and changed so far, but I understand time and people are probably both in very short supply for that.
I'm basically in agreement with swaldman's overall idea of not knowing where DW is going long-term in terms of what the backend dev is doing, what the point of working on each bug is, how resolving each bug contributes to exactly what specific goal besides keeping the site running on a day-to-day basis, and that communication is not all it could be to begin with, so I'm trying to tie in ways all of that could be improved not just for established volunteers and paid devs but for others who might want to jump in and make their load a lot easier.
no subject
IRC is an old protocol with a severely declining userbase, it needs to be downloaded to one's computer to be usable (though I understand there's a way to connect online through freenode.net, but I'm not sure if the functionality is the same) and it has an image problem: it came about in the days of BBoards as an offshoot of them and has the appearance of being for older and/or more highly tech-inclined users (and I'm "older" myself so there's no need to read anything too special into that statement). Nothing wrong with any of that but it might be scaring off people who didn't get online until the early 2000's or later, simply by looking or seeming harder/more fussy/more exclusive than it actually is (OK; it has that effect on me even without even throwing in the exclusive feel of the whole thing). Just my two cents on that.
I'm quoting what you said on that to pick up where I left off, though, not to really comment so much on IRC's pros and cons directly. Since I think its cons might outweigh its pros for the rest of us here who are not officially volunteering or working on DW just yet, my idea (the one I had to abandon when I said I could write more last night but I had to go) is that either instead of or else in addition to IRC we create
I understand we have dev communities all over the place but I don't think potential baby devs like me either a) know they're already open for that sort of help and support and/or b) even if they do think that might be so, they're afraid to just throw themselves out there within them. For this idea to work, established dev support would have to be strong; questions posted within it would have to get answered fairly quickly and everyone supporting the community would have to be pretty obviously stoked about working on DW and helping others to grow in that same sort of role, otherwise I think potential devs might again think they're not wanted or simply lose interest in it.
You mentioned having some issues with changelog being an untranslatable mass of jargon.
Not exactly, but yeah, sometimes. Seeing TT mentioned completely threw me for a loop, which I can still recall because not much else has had that effect on me. I had a vague idea of Foundation being CSS-related to begin with (and, in fact, I still do, but it's just a vague concept). Luckily I've followed changelog for almost 10 years, counting the four years I followed it on LJ, so I know what some of our backend code looks like and what it does where and I stare at my own s2 enough to have some idea of what's being discussed the rest of the time. Most people don't stare at their s2, though, so I'm really rather strange in that way. For most people on DW I'm sure changelog makes about as much sense as reading through ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Backwards.
I 110% agree with you, which is why I'm REALLY happy that Dreamwidth does code tours. They came into being as a direct response to the "what the heck is that supposed to mean????" and/or blank-eyed stares that seem to happen whenever changelog is used. They break down the dev side of things so that non-devs (or newer devs, or non-dev staff) can see what's going on.
I agree the Code Tours are awesome and I always love reading them to see what's new and catch the latest. My quibble is we don't post every change within them and even when we post darn near all of them, they often aren't explained too well, depending on who's doing the tour (and this is in no way meant as a slight against anyone who has ever done code tours, since sometimes it's just the way it is). I would love if we had an archive (in wiki form? not sure where I'm going with that, exactly) of changes written in completely human understandable form just to aid in the process of understanding this site's history and what's been added, subtracted, and changed so far, but I understand time and people are probably both in very short supply for that.
I'm basically in agreement with swaldman's overall idea of not knowing where DW is going long-term in terms of what the backend dev is doing, what the point of working on each bug is, how resolving each bug contributes to exactly what specific goal besides keeping the site running on a day-to-day basis, and that communication is not all it could be to begin with, so I'm trying to tie in ways all of that could be improved not just for established volunteers and paid devs but for others who might want to jump in and make their load a lot easier.