Question thread #23

[pauamma]

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

Also, I'm curious: if you have a coding blog, would you like links to recent entries rounded up on dw_dev? If so (no obligation), feel free to comment with links and someone will compile them and post a new entry here.

Comments

[alexbayleaf]

This is a meta dev question!

I recall Dreamwidth has, on various occasions, offered to buy books for DW devs. I was wondering how this worked out, both from the POV of the developers and DW as an organisation. Is it still happening? Why or why not?

[denise]

Weirdly, we did not have a lot of people take us up on it! (A few, but not many.) I think people are just really hesitant to put themselves forward and say "yes, I would like this thing, thank you," and I bet there's a bit of impostor syndrome going on as well ("but I haven't done anything to DESERVE this thing").

Next time I will probably do a thing like "here are two book titles relevant to DW, pick one of the two and I will send it to you", and then ask everyone who submits a patch during $timeperiod to give me their addresses...

[batrachian]

I am curious about the lifetime and planning of code pushes. From what I've overheard in irc, the general consensus seems to be 'when we get around to making one', but what triggers that decision? Is it a certain threshold number of fixes?

Tangentially related, what process do folks use for finding bugs to work on? My trawl through the list on GHI didn't find anything that made me go 'ooh I want that', which has been my process to this point.

[denise]

It's generally one of us going "eh, we hven't done one in a while, how about this weekend?" or one of us going "that fix that just went in is something I really want, let's push soon?"

[batrachian]

Alrighty then. I suppose Soon(tm) just looks long because there's a feature that I want.

*attempts to not watch the pot*