Dreamwidth Development

Real-time development coordination -- on Discord!

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 11:28:29 GMT

Posted by: mark

Hi all!

In the deep dark ages past we used IRC as the means for doing real-time development/volunteer communication. This worked well enough for years but as a medium there are a lot of limitations to IRC and most Dreamwidth staff haven't been active there for a long time (for various reasons).

Some time ago we created a Discord community and have been using it for some real-time communications since. It has proven to be effective for our purpose so we're going to make it official. If you would like to have a place to go to ask questions, talk about development, and similar Dreamwidth related conversation, you can find us here:

https://discord.gg/dreamwidth

If you do decide to join us, when you join you'll only be able to see much at the beginning. Just tell us what your Dreamwidth name is in the #introductions channel and as soon as staff is around we can get you the right access to see the rest of the channels!

I want to emphasize that this is just for volunteer/development communication and isn't meant to be a social lounge. IRC is still a reasonable place to go for that if you just want to hang out and chat, but we won't be using Discord for that.

Questions & comments, fire away!

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FYI: IRC nickname change

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 00:59:45 GMT

Posted by: mark

Hi all,

I've changed my IRC nickname from the old trusty xb95 to the new shiny zorkian.

If you need to find me on IRC, please message me there.

Thanks!

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Coder meetings

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 12:11:40 GMT

Posted by: denise

fu and I were talking this morning about a bunch of things, and we thought it might be interesting/useful to have biweekly or monthly irc coder "meetings", where people could talk about what they were working on, brainstorm about problems they're having, give updates on major/larger projects they're working on, ask for help or ideas on how to design or implement things, and just generally support each other. The reasoning being, when we're all scattered around the globe like this, it's hard to just walk down the hallway and sit on a team member's desk and bounce ideas off them, and that a) leads people to feeling isolated and out of the loop, b) makes it so that nobody really knows what anybody's working on, c) makes it hard to get a lot of support and encouragement, d) doesn't give anybody a real chance to "show off" the cool things they're working on, e) makes it easier to forget about DW stuff and push it down the priority list because you don't get that sense of social reward, f) reduces the chance that somebody will say something to you in passing that will give you a great idea for how to fix that thing that's driving you nuts, and g) doesn't give us all a chance to get together and brainstorm about what we should all be concentrating on, etc.

I'm envisioning an hour or so in irc, scheduled in such a way as to make it easy for people to attend, timezone-wise (or, since we're so geographically disparate, having two separate sessions, and people could attend one or both), held once or twice a month. For those who don't/can't irc, we could log the sessions and post them to dw_dev, both quick summaries/minutes and full logs (edited to remove irrelevancies such as join/part msgs and off-topic chatter).

I know that I would really appreciate something like that, since it's really easy to start feeling isolated and disconnected (even when you own the place!) when you're working from home and on incredibly weird schedules! Still, I don't want to go to the trouble of setting something up or working out the logistics if people wouldn't be interested. Therefore, a poll:

View Poll: #7281

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