Ah right, scream into the void and get ignored because I’m not a multimillion dollar donor. Forgot to waste my time, no I have not.

Do you have any more useful suggestions or is void talking all im allowed to do now or get shouted down with “you haven’t done enough” bullshit?

I guess perhaps I’m just disenfranchised in which case, nothing systematic is gonna help.

Guess I’m the doomer after all.

Ah yes, me, the demigod who can act up on all my worries. Tell me again my plan to get trump to fuck off the 2024 election?

Not to be too sarcastic at you, it’s a good sentiment that I do sort of agree with, but it places too much “you can do anything” blame on the observer who literally is already worried. Aka, this runs a major risk of demotivating people straight into doomerism when they’re faced with worries there’s really nothing that they individually can do about.

Unless I’m wrong and there is some legitimate answer to that sarcastic opening question that I, individually, can do about it, in which case, I’m all ears lol

That’s fair. Part of my job is converting non-technical users into technical users by teaching them things like problem solving approaches that are supposed to help them teach themselves how to learn whatever they need to actually do their job. I don’t teach them what to do, I teach them how to learn what to do.

I agree that you gotta meet people where they’re at, but I try to teach them how to poke around any code repo site, like GitHub or gitlab, so they can use it. Usually I point them to the docs and start by pointing out my favorite parts so that they have somewhere to kind of start by themselves, but it is a skill set that can be practice, or at least I am convinced it is.

I’m not very good at this part of my job, but also, no one is, so it’s not a bad thing, I just want to do better. I guess I never thought of it from a truly non-technical and not wanting to be technical perspective before. This could be solved by a secondary interface designed specifically for this kind of user. It would not allow code download or interaction, but it would allow for issue logging. I might put this idea in my ever growing project list because it sounds like it would be a useful product…

I’m interested in where the limits to expectations lie here. I’m not trying to be a jerk when I say this next part but I do worry I may come off that way but I’m trying to figure out the boundaries of what a “reasonable” expectation is so I can make tasks like this easier for my own team (completely unrelated to this project but it’s essentially the same problem).

Is it not reasonable to expect people to type into a search engine something like “GitHub help” and then poke around in the links that come up?

… Well I’ll be damned, I tried my own method before commenting, and the first link that comes up is a red herring, how obnoxious. I was hoping it’d be a link to the docs, not GitHub support. I guess I just answered my own question: no that is not reasonable.

As a technical user, I am still at a loss for how to help a non-technical user in an algorithmic way that will work for most non-technical users x.x guess I’ll be thinking about this problem some more lol

(I guess I’m rambling but I’m gonna post this anyways in case anyone wants to chatter about it with me)

I got a reason! It’s because people are afraid meta is doing what Microsoft did to a much earlier project. The crux of that whole story is that Microsoft adopted the new tech, became the biggest player thus dominating the area, then, when they had full control of the tech they ended up shutting it down. Some people are convinced meta is going to do that to the fediverse.

This is vague and handwavy, I’m hoping someone actually knows the name of the project. It was early 90s I believe or maybe into the early 00s but it was before my time in the tech sphere of the internet.

Yeah, that makes total sense.

Most software engineers also have to actively maintain and add features to their finished project, and those aspects change a lot about how the problem can be approached.

I failed to take into account why might I have not been effected by tech debt despite occasionally creating it before commenting. Will have to make sure that filter gets a bit stronger lol

Ah yeah, that would be a worry, except I forgot to mention that most of the code I work on usually gets thrown away after like 6 months. Makes tech debt not have nearly as big of an impact on me.

We do have a longer lasting code base that the little widgets I make run off of. That has a much more strict requirements to ensure tech debt is not introduced specifically so we don’t end up in that sort of a position.

That said, and yet we couldn’t even keep it out of our own code base. So yeah, I think my original comment is just wrong because I forgot all the ways tech debt actually has effected me in the past and how my industry’s project cycle is so short term that i rarely have the opportunity to run into tech debt that I caused in a problematic way…

Fair point, I work in a consumer facing, fast turn around, short lived code project industry. Not a typical software project with long life cycles.

These practices would almost certainly bite my company in the ass if we had to maintain anything for longer than year.

Occasionally, we do have to support a client for multiple years, and everytime it’s a hilarious shit show trying to figure out how to keep all the project dependencies up to date. This is likely platform tech debt, and would be the beginning of the problem if we didn’t have the privilege of being able to start over from scratch code-wise for each client’s new order.

I guess I’m just in a lucky spot in the programmer pool where tech debt literally doesn’t hit me as hard as it usually does others, and I just couldn’t identify that before now lol

Instead of saying tech debt isn’t that bad, my tune will change to something else. Like I said, I was on a team at one point that had a worse than usual tech debt problem, and it was unworkably stressful to deal with. Im guessing that experience is more typical of being near tech debt than my other experiences.

Rarely have I ever actually had consequences for my sins, which tends to be why I don’t go back and fix them…

If tech debt weight is felt in any way, it tends to get fixed. If it’s not felt, it’s just incredibly easy to forget and disregard.

(This is mostly me not learning my lesson well enough from my time being on Tech Debt: The Team. I do try and figure out the correct way to do things, but at the end of the day, I get paid to do what the boss wants as cheaply as possible, not what’s right :/ money dgaf about best practices until someone gets sued for malpractice, but on that logic, maybe the tech debt piper just hasn’t returned for payment from me yet… Only time will tell)

I mean, it’s probably less likely to happen, but it is a prison disease, which means it can kind of just suddenly happen if a protein folds the wrong way (if I’m not misreading the internet wrong about it)

Though it seems like you’re relatively safe if you stay away from brain tissue, so I guess you’re probably fine.

Still, I’ll just ask you what it tastes like before I’d try it myself haha

Enjoy your side of kuru! It’s the gift that waits to give, but once it starts, it never stops!