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Entry tags:
Blanketfort Failure
(To anyone who doesn't care about OTW: I'm so sorry? Also, maybe we should hang out more. That would be refreshing.)
Just to clear up a couple of misconceptions here: Naomi isn't the AD&T chair this year (and hasn't been since 2008), and thus she's not the manager of AO3-related coding projects. Amelia and I are the co-chairs, and we're the ones responsible for what goes on. Concerns about management of AD&T or coding or testing volunteers should be directed to us, to the volunteers committee, or to Kylie, our testing lead.
lim is a highly competent adult who has the right and ability to speak for herself and to make her own decisions. She volunteered to do the CSS overhaul, which is a project she'd undertaken twice before in the past. We don't ask anyone to do anything they don't have the time and energy for, and if we stopped people from working individually on big projects that interested them, nothing on the site would ever have gotten built.
I am incredibly grateful to Naomi and lim, the 10 other coders, and the dozens of testers who worked on our last release. There are some quality improvements in there: our CSS has been streamlined and reorganized, you can now write a site skin that doesn't include any of our CSS, you can add skins on top of one another, prompt meme listings are more readable, we have an enormous new tag set and challenge nominations feature (which has now had a successful first run with Yuletide noms!), news posts can now be tagged and filtered, and we fixed an enormous slew of bugs. And I know most people can't see the admin side of the site, but oh man, that is SO much better now. There were over a hundred tickets and a thousand code commits involved in this release. It sucks massively when bugs make it through to production, but even though we're always working to make our process better, it's never going to be flawless. I believe in constructive responses: you fix the problem, you do your best to fix the problems that led to the problem, and you keep going. As an example, we haven't had a formal structure in place for doing mobile testing, and due to circumstances which were as much my fault as anybody else's, the need to re-test the site on our phones before we deployed got lost in the shuffle. It's certainly not the fault of the testers for not doing something they weren't aware they needed to do, and it's easily addressed for the future. In this case, we were able to fix the bug within a day. We do our best, simultaneously, to communicate everything that's going on; sometimes it takes a day or two for a full post to appear because the people who would write it are hard at work fixing the bugs or answering support requests. There's not a huge team here. If you'd like to change that, come and volunteer.
Just to clear up a couple of misconceptions here: Naomi isn't the AD&T chair this year (and hasn't been since 2008), and thus she's not the manager of AO3-related coding projects. Amelia and I are the co-chairs, and we're the ones responsible for what goes on. Concerns about management of AD&T or coding or testing volunteers should be directed to us, to the volunteers committee, or to Kylie, our testing lead.
lim is a highly competent adult who has the right and ability to speak for herself and to make her own decisions. She volunteered to do the CSS overhaul, which is a project she'd undertaken twice before in the past. We don't ask anyone to do anything they don't have the time and energy for, and if we stopped people from working individually on big projects that interested them, nothing on the site would ever have gotten built.
I am incredibly grateful to Naomi and lim, the 10 other coders, and the dozens of testers who worked on our last release. There are some quality improvements in there: our CSS has been streamlined and reorganized, you can now write a site skin that doesn't include any of our CSS, you can add skins on top of one another, prompt meme listings are more readable, we have an enormous new tag set and challenge nominations feature (which has now had a successful first run with Yuletide noms!), news posts can now be tagged and filtered, and we fixed an enormous slew of bugs. And I know most people can't see the admin side of the site, but oh man, that is SO much better now. There were over a hundred tickets and a thousand code commits involved in this release. It sucks massively when bugs make it through to production, but even though we're always working to make our process better, it's never going to be flawless. I believe in constructive responses: you fix the problem, you do your best to fix the problems that led to the problem, and you keep going. As an example, we haven't had a formal structure in place for doing mobile testing, and due to circumstances which were as much my fault as anybody else's, the need to re-test the site on our phones before we deployed got lost in the shuffle. It's certainly not the fault of the testers for not doing something they weren't aware they needed to do, and it's easily addressed for the future. In this case, we were able to fix the bug within a day. We do our best, simultaneously, to communicate everything that's going on; sometimes it takes a day or two for a full post to appear because the people who would write it are hard at work fixing the bugs or answering support requests. There's not a huge team here. If you'd like to change that, come and volunteer.