Dreamwidth Q&A Session

[denise]

I realized this morning that it has been quite some time, so I figured it would be a good time for another Dreamwidth Q&A session!

Got a question on how the business end of DW works? Curious about the progress on a particular feature? (Although I can probably answer that for you by saying: we're working on paying down our technical debt so that we can move forward on a lot of the planned features; it got to the point where we couldn't progress further without making some aggressive modernization of the existing codebase.) Wondering what an average day in the life of a DW employee is? Got that one question that you've been vaguely wondering about for ages, but never felt like it was "important" enough to make a support request to get the answer on? Want to know if it really is that cool being able to work from home without wearing any pants? (Answer: yes, especially when it's 85 degrees F in my office and the air conditioners won't be delivered and installed for at least another day or two.)

Comment here, and we will answer!

(Just a reminder: you may receive comments or replies from people who know the answer to your question, but aren't officially DW staff. If the person who answers you doesn't have the official "staff" userhead -- -- they are not DW staff. They may be correct -- if they aren't, I will be sure to answer and clear up any misconceptions -- but they are not speaking ex cathedra Dreamwidth, so to speak!)

No question too big, no question too small. There's also previous Q&A sessions and the Business FAQs to browse through!

(Answers may be a bit slow depending on computer woes and additional stuff going on, but we will answer!)

Comments

[desh]

How much interaction do y'all have with the open source world at large? I know you've gone to occasional conferences, but I mean digitally. In fact, I'm not 100% sure I know what I mean. Is there a CPAN for application-level stuff rather than library-level stuff, and if so, do random non-DW people pitch in on DW code periodically? Do many DW coders pitch into CPAN projects? If so, do they do it specifically for DW, or just for fun?

[denise]

We don't have a whole lot of interaction with the wider open source world -- not because we don't want to, but because our cultures are just so drastically different! We do contribute major security fix patches to LJ (and of course all of our stuff is available for them to take into their tree, although they don't do a lot of it), and I know fu has been doing some work on Mercurial, since we use Mercurial as our source management software. I've been thinking of coding a little for Bugzilla, since there are some things about it that annoy me, too.

On the whole, if we find a bug in one of the modules/etc we use, of course we'd send patches upstream! But -- speaking only for myself here -- I find the prevailing culture in a lot of OSS projects to be utterly toxic, and not at all the way I'd like to spend my time. I can't speak for everyone, but I think I'm not the only one.

I know we've had a bunch of people from the wider FLOSS world hear about us and decide to come hack with us! We do our best to make it fun.

[azurelunatic]

I've been trying to do a little outreach here and there, because it looks like DW has invested a good deal of time and energy into making a workable social environment that welcomes diversity, vs. the stereotypical OSS project culture that attempts to celebrate its developers' merits but winds up deciding that the really hostile and obnoxious person with the excellent coding skills is too precious to risk offending by asking them to change or reprimanding them, at the cost of the potential contributions of all the people they pissed off.

The exact hour of change in that stereotypical OSS culture may not quite be at hand, but it's coming ever closer, and I think while Dreamwidth is by no means perfect, there are still a lot of things that it has to offer in terms of culture management as well as development.

I know there's a certain amount of crossover between the Geek Feminism crowd and Dreamwidth people, too.

[exor674]

There really isn't any CPAN module/whatever for Dreamwidth, and I don't think any of *our* library-level stuff that we have created is really extractable into CPAN.

For DW-related stuff, I have personally contributed a patch to http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/Unicode-CheckUTF8-1.03/ ( but I am not sure what, if anything outside LJ/DW uses that module ) after working around the bug on DW itself.

And for non-DW-related stuff, I've contributed one patch to http://clang.llvm.org/ -- I want to do more, but I have not had the free time to learn the codebase enough to do much of anything.

eta: oh, and in sorta-DW-related I have also contributed a few patches to a tool that zorkian has been working on that I have been using to help with development/performance improvement.