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

[silveradept]

How many entry points are there for the volunteer sphere for Dreamwidth?

F'rex, while we hear regular updates about the code backend (and many thanks for the posting on technical debt and the need to get one's house in order before moving forward with further additions), for someone who doesn't code (and has it ever been explicitly mentioned what kind of coding one would need to help there?), that's not an avenue with which to volunteer.

For someone who, say, works a full-time job and may have additional time commitments on top of that, like family, is there a way that person can volunteer or contribute their limited amount of time to the project doing things that have significance?

I know there's a vibrant community of stylists, coders, testers, and others, but when volunteering projects come up in things like regular newsletters, it always seems like an appeal to someone who has both coding skills and time on their hands. I'm sure there are other avenues, but I don't know if I've seen them promoted all that much.

This may not need an official-DW-hat response, unless there's someone with an official-DW-hat that handles such things, but it would be nice to know if/where something is that says, "If you have just an hour to spare, you can volunteer like this. If you have a day to spare, this will take you about a day's worth of time, etc, etc."

I suspect there's an untapped volume of volunteers out there saying "I'd love to, but I just don't have X." How can they be brought into the fold?

[jumpuphigh]

There are a ton of things that can be done. Head on over to dw_volunteers, say, "I'm interested in volunteering" and I guarantee a response. :D

I do support and that is something that can be done sporadically by anyone. Anybody can answer a question and have it approved. Here's the link for the queue: http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/help

[silveradept]

Thanks. I've been looking around there to see what usually shows up, and it looks like I might have to dig in to the entires more to get a complete handle of things.

[matgb]

Now that some life stuff that's been causing me a headache for the last 8 months or so appears over with, I need to start working on Documentation properly.

Basically, if there's a bit of the FAQs or site copy that makes no sense, could be clearer or simply doesn't exist, we need to update it.

It takes no coding skills to rewrite a set of instructions--if that sort of thing interests you, sub to dw_docs and within the next few weeks I should be able to get something started. Denise has been doing some last 6 months or so, but it's really something I need to get my head around, I keep looking at how big a job it is and saying "no time for that now", but all the time sinks are gone so I need a new set of excuses ;-)

[silveradept]

Documentation - the bane and lifeblood of every project! Thanks for letting us know about it.

[rho]

Totally non-official answer here, but I used to be volunteer in charge of all things documentation, so I like to think I have at least a vague idea what I'm talking about. (And for the record, the reason I'm not any more is down to personal reasons and not anything that DW did.)

One of the big problems here is that managing volunteers is a lot of work, certainly more than I expected it to be, and I expected it to be a lot. This isn't to say that it isn't worthwhile, because it definitely is. A well defined route into any potential volunteer avenue with training and clear progression would be a marvellous thing, but it's also no easy feat to bring about.

If you've read denise's posts about technical debt, then some of what she has said in them also apply to other areas of volunteering. Just from within the realms of documentation, which is what I'm familiar with, I can give a few examples.

The vast majority of text on the DW site (excluding entries and comments) is not actually hard-coded as text. Rather, in the site's code, it essentially says "put the text with this code here" and then there's somewhere else where there's a list of the various codes and the text that goes with them.

In theory, this means that it's possible to change the site text without having to change the code, but in practice, the system is a Byzantine monstrosity. It's confusing, over-complex, unreliable, and generally only barely fit for purpose. I don't think that anyone who's interacted with it would argue against the idea of ripping it out (with extreme prejudice) and rewriting it from scratch.

The problem is that this is a big task that would require that a set of specifications for a new version be drawn up, then for someone to actually code them, then for fairly extensive testing to be done, then to figure out how to switch the live site over to the new version without any interruption. I'm sure that this is something that could be accomplished if people really put their heads together on it, but it would likely require a bunch of people working on nothing else for several weeks, which isn't realistic at this point. Basically, it's a classic case of technical debt.

What that means is that we're left with this ghastly system to work with, which makes bringing in volunteers much more difficult. In your hypothetical case of someone who had an hour to spare, if they'd come to me when I was running documentation and said they wanted to work on improving site text and wanted to know what they could do, my answer would have been a regretful "nothing".

It would take at least an hour to properly explain how the system worked. And even then there'd be other problems. For instance, there's no good screening process within the system. There's a single privilege that can be granted which gives people access to the system, which lets them change site text however they want. Ideally, we'd be able to have a system where volunteers could submit things as "I think this ought to be changed" and then an admin, employee, or senior volunteer could come along and approve the change if it was appropriate.

But with the system we have, we need to be sure that the person in question is both trustworthy (so they don't change all site text to vulgarities, libel or rude pictures) and competent (so they don't add in misspellings, for instance). This is also a time consuming process, which makes it much harder to bring in new volunteers than I would have liked when I was in charge and than I'm sure denise would like now.

This is absolutely not to say that these time investments aren't worth it. They repay themselves many times over once you get a whole lot of extra volunteers putting their time into things. They just aren't always possible, mainly because the scope of technical debt expands far wider than you might expect.

[silveradept]

...wow. Technical debt really does extend to places you never would have thought. I'm guessing this was an offshoot of "Well, I'm the only person who ever really needs to know how this is done, so..." in the original coding sequences.

That rewrite project sounds like it would be a really good one to work on...at some point. Maybe with a crack team of experts, we can lick it, or at least get better design specs in place for that time when the code monkeys can do it.

[denise]

More like an offshoot of Brad doing a quick and dirty hack (and Brad's UI design was not the best in the world) and thinking "that'll be good enough", then getting little bits of added functionality glued on over the years. It's ... special.

(Most of the admin stuff is special, but the translation system is totally horrid.)

[pauamma]

Please pick up line 3, there's an attorney for the Perfectly Horrid Things Anti-Defamation League who'd like to talk to you.

[denise]

Basically, it all depends on what you're into -- what skills you have, what you enjoy doing, etc, etc. There's always a need for people to pick up and run with big tasks, but there are a few little things that you can do:

* If you're good with colors and color combinations, we always are looking for more themes for existing styles. Check out dreamscapes for submitting color themes.

* If you want to rewrite FAQs, as rho said, that's a bit more of an issue than it looks like, but we're always happy to have drafts of changes -- for instance, if you notice a FAQ we're missing, and want to write it and toss it at us for our FAQ team to put up, that's always welcome. Just post your proposed FAQ, etc, to dw_docs.

* If you're the type of person who enjoys mindless repetitive clicking, dw_antispam often needs new spamwhackers! Keep an eye out there for calls-for-volunteers.

* In general, there are occasional one-off projects that need doing -- keep an eye on dw_volunteers. (We're all trying to be better at posting about the little tasks that need doing.)