Hi gang,

I saw a couple of friends coping in a DIY way with a possible bug today (tough to say at this point), and it prompted some thoughts about how little attention I've given the platform in a long time. My last push to the server was... cough... two and a half years ago.

In a way this is not such a bad thing. Hey, it works!

But there's a lot that could be improved, and long-running bugs that haven't received attention (notifications for your own replies, anyone?), and believe it or not I'm still interested in the question of whether I did everything I could to make it easy for folks to onboard and, yes, grow the site.

But of course there's very little time.

Meanwhile... recently in another context I was facing pleas to do more in a space that's outside of my more essential responsibilities from day to day. I am very well supported at work. But as in any workplace there are gotta-haves, wanna-haves and really-oughta-haves and it can be tough to juggle them.

So I struggled to organize this really-ought-have stuff as a Project. But a Project implies a Budget and Time and there is no budget or pre-scheduled time for that particular thing right now (darn those pesky gotta-haves). That meant everything I was writing felt like a recipe for stress.

I felt stuck, and anxious.

Then I noticed a kanban board feature in our internal wiki and deliberately created an itty-bitty kanban board to track progress in that particular arena.

When I was asked if I wanted to turn it into a Project instead... I said "nope!" Because the medium is the message. Project = Milestones. Schedule. Release Dates. Time Pressure. All of which are appropriate when resources are available, and needlessly stressful when they are not.

But a kanban board says "hey... this is the art of the possible! Nibble at it. Bash at it. Occasionally really go at it. You'll get there."

My kanban board at work turned out very well and I'm still using it to nibble away at the oughta-have thing I can only work on occasionally.

So in the same spirit, I plan to set up a kanban board for One Post Wonder.

And today, in that kanban spirit, I did three itty bitty things to move the ball forward:

1. The "submit a bug" button just sends me a damn email. It used to post an issue to my github project, which was too clever by half. I didn't get any notifications, I didn't pay attention and you probably felt neglected. I'm sorry about that. This should be better.

2. I fixed an issue that caused gmail to reject some emails from One Post Wonder. There are services you can pay to deliver your emails reliably. Cost aside, I feel it's important that we try to maintain independence in this area. Even though it's a pain in the ass and an ever-moving target.

3. I changed the welcome message you see when you sign up from "each day, post a carefully curated sonnet concerning the state of world affairs or you will be punished with lasers" (*) to this:

"It doesn't matter if it's a cat picture, a duck joke or a column worthy of Alexandra Petri."

I think this is way more welcoming, and I hope it will encourage people to feel like it's OK to just chill here. Lord knows I do. Shitpost away, everyone. You just can't do it more than once a day.

(*) It didn't really say that. It was far more well-intentioned but still kinda intimidating.

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8/28 '21 12 Comments
I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record.
I don’t feel tardy.
Tom, I'm very grateful for all the work and thought you've put in to creating friendly online spaces over the years. You have such a knack for it, and you do us all a great kindness. Thank you.

Perhaps you could share some of the "work" of it with some of us who code, if you and they are willing? Maybe you've all known each other long enough that it's time to grow into more of a cooperative model? I daresay you needn't shoulder this alone.
I should mention that Sean coded quite a bit for a while in addition to doing a beautiful job on the design. I am only now finally thinking a refresh might be in order. It still looks great.
Tom did canvas for contributors and, mea culpa, I signed up and then kinda got bogged down in even trying to get my development environment off the ground - OPW uses a few things I'm not au fait with and had to read up on. As a result I've had the code sitting on my laptop for several <embarrassed small print>years</embarrassed small print> without me doing any more than poking ineffectually at it.
No big, man. I could see that readability was an issue with that old school callback library, and I started a conversion to async/await style which is much more readable and maintainable, but did not finish. I should try that again in a more incremental way.
I am thinking about moving it to Amazon Lambda and such, which would be good for scalability and good for my skill set.
Ah, Amazon Lambda, or as they called it in the old days, "buying CPU time on the mainframe."
Heh. It’s just that I keep solving things with old school scripting on servers I fail to treat as cattle. Need a shakeup.
tsk, don't diss my employer's cunning dressing up of old tech as new. Now, can I interest you in a punchcard?
I WRITED SOME CODE. I HOPE YOU LIKE IT.

LOVE
WAIDER
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/109276/kanban-drivers-edition is a game about optimizing your automotive assembly line, and I'd heard about it but never bothered learning what "kanban" meant.