pachunka

When I was 30 (and a half! ) I wrote journal for DA that I never published.

Half its purpose was to showcase an experimental new design for journals - it needed more work, and the the prototype was never finished - and the journal never-published.

Today my deviantART/DeviantArt account enters its third decade of being online, and it seems like a nice day to finally let it run amok. :j

Here it is:

https://goji.link/creativity/

&

The World Wide Web turned 30 today! Still my favourite ongoing human project.

Also, pretty cool when you consider DA is 20.

I'm actually on Saturn rightnow, so I'd better post this before I lose signal for a day or so..

:peace:

Hello darkness, my old friend~

It's been a while since I've used my journal as an actual-journal.

I like making programs/software/shmeeder-deeders. It's difficult and a lot of fun. It's also almost-impossible to get software right if your target audience is another human being. For instance:

A few years ago, I was looking up for some information on StackOverflow (it's the programming-help-community that FINALLY dethroned ExpertsExchange), and somebody had said something clever in a comment. I visited their profile, and it boldly declared that this person had "0 contributions" - because the site only counted 'full' answers-or-whatever as 'contributions.' I class it as a total empathy failure - and the fact that this software-making-community was inevitably going to be setting an example for the rest of the web made me feel like empathy-in-software just wasn't gonna get any better any time soon.

New versions of old things are the hardest. Usually somebody takes their eye off something. A lot of old games are getting modernised, and loading times go up - so somebody designs a loading graphic - that graphic automatically shows up whenever loading might take more than a half-second - BUT in the old game, the timing of blacked-out-screens/transitions/level-introductions were all designed AS loading-distractions so that the player never NOTICED loading. But now, a lot of otherwise-cinematic moments are interrupted by flashing loading graphics in the corner - or little audio-hiccups - or awkwardly timed achievement notices - SMALL things that not-enough-people think are important enough to work on fixing.

In software, programs are mostly slower than in the past - a long-slow splash screen is almost a positive-mark of "pro" software because it's doing "so much" that it takes it a long time to start. Web pages rely on libraries that rely on OTHER libraries, all of which are sent over the wire BEFORE you can even find out what website you've just visited. Web pages take time to "settle" - you click the searchbox, but if you did it too soon, you mightn't be typing in the "real" one - the page is gonna shift and jump under your fingers. At DA we did a LOT of work to make sure that stuff like that didn't happen, but unless every site does that, then the result is that you kinda-know-all-the-time that the web is a bit of a "slow creature."

"Migrations" (as they're called in software) are hard - it's where you move a bunch of data from one thing to a new thing that isn't gonna be quite the same. One thing that didn't make it through the Eclipse profile migration was the Pride widget. Same for the Bolt Award. These are RARE items, and it makes sense that they wouldn't get the full-concentration of those conducting the migration; moving all that stuff is hard enough as it is - and those examples can be recreated by the individual profile-owner manually using custom-thingadoos. That's how things end up going.

I see stuff like this every day in all walks of software, and people-everywhere slowly build up this expectation that things aren't going to work quite like they excpect, and so they naturally grow to distrust the marketing that accompanies it. People aren't oblivious to small stuff not being right - people notice, and they quietly change their behaviour and expectations to adapt.

..which is a real ronkadoo because, as discussed, this stuff is hard to get right, and most processes that help drive the work forward, also drive it past the small details.

I suppose if I have a point, it's that if you make software, and your instinct is that something small isn't-quite-right in what you're making, it's worth improving it - people WILL appreciate it, even if they don't say anything - and nobody "higher up" is gonna ask for it, because decisions take processing time, and that's in short supply. Quite literally, only you decide.

Also, yanno: Hi watchers. Howya keepin'?