Patchwork Development April/May 2018

supersedes Improved Moderation Features in Patchwork and Reapplying to continue work on sameAs / multi-feed identities April 2018 grant proposals

I've given it some thought, and I wish to replace my two grant proposals for this month with a single one.

Focusing on one task for a month is really not my style. In my last grant, I did get a lot achieved but ended up feeling rather guilty that a lot of what I achieved was not what I asked for money to do. I would like try doing something similar to what @andrestaltz and @cel did for mmmm and git-ssb dev.

I also feel that as Patchwork is highly used by the community, that ongoing development of it is very important and should NOT be something I just do in my spare time (which I have a lot less of this year).

What I want is for the community to trust me with the resources needed to be able to put a couple of months into working on a bunch of ideas I have for patchwork. These include:

• Better moderation features
• Improved feeds and filtering
• More work on sameAs (maybe release a working prototype?)
• Bug fixes
• More time to review other people's code and assisting with PRs
• "Gatherings" improvements
• Performance improvements
• integrating work done by @Dominic on ebt and ooo

I plan to stretch this out over two months. What gets done, gets done. This will be a lot like how I managed dev last year, but this is to make me feel good about dedicating this time and energy into the project rather than feeling bitter that all my work is being used by hundreds of people without compensation.

Hopefully this proposal makes the decision a lot easier! I certainly feel a lot better about this option.

Thanks @Piet

Great proposal @mmckegg :)
As a suggestion, you could mark some of those items as high priority and others as stretch goals.

I was pondering what to say about the other two proposals and then you go ahead and fix it for me

Strongly in favor of this proposal!

Emotions: confused and a little grumpy, and happy
Rational: I am glad that you're being clear on what you are energised by. I feel annoyed that you've dropped this change part way into the decision making week because for me personally it is a surprise and I'd already been doing thinking based on a different configuration. This is making more mental work for me as a participant and more work to try and fold in everyones feedback as the Adjudicator (perhaps). I can get over this but wanted you to know this felt jarring for me, and this isn't my preferred way to operate? I think it might be good to re-emphasise that the week before the 1st is about iterating and refactoring? I dunno, what do you think?

@mix

This is making more mental work for me as a participant and more work to try and fold in everyones feedback as the Adjudicator (perhaps). I can get over this but wanted you to know this felt jarring for me, and this isn't my preferred way to operate?

Yeah, I'm really sorry about that. That was my biggest concern. I was feeling kind of bad about my original submission for the last week, but I couldn't quite figure out why. Then I realised yesterday when I was out for a walk what I needed to do instead.

It was either this, or withdrawing my submission completely. Hopefully this simplified things in the end.

MOVING ON, here's my thought on this new proposal :

+1 what @andrestaltz said about prioritisations.

For example

• I feel excited about the sameAs thing getting to a working prototype that's deployed. I feel apprehensive that if it's one-of-many then it'll get a look but we won't get substantive progress / learning.
• I also feel like gatherings needs some love in a way that's useable across platforms. I'd love to help out with that for Free (I feel like our work on ssb-loomio has progressed my thinking and practice a lot and I'd love to have great gatherings everywhere). I personally would not value your energy building patchwork only gatherings features (not sure what your plan was / is though)

Mmm, it's this line I want to pay attention to.

...rather than feeling bitter that all my work is being used by hundreds of people without compensation.

What I write below is critical, and appreciative. I want you to be 100% clear @matt that I want your hard work to be rewarded and honoured. I want to step back and choose a path forward that does more than just get us more of the same (e.g. 2 months on, then more bitterness)

That preface done, here's a range of feeling vectors that came up for me reading that line:

• You're incredibly generous, your actions suggest you enjoy maintaining
• I don't think you want to be a maintainer for everyone as The Butt Client... but I don't see that changing and I don't see you acting to shift away (by either adding maintainers, or generalising tools so other clients can be aweseome)
• If there's bitterness around, I don't think just shoving money at it is a good long term solution
• I want your work to be seen and valued and appreciated
• Supporting you to change your mind a lot, or to loop over decisons, or to propose the option to create options and might not be support.
  • There are studies that show that the option to change your mind makes people measureably less happy with their choices. Have looked for the reference, but can't find it quickly
  • Perhaps I have some challenge around wanting specific things out of grants. I think my preference would actually be fo some and some - e.g. definitely sameAs to this point, then follow your heart.

Urggh, I feel unpleasant writing this. Perhaps I should just calm the crap down because you clearly do rad stuff. Perhaps I'm muddling other issues (like feeling empathetic pain listening to you critisize yourself incredibly harshly) with something that's not really related.

Care about you and would love to talk about this more.

p.s. "MOVING ON" was not a passive aggressive response to your reply "Yeah, I'm really sorry about that."

I was writing the above replies in 2 parts and you caught me mid flow !

Supporting you to change your mind a lot, or to loop over decisons, or to propose the option to create options and might not be support.

should read :

Supporting you to change your mind a lot/ loop over decisons/ propose the option to create options might not actually be a good way to support you - it could be anti-support.

@matt yay this proposal is great! i love reading the authentic you in this proposal, saying hey this is me, if you want to support me here's what i'm doing! and thanks for being vulnerable enough to break the process, i'm glad you were able to share honest messy communication rather than be dishonest to yourself while doing what others expect of you. so anyways, keen for you to follow your heart and deliver the Patchwork you want to see happen!

had a good talk with @matt about all the things at art hack. Couple of thing we came out with:

• would love to try and raise money for ongoing Patchwork support / maintenance
• the grants seem to prioritise discrete projects as opposed to the important work of taking in all the needs of a large project and tending that garden with small tweaks or larger well mulled over changes.

I'm all for supporting Matt, AND I want to commit some time and energy to this maintenance problem. Perhaps we can start by considering Patchwork then moving to more general case. But that's a different thread

I found @johnny's post above rather hurtful, and mostly because most of what he says above is true.

My initial reaction was anger. Maybe I should just block him, and then I'll never have to think about this shit again. But that didn't seem right, I don't want to add fuel to that fire.

So instead, I'm going to attempt to be completely honest.

I really enjoyed working on patchwork last year under the mantra of "make ssb work for me and my friends". It wasn't about being super slick, well tested or any of that. Just something that was nice to use. What changed was that thousands of people started to use it. And I have nothing against that, but once people started being given money to work on things that I see as a lot less important than client dev (which of course isn't necessarily true, but how I feel), I started to feel a bit left out. I tried to do the criteria for the first sameAs grant, but you know what, I FUCKING HATED IT.

So I suppose I could treat ssb-grant application like a job interview, where I have to sign my soul over to the needs of some abstract entity. But then I might as well just do that but for a real company.

Seriously, this is not fun. The proposal in this thread is as formal as I am happy to go with this process. If the community wants to fund that, I would be very happy. If not, I will be looking at other options:

• alternative funding
• forking patchwork out of ssbc, and doing it in my own space (invite only)
• giving up (or at least taking a very long break)

To address @johnny's suggestions for how real client development should be done.

[patchwork] should have died a long time ago, but because people use it for onboarding, it has outlived it's design; features added to "officially" supported clients need UX R&D so that they don't inadvertantly effect the next three years of onboardind, sharing, community building, w/e people should be using ssb to accomplish in their life

Sure, somebodyshould probably do that. Not me though. Sounds boring as hell. Grants aren't gonna get you that. You need a well resourced team, working full-time, otherwise folks are just gonna burn out.

I would love to see more people step up and make clients, but you know what, IT'S REALLY HARD. It takes up tonnes of time. Patchwork may be a steaming mess, but it works, and exists. ARGEDGE

</RANT>

Obviously this post was written in the heat moment, so apologies that it makes very little logical sense. But I'm sick keeping this shit bottled up, so here it is. I love ssb, and (mostly) everyone here! I want to discuss this in the most productive way possible, but I am getting a little bit pissed off. Money changes things.

Thanks for that @matt, really good to read that.
A piece that reflects for me here is that I've been citiquing Matt for getting caught up maintaining "the main client" but I've barely helped where I could of. Specifically I've only made one installer for Patchbay, even though there have been a bunch of updates since, and I haven't added any way to use invite codes in the interface - because I assume Patchbay is a second-stop!

I'd really love to be part of a push to make, maintain, and advertise installers for all major clients. People should have fun and realise that client are like different linux distros...

I agree about the need for design, onboarding, and long term thinking. Who wants to do some of it instead of talking about it? Doing it probably involves getting some financial stability and starting to lead out on it as a hobby project to help people understand the terrain.

@matt I really appreciate what you wrote in response to @johnny. I never really knew for sure how you felt about ssb, so it was great to read you spell it out. I can totally relate to how stressful it is to maintain patchwork - I started to feel like that when I was maintaining patchbay, and only a handful of people were using it!

I think you are acting in good faith by changing your proposal. patchwork is essential to ssb. And remember, one of the goals in grants process is no one burning out. Maybe we should divert some (say, half) of the remaining grant funds to be maintainance funds? I would especially be in favor of the idea of having other people help, so that knowledge of patchwork internals is shared.

also what @matt wrote here:

I was feeling kind of bad about my original submission for the last week, but I couldn't quite figure out why. Then I realised yesterday when I was out for a walk what I needed to do instead.

matt is being real. My questions now, are what does @matt think is the situation he works best in, and how might that overlap with what ssb needs? if there was a process to best facillitate (patchwork) maintainance, would @matt want to lead that?

I am loving this conversation. I love working with excellent humans

@johnny

I don't think my words hurt, I think that the realizations you might have from my precise use of them causes things to happen that I don't control

If you end up losing all your scuttlebutt friends because they block you, then that might become your problem.

I suggest in future communication you could consider what emotional reactions your comments might receive. Humans are very emotional creatures, and if you get on someones bad side, there might be no coming back.

You are right about many things, but that won't help if no one is listening.

Software is hard - you could walk into any room of developers and scream "this software sucks". We already know that. we are working on it and we don't need someone to angrily tell us that. That is the easiest thing in the world to do, writing software that works reasonably well is much harder than that.

@Dominic

My questions now, are what does @matt think is the situation he works best in, and how might that overlap with what ssb needs? if there was a process to best facillitate (patchwork) maintainance, would @matt want to lead that?

I work best when I have short tasks with fairly immediate results (or can at least see an end in sight). I am most motivated by things "as-they-come-up" and trying to deal with them sooner rather than later. If things sit for too long, I tend to stop caring enough to deal with them.

My favorite way to work on Patchwork is watching out for things that suck, and then just fixing them on the spot.

Lately, I have been trying to apply this to incoming pull requests too. But rather than just pulling them in and doing the work to merge them, I've been trying to help others to do this by giving suggestions on the PR reviews. Hopefully this is helping other people to start understanding more about what needs to be done in Patchwork to maintain my desired level of "quality".

I am happy to continue doing that and hopefully start writing more of the contribution guide as issues come up. Hopefully this will allow me to over time hand off more responsibility.

But at the moment, I would very like to receive a small passive income as an acknowledgement of my contributions to the scuttleverse. I don't see this so much as changing what I am already doing, but it will at least cover me to be able to be more flexible in my work life and therefore have more time available to patchwork tinkering, maintenance and management (and more likely to be able to accept the immediacy of a problem that comes up and deal with it right then).

I guess based on that, I would be happy to accept the official title of patchwork maintainer for say, 1 year. After this, who knows. We'll see in a year

As far as an amount I would be interested in, I think that the equivalent of around 3 ssbc-grants stretched out over the year would do it!

cc @mix

This @johnny this apology is too little too late, for me. A few months ago this might have cut it.

I'm dangerous and you should stay away from me; i'm actually a lunatic and a cazy person

The definition of most mental illnesses includes something like "and the condition negatively affects their life or their relationships". I'm not really sure about the idea of "mental illness" but, this is as close as you've come to actually admitting your behaviour is a problem and your own advice is for us to stay away from you.

@Matt McKegg Patchwork is my favourite piece of software right now. I think it is beautiful and I'm totally satisfied with it for my everyday usage.

And I hope everyone has taken their anti-troll shots.