art3mis pmZola2022-06-23T00:00:00+00:00https://art3mis.pm/atom.xmlon writing blog posts, learning things from the internet, rejection letters and taking care of your users, and twitter as a source2022-06-23T00:00:00+00:002022-06-23T00:00:00+00:00https://art3mis.pm/posts/on-writing-blog-posts/<h3 id="playing-on-art3mis-fm-uncantena-by-sylvan-esso">playing on art3mis.fm - <a rel="noopener" target="_blank" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYpe5CzVcho">uncantena by sylvan esso</a></h3>
<h2 id="on-writing-blog-posts-yes-i-m-feeling-pleonasm-y">on writing blog posts (yes, i’m feeling pleonasm-y)</h2>
<p>i’ve been encountering plenty of tech-person blogs recently, including
random y2k-themed neocities blogs while surfing the hotline webring,
genuinely well-written blog posts by local internet heroes, and
figbert.com. i have a lot of blog-type writings for myself in the notes
app, and seeing these posts got me excited about writing something to
put out there for the internet to see. if i’m trying to think about
what would interest the hacker-news-type crowd about something i would
write, i think it would have to be that i’m completely clueless (more
on that in a second), so they can all clown on me and hate on me a
little bit. that’s okay, it’ll be entertaining. </p>
<h2 id="on-learning-things-from-the-internet">on learning things from the internet</h2>
<p>I DON’T GET IT. honestly, please help me. it feels like everyone in the
internet tech crowd just KNOWS and i don’t get it. compositor?
encryption vs encoding?? static sites???</p>
<p>breathe in, breathe out. whew. </p>
<p>when am i going to get to the point where i just know what things mean
and how python works and how to use git without searching something up
every ten seconds? seriously, someone tell me. </p>
<p>i don’t get the whole thing of teaching yourself via the internet. i
know there’s amazing geniuses out there who are fluent in tech-speak
and know everything in the whole world just by googling things and
collecting knowledge, but that just doesn’t work for me yet. i can’t
remember things long enough for them to stick with me, and there’s
simply too much to cover. As someone who hasn’t had much experience on
the internet (former sheltered asian kid with internet restrictions,
thanks mom) who’s been thrown into the world of software design,
learning all these things from the internet is overrated- give me a
really good tech dictionary and maybe i’ll start to get a handle on
things. </p>
<h2 id="on-rejection-letters-and-taking-care-of-your-users">on rejection letters, and taking care of your users</h2>
<p>a few months ago, i reached out to a certain company about working with
them, and was rejected. don’t get me wrong, they were really very
frickin nice about it- they looked at my site, invited me to their
slack (christian, if you’re seeing this, stop reading)- but they said
they couldn’t offer me a position. usually, this wouldn’t be good news,
but when i saw the email halfway through my math class i couldn’t stop
smiling because i was so excited to see the name of one of the leaders
of a project i’m a huge fan of in my inbox. </p>
<p>i think we have this idea of a barrier between the developers, and us
as the users. this is a clear consequence of corporate user
interaction- when you get used to receiving automated, politely-written
responses to issues or just general emails, you start to think of
software as a “what” and not a “who”. there’s no sense of the people
behind the project, and the user becomes someone who has the privilege
to receive the results of some closed-source project, rather than a
collaborator in an open-source project. receiving that email shocked me
and excited me so much because there was a real human behind the
project, who cared enough to get me involved in their community, talk
to me like a real human being, and give me the space to interact with
their project. when we released <a rel="noopener" target="_blank" href="https://github.com/smmr-software/mabel">mabel</a> a few days ago, they
helped promote us and congratulated our work. </p>
<p>now that mabel is out and circulating among users, i’ve sort of begun
to realize how important it is to communicate with your users on an
equal level. talk to them like a real human being. respond to their
issues on github, even if they work it out themselves, so they feel
seen. encourage them to contribute to your projects. that’s how you end
up with a real community, and users that stick. </p>
<h2 id="on-twitter-as-a-source">on twitter as a source</h2>
<p>these past few days, i’ve been reading
<a rel="noopener" target="_blank" href="https://adamsmith.as/papers/wfc_is_constraint_solving_in_the_wild.pdf">isaac karth and adam m. smith’s paper</a> on WFC constrain solving,
and it’s really interesting, and i definitely understand all the words
in it! but what really stood out to me was the fact that almost half of
the sources in the paper are just tweets or personal correspondence.
school really makes you think that you can only use scholarly articles
and reference sources, and here’s an amazing paper coming out of a
reputable university citing tweets. maybe it’s just a symptom of video
game devs hinting at work on their projects on twitter, but i still
think that’s really cool. twitter is kind of a modern primary source,
in a way. there’s nothing more accurate to a developer’s project then
their own personal statement, i guess. </p>
<p>anyways, that’s my first blog post. <a href="mailto:moon@art3mis.pm">let me know what you think!</a></p>
<p><3 art3mis</p>