Personally, I’d love this system (I immediately thought of some code snippets I’d bring!), but I’m curious how you’d handle candidates without any open source projects or contributions who still have a substantial employment history but are unable to show any code from that because it’s all proprietary.

My biggest (mostly) irrational internet pet peeve is the proliferation of people suggesting “:wq” when “:x” is strictly better.

This is exactly right. However, something that I’ve found frustrating is that in many projects (at least the ones that I’m interested in), it feels like there’s a secret roadmap that’s not documented anywhere outside of the maintainer’s head(s). You can scour the wiki, watch the IRC channel and mailing lists, and read through the issue discussions, and you still won’t have a good sense of what they want done next or if the change you want to make is incompatible with some big planned rewrite. I know the answer is to just ask—and I’ve done that more and more recently—but that can be a big hurdle if you’re just getting started.

I’m trying to build a community for a project right now, and this is something I’m very aware of. I’m trying to report on what I’m working on and planning in the project chat so that if someone else comes along, hopefully they’ll (a) understand the current status and (b) feel comfortable asking about the overall vision.

That’s why git log --oneline exists ;)

My commits tend to be pretty verbose. Here’s an example log from one of my projects.

I follow the standard imperative style for the commit title, and then I use the body to summarize any important internal changes, reflect on the overall project status (for example, what milestones this commit crosses or what other work it might enable or require), and state what I’m going to work on next. I’m sure some people find it too wordy, but I like having the commit history show lots of details about the overall status.

Edit: I always have a descriptive summary, i.e., never one word commits or similar.

Nim is one of my favorite languages, and has been one of my primary languages in rotation for projects for the last five or so years. I’ve written servers (and web frontends, CLI tools, quick scripts, etc.) with it and am very happy with the results.

It’s hard for me to put into words why I like it so much, but I think it might actually be because it’s such a mishmash of paradigms. If I’m in a functional mood, I can use lots of ideas from functional programming. If I feel like using OOP everywhere, I can do that too. And if I want to mix both together, it’s no problem! Nim kind of feels like the Wild West, and while that’s something I’d dislike in most languages, for whatever reason it works when writing in Nim.

As already mentioned, you’re probably looking for Obtanium. There’s also APKUpdater, which hasn’t seen updates in two years but has a 3.0 branch ready for testing. (I haven’t personally used it.)

For Liftoff specifically, I’ll add that it’s available in the IzzyOnDroid repository for F-Droid, which is useful if you’re already using F-Droid for anything else.

I have a pretty unique perspective on this as someone who’s worked in churches my entire adult life. Probably the hardest interview question I’ve ever been asked–across both technical and non-technical interviews–was when I was interviewing to be the organist at a large UMC church in early 2019, right before the General Conference vote that set all of this off. They basically summarized the situation to me and then asked if I was comfortable coming into the position not knowing which way the vote would go. In many ways, this question felt like asking if I had principles and if I was willing to stick to them. As a progressive person, I had to really think about if I’d be ok being in a place where I wouldn’t be allowed to play for a same-sex wedding.

That church’s senior pastor was one of the leading figures in the movement to affirm LGBTQ members. We quietly performed at least one same-sex marriage while I was there, which was technically in defiance of the denomination’s restrictions. Since then, I’ve moved to one of the most prominent progressive mainline Protestant megachurches in the US. We’ve had long standing partnerships with many LGTBQ organizations, and we do lots of tangible things for all sorts of underrepresented communities. We had a visiting trans pastor speak about a month ago, and they received an instant ovation from the congregation.

My point in all of this is that it frustrates me to see comment sections like much of this one where people insist that every church is a highly regressive place. As someone who’s in the closed door meetings, I promise you that there are many that are not, and it’s not just all a ploy to try to stay relevant in today’s society. Some places really do support these causes because they believe in them.

(As a footnote, I’ll say that I don’t like to talk about my religious views online, as it might put me in a weird position with my current and potential future employers. An acquaintance of mine wrote a great blog post that sums up my feelings well.)

This is interesting—I hadn’t heard of vis or Sam. Thanks for sharing!

I will say that I like to think of myself as a reasonably advanced Vim user, and the substitution commands used for the example wouldn’t have even occurred to me for changes 1 and 2. I would have automatically done it the alternative ways listed. I’m pretty sure those would be faster to type too (they’re fewer keystrokes). Is it really true for most people that “the substitute command is used 90% of the time when using commands”?

Thanks! I did consider Matrix as well, and in fact just set up a personal server yesterday. I was worried about it being too high of a barrier to entry (the reason I stayed away from my first instinct, IRC…). At least Zulip is intuitively just a chat app, even though it might turn people away who don’t want to register for yet another account. One option could be to add Matrix and IRC bridges for Zulip, in the hopes of keeping everyone happy?

I’m still not sure what the best way forward is. It’s a tricky balance between promoting FOSS and remaining widely familiar.

This is aptly timed for me—I spent some time this weekend trying to decide what chat service to use for a project of mine. I’m just starting to try building the community, so it feels like I should have a chat ready if/when people start showing up.

I didn’t consider Discord because I wanted to stick with free software, for the reasons outlined in this post and other similar ones. In the end, I settled on Zulip, but would be happy to reconsider (so far, the chat is just me talking to myself!) if anyone wants to suggest an alternative or has experience in a similar situation.