I jumped on board for helping with development during the pandemic, but unfortunately my personal life exploded and I got real sick about it for a few years. I’m back now, and I’m wondering who to talk to. It looks like things got kind of unwieldy last year.
Look, the do-ocracy is most accessible IMO. We can teach each other and learn from each other by doing. I’ll make a pull request, I’ll get feedback from developers at all levels, and at the end it’s either accepted or rejected. If my efforts stagnate, others can clone my in-progress work and flesh it out, and my name still appears in the contribution history (if people take care to use git correctly).
I care deeply about accessibility in tech, both the commercial industry and the practice. I’m one of the marginalized. I’m disabled and can’t work full-time. I am a very competent dev but I don’t have the educational or class background, and the US South is a socioeconomic war zone. I lost 3 people last year. I have gotten stolen from when I tried to freelance. I could get better work based on the portfolio of contributions to SC I am building, but I wouldn’t want it! It’s all for-profit medical, petro, and war! My entire culture is rotten!
We work in a hostile environment. It’s a ton of work to build bridges to each other and focus on value and creativity, and you’re gonna watch some of what you build get destroyed so cheaply… I’m not into religion, myself, but I get it. There’s no absolute solution. We have to do our best and let forces more powerful than us sort out the rest.
But at the end of the day, for me all this extra rhetoric is just an additional accessibility barrier. Talk is cheap. Let’s go back to Github and tear into it. And if people need money to stabilize their lives so they can contribute, give it to them. If people dislike/have enough money and want to trade on value alone, that’s fine too. My late sister used to say “get in where you fit in”. We have a lot to learn from each other and a lot to build together. Don’t be shy, let’s get back to it. The war pigs don’t have to come after us with guns if they got us with drugs and drama. Avoid fear, shame, and dogma. Let us creatives create.