Periodic "let's move off Slack" thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27149123 I wonder if it's worth redoing the Zulip survey from https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/046

Yes, I am watching how things develop, w.r.t. one of our ongoing podcast sponsors. I'd like to wait and see how they handle this before making any decisions. If you have thoughts feel free to DM me or post a reply to this message, and I'll get back to you (within a day or two).

I think funding announcements like https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5U3SEW6A/p1627463596030700?thread_ts=1627463596.030700&cid=C5U3SEW6A don't belong in #linking-together. Thoughts?

Here's a big one. Apologies in advance to everyone for the unbidden rabbit hole. I think we need to rename the community. Future of Coding doesn't aptly reflect what this community values, or the sort of work we do together. • We spend more time studying the past than we do dreaming about the future. • We don't care much about code — very narrow. We care more about computation, broadly, but also so much beyond that: art and culture, social dynamics, systems and power, physics, aesthetics, time, games, and more — and how all of those things relate to the computer (though even that is too narrow). What we care about is very hard to pin down, because it's made of up of many parts that themselves aren't pinned down. • The name (deliberately, I believe) alludes to Bret Victor's talk The Future of Programming. Like much of Bret's work, this talk is a quietly scathing critique of the dominant culture of programming. I think that that aspect of Bret's work really resonates with folks here. But the name Future of Coding doesn't capture the fact that Bret was being sardonic. I see lots of people taking the name too literally. • Speaking of taking the name literally, it's really pretentious. There's a real problem with self-importance in startup culture, and with a name like "Future of Coding" we sound like a bunch of growth hackers. That ain't us. This is the sort of topic where we'll probably never all agree on a single thing. Ultimately it'll have to come down to a vote, or someone will just have to pick something. It's like the "let's move the community off Slack" (which I'm still very interested in doing), which was.. a lot of work, and not fun, but important, even if we haven't actually made that move yet. I'm interested in keeping this community alive and active for a long time, so I think it's worth challenging ourselves to keep making the community itself better and truer to its own values. In particular, I'd like to use this as an opportunity to challenge any sense that this is a community primarily for white startup dudes. We have that reputation, and it's going to take effort to shake it. This is an opportunity to make that effort. I'm opening up this discussion very broadly at first. Please share your reflections on why the current name is bad (or, hell, good). If you have ideas for a better name, that'd be fun too. If you have meta-meta level thoughts about whether renaming things is a good idea, that's welcome also. This is going to be a messy process, and that's fine.

Is there a channel I can post a potentially interesting job offer from the Wikimedia Foundation?

Hey all! I couldn’t find the answer in the docs, so What is the process to create channels? I would like to have two new channels #of-explicit-state and #of-markup-languages . Are the names any good and understandable and in line with FoC naming tradition? The purpose I have in mind is to have a place for detailed and concrete discussions on the mentioned topics e.g. among those especially interested; e.g. people exploring/defining/implementing new variations on state machine formalisms, mark-up languages etc; Thus topics to detailed to be of general interest for e.g. #thinking-together Maybe this need is already covered in an existing channel?

Hello, sorry in advance if this is somewhat spammy but … anyone in the community living in Lisbon ? we don’t have #C02BM6VTGUA channel but if you are interested i’d love to organise some in person meetup. PM if this is relevant 🙇

Does anyone else's icon for this community look like this

It might be about time to refresh #random-encounters, I'm getting about half of the pairings as no-shows. What are other people seeing?

[this is no biggie, and I must suppose that only I have this problem?] No matter how much I try reform my mind, I keep thinking that #present-company is a channel for presenting your company, startup etc. But then when I re-read the description, the channel is about some metaphorical meaning instead. I think this is an example of the problems of learnability/memorability that arise when the literal meaning is plausible (at least for non-native me!) but the metaphorical meaning is the intended! 🙂

Is there enough interest in this community for a research/literature-oriented channel? I read lots of papers and quite often they’re relevant to this community, but I it doesn’t feel appropriate to overload #linking-together with academic writing. A dedicated channel could also be a place to help each other with copy editing, proofreading, informal peer-review, etc.

Nadia recently published a fantastic new essay on "Idea Machines: a network of operators, thinkers, and funders, centered around an ideology, that’s designed to turn ideas into outcomes." The main example she uses is "effective altruism". She also refers to the "tools for thought" community (which we are related to) as something that could turn into an idea machine. https://nadia.xyz/idea-machines I think our community is fairly close to being an "idea machine". We are missing some funders (though we do have some), as well as a shared agenda (though we do have some). I personally intuit that we're just a small amount of branding (I never liked the name "future of coding" all that much, and yes I came up with it) away from the status of the "tools for thought" or even the "effective altruism" communities. I feel like our community needs to be easier to "point to" in the way one can point to EA. Any suggestions on branding or other structural changes we could do as a community to become more effective?

Is there a channel or way of organizing meetups? I'm in Berlin, I see a lot of others hail from Berlin, but no Berlin specific channel.

Hi all! Any folks in Barcelona or close to there? It would be great to have also a in-barcelona channel! 🙂

Hey 👋! I'm in Mexico City and wondering if there's other people in Mexico or South America

Howdy! Does anyone else hail from the Memphis TN area?

Can I just create an “#in-israel” channel? (just asking because stumbled on another person here from Tel-Aviv and if there are more of us perhaps one day it would be possible to organize a meetup)

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/19/23269717/slack-price-changes-increase-september-free-plan-changes Slack's free plan is changing to show 90 days of history instead of the past 10k messages.

Quoting @Chris G

Related tangent – I've wondered if there should be a much wider notion of "two-minute-week" – for instance, I'm not ready to post videos and show+tell – but would I post a little microblog update? No, because I'll just end up talking in a private sort of language that no one understands. But should I do that anyway?

Think about the original twitter status update, how it was a still-undefined format. Lunch and what's on tv and headed out and reading X, all became the first announcements. There weren't pictures of peoples' lunches back then!

I've often felt this same thing. #share-your-work and #two-minute-week feel like very structured places. #thinking-together and #linking-together have their own purposes. I've often wanted a place where I can share what I'm up to or thinking about without feeling the need to meet some bar. Now maybe its best that we don't do that. Maybe it is just noise. But since someone else mentioned it, I wanted to post about it. I was thinking something along the lines of #devlog-together. Only structure I might suggest is that people should post at most 1 top-level post per day. I know something like this would encourage me to share more. Would I share every day, probably not. But it would be a place I could share things that I don't feel meet the bar of those other channels. Thoughts? Good idea? Or just noise?

Curious how y’all added the descriptions on the Slack emoji responses? I did some googling but couldn’t find any info, and couldn’t find anything in Slack preferences in a workspace where I’m an admin (maybe it’s featured flagged?). Looks like a really clear way to make sure people understand intent when others are emoji’n their posts!

I'm tweaking the wording of one of the guidelines in our Member Handbook, which pertains to the #introduce-yourself channel. Old:

Please, no links to startups or companies, unless the link points to something deeply technical, philosophical, or otherwise interesting for us to talk about.

New:

Don't use this channel to talk about a startup or company. We want to learn about you as a person. If all your Future of Coding-relevant work happens to be taking place within a startup, talk about the nature of the work, not just the name and nature of the startup. Rather than linking to the startup homepage, link to a blog post or technical document that describes something interesting about what you're working on.

Our community moderators are very sensitive to posts in this channel that feel even slightly like spam. The mods may delete your post and message you about it. They'll encourage you to post again, and help you rewrite your introduction to be more appropriate for our audience.

Feedback welcome.

Dedicated channel for Advent of Code posts? Vote with 👍👎🤷

I was wondering what people thought about an app I've been thinking about for virtual communities to use. I've been thinking about something called like "AFK Meetup" and it would be a place for members to list an approximate area of the globe they are in so if people are traveling, then it could be easier to start something with the people in an area to try to get together. I'd prioritize it as a Slack App + Discord app with a simple web interface, and perhaps I'd even make it easier to create get togethers across multiple communities.

Ever heard of "Slack Apps"? They're these little add-ons people can install in a Slack workspace. Most of them require a salad bar of permissions (eg: reading messages, posting messages, joining channels, etc etc) and they run somewhat invisibly, with unclear ownership/maintenance. So in the interest of protecting the quietude and in consideration of the sensitivity of our community, I've long had our Slack workspace configured to block app installs, pending manual approval by an admin. I usually get one request a year. Sometimes the apps are good (ie: we have one to facilitate a connection with Matrix, and another to run the #random-encounters). But often they're junk/spammy. In the past week I've had a handful of requests, all from members who seemingly have never posted. Some of the apps seem innocuous if perhaps a little ill-fitting (eg: Notion), others seem suspect or would at the very least require careful scrutiny. This request rush seems like as good a catalyst as any — I'd like to codify some Handbook guidance around Slack Apps, so I can simply point people to that writing if these requests continue at this increased frequency. Here's what I'd like to say:

Unsolicited requests to add Slack Apps will be ignored. If you'd like to install an app, please start a discussion about it in #administrivia or DM @Ivan Reese. Describe in detail how the app will benefit the community at large, and how it aligns with the goals and vibe of the community. A request from an active member for an app that addresses a longtime pain felt by many is more likely to be approved. A request from a new member or an app that addresses a personal inconvenience is not.

Thoughts and feedback welcome.

There's so much talk of AI. It's overwhelming the community. The threads are unspooling, bodies piling up in the streets, thoughts flowing in a turgid stream like blood laced with nanotechnology. I've created an #of-ai channel to contain the inflection. Gather the hyped there, the frothing mouthes, the coping, the nerd sniped. Get out of the town square, get into my self-driving car, ye damned.

the link to join Slack group is not working on the website https://futureofcoding.org/community

This message contains interactive elements.

I don't think there's been a proper @Mariano Guerra appreciation recently: it must be a lot of work doing all that newsletter and Twitter stuff. Thanks, Mariano! 🤗

I've noticed that sometimes I see something interesting here that I need to read or think about, but coming back to it, to re-read or reply, doesn't happen 'cos it's lost by then. But NOW! I've discovered (after all these years at work and home!) the "Save for Later" bookmarking system here! That little ribbon icon puts the individual post into "Later", top-right. Apologies if I'm the last one to find it.

Hi folks. This is your yearly reminder to go along and update or add your entry within my project spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12sTu7RT-s_QlAupY1v-3DfI1Mm9NEX5YMWWTDAKHLfc/edit And, anyone new here: (give it a week for everyone to update their entries, then) go and look, to see what's going on in the future of programming/coding space! (Please don't advertise the URL in case it gets vandalised by trolls: it's on my account and I've not been bothered to enact a more secure solution yet!)