<!everyone> — I'd like to present to you the first ever Future of Coding Community Survey. Link below, supplemental notes in the following thread. ➡️ https://forms.gle/cBzxD7CQyoQxNGyw8 ⬅️ Thank you for taking the time to fill it out, giving us helpful data for deciding what new things to do for the community in the coming year.

I can't do fewer than 12 interests - there aren't 4 that I can remove!! 😄

Ok, I'll up the limit. Hang tight. Done. Might need to reload the page.

Done sir. I was surprised you didn’t mention design/parametric/CAD inspired tools or something similar in the areas of interest. So I assumed “video games/simulation” + HCI covered those.

Yeah, I feel that question is the weak point of the whole survey. If we do another of these in the future (say, annually?), I hope to spend a lot more time coming up with a better way to ask that question.

I like the classification by topic effort. Free form would be one hell of a mess to parse, and by definition people in FoC are reluctant to label themselves and what they do. But sure, that classification will evolve.

Just realized that I asked how often people post here, but not how often people check / read. Doh!

Now it says "Must select at most 12 options". How about if I fill in the survey twice, posing as 2 different people. I think I could split my set of interests into two different "personas". Or you could remove the limit, which isn't as necessary as you think it is.

For the "topics" question, HCI and Human/Social factors seem like almost the same topic to me!

I interpret HCI as being more about the technical issues of human computer interfaces, while I think that Human/Social Factors is more about issues around the impact of technology on society, what I now label "Convivial Computing" after reading Illich. At least, those are two separate interests for me, and that's how I map those interests onto Ivan's schema. I don't see anything for computer graphics, 3D modelling, creative coding as an artistic medium, procedurally generated art, music. Nothing I can use as a proxy for art.

A) Please, nobody fill out the survey more than once. To make it anonymous, there's no enforcement of single submission per person. Repeat submissions will reduce the quality of the data. B) It's a common line of argument against modern business culture that says, "You can't have more than one top priority." By the same token, you can't have more than one thing that you are most interested in. That's the essence of the question — what is the pursuit that has you most passionate, most curious, most determined. If you need to choose more than 50% of the long list of choices, that's no longer speaking to the peak of your passion, and is instead speaking to the breadth. That's a separate question entirely, one which I sadly didn't think to ask in this survey (nor did anyone else who helped draft the survey in #meta — I'm taking you all under the bus with me!) I don't want to revise the survey significantly now, because it would be unfair to all the folks who have already responded. However, I've learned that this is a very nuanced kind of question to ask, and so we should probably have further discussions about how to classify our interests and wrap some sort of quantifiable mesh around them in advance of the as-yet-hypothetical next year's survey.

Yes, I do have multiple top priorities, and I deal with this by switching focus periodically. I have several distinct clusters of interests, which I switch between when working on hobby projects. I can only focus on one top priority at a time, so eg my artistic output plummets when I am sprinting on compiler optimization or language design. Within each cluster I think I could prioritize. I accept that this makes me a lousy business person. P.S. I don't think that everybodies brains are necessarily wired in the same way, with respect to things like only having one passion.

That makes sense, but uncapping this question would cause issues with over/under representation. Perhaps it'd be better if, say, you could assign 100 points to various areas of interest. Regardless, this is something we'll need to revisit in the future.

Thanks for putting this together, @Ivan Reese. Excited to see the results!

That's a good survey! Except for one point. You made me say that I won't financially support the podcast, because the only support you envisage is monthly payments via Patreon. I am rather reluctant to sign for regular payments for anything, I prefer to initiate each payment explicitly. And I have had troubles in the past with Patreon not accepting my credit card, to the point that I gave up.

What Konrad said ☝️ I am absolutely willing to support, but maybe it would help if the question was broader 🙏

Good points. Those questions are just to take the temperature of the room, vis-a-vis patreon. Figuring out exactly what options to give people, I figured, was better left for down the road after I've actually started releasing episodes, so that folks know what they're helping out with.

Thank you @Ivan Reese for creating this poll, it needs more free text answer spaces though! For example: I'dl like to sponser podcasts but also would like to participate in some if that isn't excluding each other?

The trouble with free text answer spaces is that they make it hard to aggregate the answers. My hope was that if someone felt too boxed-in by a particular question, they'd feel comfortable reaching out to me and share additional info, or just skipping the question (since all questions are optional). Not a perfect solution, but a necessary trade-off. And in this case, it seems to have worked. If you'd like to sponsor the podcast, send me a private message and we can start talking about that. Sponsors are still allowed to participate — this isn't a show where editorial independence / journalistic ethics are a meaningful concern, so I don't think listeners will object on the basis of presumed bias. They haven't yet, at least.