Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

Dear OSS community on Mastodon,

Every day I scroll through my feed and I see proud announcements like:

“First Alpha Relase of HyperTurboWidget available"

or

“Version 2.7.1 now with improved glorb handlers!”

or

“Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is out”

… and I sit there wondering if I should be excited, terrified, or calling a licensed electrician.

Don’t get me wrong, I love open source. I just have no idea what three quarters of these projects actually do. Are we talking about a web server? A file system? A middleware thingy that keeps the flux from overflowing into the space–time continuum?

So, dear OSS developers of the world: When you announce a new release, please give us (your adoring but slightly confused audience) just a tiny bit of context.

• Tell us what your software does.
• Tell us why this release is cool.
• Tell us what it requires to work.

Example:

We are proud to announce Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is now avalaible. While it creates a nice wormhole to 1955, it requires an underlying gigawatt stack 1.21 to work reliably.

Because nobody wants to cheer enthusiastically for “v2.7.1” while secretly Googling “what is a glorb and why does it need handling”.

Yours truly,

Someone who wants to celebrate your achievements

This was inspired by a post that reached me as screenshot:

Updated "greek task list":

orphean task: when you almost succeed, but lose everything the moment you turn around to check your progress.

daedalean task: when you’re forced to design something brilliant and functional… that you yourself will inevitably become trapped inside.

medusan task: when your project becomes so horrifying that everyone involved freezes in place rather than deal with it.

tantaline task: when success is right there, but bureaucracy or budget cuts keep snatching it away at the last moment, forever.

pandoran task: when fixing one small issue unleashes a thousand new ones, but hey — at least there’s still hope somewhere in the ticket backlog.

odyssean task: when the assignment technically has an end, but it’s buried under so many side quests that you forget what the original goal was.

narcissian task: when the entire effort is about maintaining appearances rather than achieving anything of substance.

promethean task: when you give people a powerful new tool that could transform their work — and are punished eternally for doing so.

orestian task: when the mess you’re cleaning up is the direct result of the last cleanup you performed.

thesean task: when the only way to finish is to disassemble everything piece by piece — until you’re no longer sure if what’s left is the same project you started.

achillean task: when your work is flawless except for that one fatal oversight that will, inevitably, destroy you.

penelopean task: when you diligently undo by night what you accomplish by day, just to keep the stakeholders pacified.

midasean task: when everything you touch turns into paperwork, compliance documents, or gold-plated nonsense nobody actually needs.

gordian task: not intended to be actually done, but violence is the answer.

“Our datacenter is on fire …”

“Don’t be so negative, let’s call it a thermal event”