Notices by Heather Buchel (hbuchel@hachyderm.io)

"It is really, really great that we are a wall-to-wall union. We’re all in it together, and it’s a signal that QA is dev as well." LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK. QA is a critical part of engineering!

SO STOKED to see this https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24205366/world-of-warcraft-developers-form-union-blizzard-entertainment

It's all "yeah, punch nazis!" until one gets shot in the ear. Then I have to hear about how we need to come together? No thanks.

Unsurprisingly, this tiny one line change pull request becomes a jumping off point for people to say even more bigoted things. In open source, you can really create the community you want to be surrounded with. 🙄

My team maintains a 4000+ page documentation site and we manage to not use gendered language. It's not hard.

https://exquisite.social/@thomholwerda/112716764371132291

One cool part about getting older is that you remember when things were good. Like Ritz crackers. I hadn't had one for like, 15 years maybe. Now they feel like they are mostly air and definitely less buttery than I remember. We've been swindled by big cracker.

I feel like it's the same with Chicken in a Biskit crackers. The coating used to be out of control. Now there is hardly any chicken. Mostly just biskit.

People that disable right click on their websites as "preventative" measures, what do you think you're actually preventing with this?

I think there are too many web developers (new and old!) that never heard the call for protecting this whole internet thing and access to it. I think about how my introduction to building for the web was from folks working on and creating web standards and sharing that work in blogs and social media.

There is a whole slew of developers now whose introduction is from all those folks I was happy to leave behind on Twitter and that's kind of sad.

I made homemade beer cheese and soft pretzels for my partners birthday (pretzels are his favorite snack idk either). They turned out pretty tasty! I usually avoid anything that involves making bread because I suck at it so I'm so happy they turned out

Is this a real thing people using Tailwind do because this made me actually lol at work
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72826605/how-to-style-nested-elements-based-on-parent-class-using-tailwind-css

I *know* there is a lot more going on here, but "Support for stylesheets" will always be very funny to me in a blog post about a UI library
https://react.dev/blog/2024/04/25/react-19#support-for-stylesheets

To the people replying to this that are all "you're describing people that have time for hobbies": I'm going to give some of you the benefit of the doubt that you know nothing about open source software, but to the others that are intentionally missing the point so they can be dismissive in a conversation regarding the inclusiveness of the OS community, you can kindly go fuck yourself.

So much of the core of tech leaves out Disabled people and that's ultimately why we can't have nice things. It's why everything ends up being just a little bit worse for everyone. It starts there, then it reaches out to other groups of people that aren't overrepresented in tech, then FINALLY to everyone else who all throw up their hands and say "Who could have seen this coming?"

I'm going to rant about open source a little, I am so sorry.

So much of open source favors people that ~ have time ~ That usually means:

- They aren't caretakers (i.e. they don't have children or elder family that have care needs) or can rely on a partner to do all of that in their stead.
- They can work long hours outside of their 9-5 jobs which excludes many Disabled people or those that have chronic pain.
- They already have a high paying job, they have health insurance.

- OR you work for a company that values open source for one reason or another (there are some very cynical reasons you can think of there, obviously, the potential for unpaid labor).

But ultimately, at the root, because we live in this hellscape where people can't have healthcare and it's a race to the bottom for wages, it's incredibly exclusionary to Disabled people or any one who considers themselves a caretaker.

it just feels like we're never going to live up to the baseline that open source needs to actually thrive. I don't see the current landscape of burnt out maintainers, especially those that are unfortunate enough to have very popular libraries with no corporate backing, as succeeding? People need healthcare. People need UBI. They need childcare. They need elder care.

Not saying we should give up on OS, but sometimes I'm overwhelmed at what we're missing.

I think about this a lot when I see maintainers who shrug off accessibility requests as "Well make a pull request! It's open source!"

The very people that are experts that you need contributions from aren't included or welcomed in this community.

Then, throw in the complicated mess that is "modern" javascript or just frontend development in general. You expect people to be experts at accessibility, to have the bandwidth to contribute, AND to navigate that landscape?

The amount of incredibly detailed Github issues I've seen where someone has taken the time to do a manual accessibility audit and give suggestions, even to write the expected HTML, but because it's not wrapped up in a PR with proper Typescript and accompanying unit tests and broken down into 5 different components for "potential" reuse it gets no movement. This is why you get no contributors for these things.

Replace me with an LLM that reminds engineers to look at and verify their changes and not just say it's fixed after making the code change. Please, I beg you.