Back when I was hopping between different projects a lot, Lando was something I used every day. I don’t know what its governance structure is and the keyboard interaction point isn’t really applicable (it’s container configuration software) but for me it checks the rest of the boxes. It made the common cases for reproducible dev environments ridiculously easy, and it naturally supports going from simple to arbitrarily complex environments as your project evolves. Plus the name rocks.
I feel like another important aspect, related to but distinct from good docs, is a healthy, supportive community. Lando’s lead author, Mike, is friendly, hilarious, and very committed to having fun with his software. The community around it reflects that.
I feel like another important aspect, related to but distinct from good docs, is a healthy, supportive community.
Yes, absolutely. If the author of a piece of software is a jerk I’m much less enthused about using it. It won’t necessarily stop me (one of the core parts of my setup environment is written by someone I strongly dislike), but it’ll grate on me.
Yep. There’s a programming language (that will go unnamed here) I refuse to use despite its often-impressive technical merits due to (1) its instability and quirks often requiring me to head to IRC, the issue tracker, whatever, and (2) rarely seeing positive interactions from the maintainers of that language in such encounters (ones I’m involved in, or ones others are involved in). It’s a real thing.
Not being a jerk is free. Maybe sometimes challenging (don’t we all want to go bananas on someone from time to time), but free. My time, however, is not, and my time is worth too much to deal with toxic communities.
This is the most vague and ‘vibe-based’ of them all, and is the least important. But I like it when software has a name that has ‘kawaii’ in the acronym or is named after a fictional character or has a name that’s just plain fun. Obsidian also falls in this category; even though I can’t think of how the name relates to note-taking, it’s just a nice name for software.
If I made high quality public tools I would absolutely give them the most embarrassing names possible. Vicious Pumpkin. Daktaklakpak. “Tau is the correct circle constant”. ZZZ, but the first Z must be the American Z and the other two must be the British Zed. This pronunciation will be in the official standard.
Back when I was hopping between different projects a lot, Lando was something I used every day. I don’t know what its governance structure is and the keyboard interaction point isn’t really applicable (it’s container configuration software) but for me it checks the rest of the boxes. It made the common cases for reproducible dev environments ridiculously easy, and it naturally supports going from simple to arbitrarily complex environments as your project evolves. Plus the name rocks.
I feel like another important aspect, related to but distinct from good docs, is a healthy, supportive community. Lando’s lead author, Mike, is friendly, hilarious, and very committed to having fun with his software. The community around it reflects that.
Yes, absolutely. If the author of a piece of software is a jerk I’m much less enthused about using it. It won’t necessarily stop me (one of the core parts of my setup environment is written by someone I strongly dislike), but it’ll grate on me.
Yep. There’s a programming language (that will go unnamed here) I refuse to use despite its often-impressive technical merits due to (1) its instability and quirks often requiring me to head to IRC, the issue tracker, whatever, and (2) rarely seeing positive interactions from the maintainers of that language in such encounters (ones I’m involved in, or ones others are involved in). It’s a real thing.
Not being a jerk is free. Maybe sometimes challenging (don’t we all want to go bananas on someone from time to time), but free. My time, however, is not, and my time is worth too much to deal with toxic communities.
If I made high quality public tools I would absolutely give them the most embarrassing names possible. Vicious Pumpkin. Daktaklakpak. “Tau is the correct circle constant”. ZZZ, but the first Z must be the American Z and the other two must be the British Zed. This pronunciation will be in the official standard.
I really think that I like K-9 Mail in part because of its name and logo. 😊 Will be sad to see it switch to Thunderbird.
I mean, when it comes to “embarrassing” you can’t really outdo Coq.
Coq is proudly Gallic.
Likewise, in France the e-mail program Pine is proudly phallic.
There’s a reason the French refer to the byte as an ‘octet’, because ‘bite’ is basically ‘cock’…
That’s not embarrassing, that’s shameful.