"Say thank you. Report bugs."

2022-05-10 | @Acidus

There is a great gem of advice which StackSmith wrote that I don't want to get lost in this recent discussion about software size and the "philosophy" of CLI programs from the 1970s.

Say thank you. Report bugs. Write great software yourself, with as many lines of code as you feel appropriate, if that's your thing.

We need more of this. Providing criticism can be helpful, but consider more positive things you can do to help.

Say "thank you"

Someone worked hard, most likely out of love, building the Gemini client or server or service you are using. Consider dropping them a note to say thank you. Trust me, it helps a lot.

• To @Mozz, thank you for Jetforce. I use it to run gemi.dev.
• To @Corewala, thank you for Buran. It's the Gemini client I use every night to read on my Kindle Fire.
• To @pitr, thank you for Elaho. I use it every day to read gemini on my phone.
• To @skyjale, thank you for Lagrange. I use it on my desktop during development to test all my gemini capsules and services like Gemipedia, Chilly Weather, and the Kennedy search engine.

Report Bugs

Reporting bugs is an awesome way you can help make something you use better. It's easy, and you don't need to be a programmer. Simply tell the developer, step-by-step, what you do, what happened, and what you expected to happen.

Here are some bugs I've filed:

Write Software

If you are able to, and you want something to be different, write software. But only after doing the first two.