The post-lockdown work rave, abuse, and shortened fuses

This article is a mix of personal stories, social & interpersonal psychology, and technology (with some drive-by remarks about Free & Open Source software). I originally drafted this article in the fall of 2021 and winter of 2022, but I needed more time to rewrite it a fourth time (because why not). So, while this post ends up landing straight into the twilight zone “between xmas and New Year”, it has more insights and illustrations and arguably makes for a better-rounded story, even if it’s a 7 to 9 minutes read rather than 5-6.

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How long does it take to create a website? (and why your FLOSS project doesn’t need one)

The 20192020 period was a long R&D cycle for me, with a whole herd of yaks to shave, however it did give me new tools and abilities, such as the capacity to rapidly develop modern-looking websites without hand-coding them nor spending hours fruitlessly searching for—and being disappointed by—”suitable” themes.

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CMSes & static site generators: why I (still) chose WordPress for my business websites

For many years, until 2021, the idéemarque* website was my own static HTML hand-written codebase, which had the advantage of performance and flexibility (vs “what a theme dictates”), but was also impossible to scale, because it had a bus factor of 1 and a pain level over 9000. I even had it version-controlled in Git all the way back to 2014 (back when I finally joined the Git masochists sect). I was the only person in the world who could maintain it or contribute to it, because, quite frankly, you need to reach geek level 30+ to enter that dungeon, while most people, including new generations, don’t know how to use computers.

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The origins of the Flow Game 🎥

Let’s kickstart the new year with a short & simple blog post, as a way to get me back on the blogging treadmill, and as a way to ensure my blog still works fine (I have just finished a very heavy-handed migration and database encoding surgery for my blog, which took months to solve… that’ll be a story for another blog post, if anyone is interested? 🤔 and yes, I’m totally using emojis and exotic languages in this post just to see if it still breaks Planet GNOME. わたしは にほんごがすこししかはなせません!)…

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Overhauling your Open Source project's "Developer Experience" and redefining the workflow

This started out as a simple status report following my first report on the revival of the Getting Things GNOME project, but turned out into a full-fledged article that, I believe, would be relevant to many community managers and FLOSS project maintainers out there. Particularly if you have an established open-source project looking for sustainable development but don’t have the luxury of paid developers, it should be worth investing the 7-9 minutes to read this.

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