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And then also my response - I had been responding as if it were an adult that could understand what I'm saying in this way, whereas a child just heard like "Oh, you weren't supposed to be using this tool, and also, you didn't say it right." I felt really bad, and I felt like I had really screwed it up, but it also made... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** You're making me like totally sad face right now... \[laughter\] It's like, that's such a touching story! \[laughter\] It's just like -- it's such a hard balance between... Like, from a maintainer's perspective, they need to also protect themselves and set boundaries (emotionally protect themselves), ... |
**Lauren McCarthy:** Yeah, it's funny, because there's a thread on the GitHub Maintainers repo that was about mobile use, and I was thinking, the thing that I do the most with mobiles, I respond and then I wanna edit it, because I'm like "Oh, that was too snappy" or "I didn't like the way I said that." And it's hard to... |
\[44:13\] I think a lot of the responses that I'm less happy with come out of just trying to do too much, or to respond too quickly, or not being in a calm enough place that I can just be totally open and thinking clearly, instead of like "Oh, that hurt my feelings!" |
**Break:** \[44:40\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So your work straddles both software and design worlds... You officially called yourself both an artist and a programmer; how do you navigate those different cultures? Where have there been really good crossover learnings, and where has it been hard? |
**Lauren McCarthy:** Well, I guess the artwork that I do -- they're really not separate things. I'm a lot of times making software or making systems as the artwork or as part of an artwork. A lot of what I do is making software that facilitates performances that are kind of dealing with being a person, or general socia... |
Since I'm doing things that are more like software systems or apps... I use JavaScript a lot, I don't use p5.js specifically that much. So the through-line between that project and my art practice is really the social aspect of it, and I think that's why I've put such a big focus on it, because it's the thing that's re... |
But then I think having a background in software and in technology gives me I think a different way of thinking with my artwork, so I'm understanding things on different levels - from a systems perspective, or from the perspective of how the technology might actually work, or what I might actually build, but then also ... |
A lot of the artwork that I do is kind of critical of or addressing new technology, and I feel like I'm able to do that in a more nuanced way, because I really understand the technology the way it's built... A lot of my friends are involved in making some of these things. |
And then I think on the software side, the art side of things really helps me think about experience, and about the kind of social aspects of things... Putting less emphasis on "What does it do?" and "How fast?" or something, and more on "What is the experience of that like?", from an original conception to after the f... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's deep. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I'm gonna have to sit here and meditate on that... \[laughter\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Why do you think there aren't more people with your skill sets and backgrounds in open source? I'm thinking people just sort of with that design esthetic or understanding, or that are really thinking about the user experience kind of things... Why aren't more of those people involved in open source? |
**Lauren McCarthy:** \[49:53\] I think there's not enough emphasis on them yet. There's still a lot of feeling of like the technical or the power of it is the thing that really holds up a project, and all the graphic design or the documentation or the community or whatever - that's secondary. I think if we flip that a ... |
Sometimes when I'm talking to my students and they say "There's so many JavaScript libraries to do touch interaction. How do I decide which one to use?", I tell them some things about various technical considerations, but I also say "Just look at the website, get a feel for it, and think, does this feel like a thing I ... |
I think those aspects are super important, but under-valued. It's been really freeing with this project to say we're not trying to make the fastest JavaScript graphics library, or the most efficient, but we're trying to make the one that really gives people an in to a broad range of techniques or functionality for maki... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's really insightful, actually. I don't think that we spend enough time talking about choosing which culture you respond to. There's a lot of focus in the technical community on "Does this thing have the right features?" or "Is this thing some version of correct?" But I think we forget that these... |
I've seen a couple projects grow and literally convince people to take on projects and to do stuff in those libraries because they responded so well to the culture. People that had no interest in doing robots I think got into Johnny-Five because of the culture. |
**Lauren McCarthy:** Yeah. I think that it's gonna have to change, because it's just becoming so much easier to learn how to code, it's becoming -- not that it's easy, but there's so many more resources, and it's becoming so much more present that I think assuming your user base is very technically minded, technically ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So you're employed to teach, not to just work on this open source library, but it sounds like a part of your role there is sort of working on this library, as well... When you think about how to continue to sustain this library with such a growing user base and contributor base, how do you think abou... |
**Lauren McCarthy:** \[53:45\] \[laughs\] Well, I don't have any great ideas. We've tried some things. We had an idea - I don't know if this was a failure or not... So there's this Processing Foundation that Ben, Casey, Dan and I direct, that is sort of an umbrella for Processing and p5.js, and I think one problem with... |
Recently, we've rolled out this membership idea, where you can make an annual donation, and you don't get any extra anything... You get your name on a website, but it's a way of trying to frame this idea of -- I guess we're trying to put out this idea of an ongoing support open source project that you use. |
We had a really great response from -- you can do this as an individual, as a studio, because a lot of design studios use us, or as an educational institution. And I'm not trying to sound pitchy here, I'm not trying to convince anyone to become a member, I'm just trying to explain what we did. So the idea behind it rea... |
We had a lot of hope that maybe we could put this new idea out here that "Yes, you're using open source..."-- less so to individuals, but especially to larger institutions that would pay thousands of dollars to a company, just a few hundred dollars to help support these tools that you teach with. So I don't know, that ... |
I think for me personally it's been -- and I guess one difficult thing is... It's much easier to get funding and also contributors around something that's new and much harder to do at first, like maintaining something. So probably like, "Oh, I'm gonna make this new library? I could probably get some grants to do that."... |
And trying to think of sort of new things, but actually kind of reframing what we're already doing as a way to try and get support... But really for me, I think the place that I've gone to in terms of sustainability is just lowering my own desires or expectations for it. That's been really hard to do, because I'm the s... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[58:28\] Have you thought about bringing on other maintainers? |
**Lauren McCarthy:** Yeah. I've made some attempts in the past to try and more formally bring people on in that role, and I think it's difficult. I don't know... Actually, maybe it's something I need to explore more. Maybe it's more the sort of thing that I feel like it didn't work the first couple times, and then I ga... |
Maybe that is something that needs more thought. It is something I'm thinking about... We're just about to launch a Spanish version of all the documentation and the website, and I realized with that -- it sends the wrong message to have really incomplete and messed up documentation in one language (in Spanish) and then... |
So trying to think of that -- for me, that model makes sense in terms of translation, and maybe there's things from that that could come in in terms of maintaining the codebase in general. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I guess similarly I'm wondering - and we didn't touch on this earlier, but something I hear from other maintainers is getting new contributors in the door - there might be these established practices for doing that, but then getting them to that next step can be harder, or getting them to come back an... |
**Lauren McCarthy:** Yeah, I think I have a little bit less of that problem, because I think a lot of people, because this is really their first time doing it, that if they go through all the trouble to learn how to do that process, they feel like that is a significant thing for them, so they feel sort of like "Oh, I w... |
And so what happens -- the pattern more typically is like, you know, over this semester they're very active, and then their thesis takes over, as it should. Or it fluctuates more, or they get a job and they have less time for it. Or maybe they have more time. |
\[01:01:50.24\] So I think going from the first commit to -- the big hurdles are like the first commit, and then maybe sustained over a longer period of time, beyond a specific, like Google Summer of Code period, or a semester, or something. But on the other hand, I don't feel it's -- I would love for people to stay on... |
Then for non-students, it's a lot more fluid. What I find more often is that people come in and are being really active, and really taking on the role of maintainer for a while - for a few months, for a year or something, and then kind of step away. So maybe what I really need to do is recognize that type of contributi... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So when do you decide, or I should say how do you decide when somebody is ready to be given commit access? What have they done in the project when you wanna give them that extra little bump up? |
**Lauren McCarthy:** I try to do it really immediately, and sometimes if I don't do that, it's just like it being like one more thing that I forget to do, among the mix of things... I'm like, "Oh crap, who else do I need to add in here?" But yeah, the general policy is that if you've made a commit, then you should have... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** This has been great... Are there any final things that you wanna say, or anything that we didn't cover that you find important or interesting, or things that you've learned? |
**Lauren McCarthy:** The thing that really stands out to me is when people have been extremely generous in some moment, that made me change the way that I thought about those projects, about the open source community, about the way I wanted to interact with other people. One example was - really early on, Evelyn and I ... |
\[01:05:54.28\] In the moment, when he was making some suggestions like this, I did not get the feeling at all -- I didn't feel embarrassed. I didn't feel embarrassed like I do now, thinking about it... \[laughter\] And I think to be able to do that is really special. Here are people that are such experts at this thing... |
That still really sticks in my mind, that what might feel really obvious to you after working on something for a while or learning something for a while is not at all obvious. Somebody's just starting out, and why would it be? So can you give someone that feeling that even if they know less, and they are less experienc... |
I also think of Ben and Casey having made Processing, and I know they follow on the p5.js repo, and then every once in a while we'll be debating something and Ben Fry will come in with a link back to this discussion that they had ten years ago about this thing, and how they already figured it out... \[laughs\] And they... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** That's a great note to end it on actually, so... I wanna thank you for coming on, this has been amazing. Thank you. |
**Lauren McCarthy:** Yeah, thank you guys. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Thanks, Lauren. This was awesome! |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Why don't we kick this off by just getting into how you started contributing to the WP-CLI, and how you went from just contributing a bit to becoming the primary maintainer? |
**Daniel Bachhuber:** Sure. I started contributing when I worked for Automattic. Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com and the WordPress.com VIP program. At that time that I was working for WordPress.com VIP, there was just on the file server a directory with hundreds of different bin scripts for performing di... |
In that experience, all of these different bin scripts had different usage instructions, and it was basically hell trying to sort out how each one worked. At the time, I was a support engineer, so the day-to-day was just like "Get a ticket. Ticket asked you to do this. Spend 15 minutes figuring out how the script works... |
A colleague of mine, by the name of Thorsten Ott pointed me to the WP-CLI project, which at the time was just kind of early stages, and he said, "Hey, you should check this out. It's kind of a standard pattern, or emerging standard pattern for writing CLI scripts against WordPress, and maybe adopt it for your quest for... |
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