EP34 – Zip It: How Devs Gatekeep the Internet

[00:00:00] Oh, looky there, it’s number one, like us. This is episode number 34 of DevRanch. Zip it. How devs gatekeep the internet. Uh oh. So, we’re sponsored by ourselves. I don’t know why this is up here, but it is. I’m Jason Tucker. You can find me over at Jason Tucker on JasonTucker. blog. I’m going to be saying that all the things

[00:00:38] and y’all know who it is. It’s the birthday boy, Jason Cosper back at it again on the world’s most influential WordPress podcast. Speaking of that podcast, go find us and watch us and listen to us wherever it is you listen to podcasts and you can also. Go and hit us up on discord. JP wire, core. com slash what is going on with like the video stuff today, but things are broken.

[00:01:10] Oh, wow. Is this thing on? It is. What’s going on here? No, no, no. I literally can’t hear you. Cosper broke the internet. With his birthday. Oh, we lost Tucker. Oh, holy crap. All right. Well, you know, having some technical difficulties over here at DevBranch today. Yeah. Um, I think we can take this moment to say happy birthday to Jason Cosper.

[00:01:47] It’s his birthday. Um, so wish him well wishes at, uh, on the internet. I Sorry. Hi, welcome back. And then, um, also, uh, don’t you have a thing you do for your birthday? Uh, yes. Every year I ask folks to donate to the Bakersfield Burrito Project. Uh, they, uh, serve our, uh, hungry and unhoused neighbors here in town.

[00:02:16] Uh, and, uh, I can make sure that a link finds its way into the show notes for folks to, to make a donation to that. They, they really managed to, uh, help a lot of people, uh, with just some beans, rice, uh, cheese and tortillas, uh, every Sunday. For like the past 15 years. So, um, yeah, uh, really, uh, amazing group of people, um, who, uh, I’m honored to, to call my friends and, and, and they, uh, Yeah, really, really do a lot.

[00:02:51] So, um, if, if you’ve got a little, uh, extra cash, please send it their way. I think we should do a new, uh, segment at the beginning of every, every beginning of every, uh, show that’s like, here’s a shout out to the nonprofit we’re supporting today. Yeah, no kidding. Um, and, and of course it helps people, actual people.

[00:03:14] And I do the, the irony of us promoting you getting a birthday, uh, nonprofit promo is funny. I just, I’ve, I’ve done it for the past few years, but it’s very fancy. It’s very, uh, in vogue as it, Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, you know, I think it’s good to, uh, for nonprofits when you’re, when you’re considering where to put your money.

[00:03:38] Is that you put your money where people are because people really need help right now. A lot of people really do and not just like people on the margins, but like, like the people in the tech industry. I don’t know if y’all got the, not that this is like. Exactly what we’re talking about. But in a way it, I could segue us there.

[00:03:58] Uh, PayPal laid off, I believe 15 percent of their staff. Uh, that’s a lot of people. It was like 2000 people or something. Um, and there were, there was a whole nother round of layoffs in the tech industry, not like the, uh, Google had some, so in the tech industry, like proper, but then also in like, you know, kind of like.

[00:04:18] Like the actual tech companies, but then also like PayPal and like sort of those companies that are tech companies, but you know, kind of in different markets. Uh, so that was their turn this time, PayPal and stuff there. So, so, you know, I was passing a, I was passing a billboard the other day that it said.

[00:04:36] And I don’t even remember what it was from, what it was for, but it was, it said, we went from, uh, donating to the food bank to needing the food bank. And I think that it’s just, you know, when you have so many people and colleagues in your life who have been, uh, let go or, you know, and we’re in an industry that’s really being transformed by AI, by multimillionaires, uh, billionaires, you know, and the, the merging of.

[00:05:02] You know, the capital tech fusion that has been happening. Um, people are assets, right? And those assets can get released if they’re not assets to liabilities. Sorry. And that they’re not assets. They are liabilities in the, that, you know, approach someone’s salary, right? Is a, is a cost that can be cut in a reorganization, for example, to show that, oh, we’re actually making more money when they’re not actually making any more money.

[00:05:31] But they are actually instead just literally not paying people’s salaries anymore. And yeah, I have multiple friends who are actually actively looking for jobs in the tech industry and, um, they’re not finding a lot. And that has been, it has been in the past. And, um, Yeah, I have a whole lot of other things to say about this, but I just think that it’s really important to, um, to, to think maybe this is not the time for vanity projects as it is so much for really supporting your community, like Bakersfield, for example, where you live, or, you know, wherever y’all might be listening from today.

[00:06:12] Sorry, anyway, so gatekeeping, oh, I was trying to figure out where we’re at, because I had to leave for a second. Well, because we’re waiting for you sort of way. You went on a tangent and you’re waiting for me. Stretching it out to, to try to, uh, try to get your back. And then I had a point to make about, you know, Yeah, we don’t have to do it all over again.

[00:06:38] It’s fine. I have to listen to the show like six times after this. So we’re, we’re good. See, this is why I love you guys so much because you totally know, you’re like, no, if we don’t stop today, right. At this point, she will explain her point again to say, no, we got it. And then I’m like, cool. So how do we get into gatekeeping from here?

[00:06:57] What, what, what, what’s the, uh, Oh, I got it. I got your segue. Yeah, please do segue. Basically. It’s like who gets, when we’re talking about people being laid off, what, who gets laid off, right? Is it top seniority people? Is it people who are, you know, towing the company line? Is it people who are like pure devs?

[00:07:15] Like, I think that’s. You know, there’s a gatekeeping that we’re talking about, which is gatekeeping other people from coming in. But also there’s a gatekeeping of sorts that happens from the top down when making those decisions about who to keep or what divisions to keep or what’s important, what’s replaceable by AI.

[00:07:33] Anyway. Quite often it’s quite often it’s a last one in first one out. Or if you work in marketing. The marketing team, and then last one in first one out, but this is why AI started replacing marketing stuff. It was because they were like, okay, we’re going to get rid of them anyhow. So let’s, let’s, uh, let’s try to figure out if we could like go through here and, uh, and replace everybody with AI.

[00:07:57] The thing that kind of sparked this topic today is there was, uh, an interesting little, uh, bug that ended up creeping its way into the latest release of WordPress 6. 4. 3. Um, there was, this is a dev branch, so we can kind of get into the weeds a little bit. Um, and so we’re going to talk a little bit more about that today, but, um, Yeah.

[00:08:22] So, uh, effectively the way that not only it turns out, um, macOS zips, its files, um, is, uh, invalid, um, under, uh, the, the way that, uh, WordPress 6. 4. 3 like. Unzips files. Uh, apparently there’s reports that, uh, people using Linux on the desktop. I think this is supposed to finally be the year of Linux on the desktop.

[00:08:52] But, um, so, uh, you know, uh, people using gnome, uh, for their window manager on Linux, Yeah, there were some reports of people compressing files using Ubuntu. Um, also running into this problem, but effectively the way that, uh, that Mac OS Ubuntu, you know, a few other, uh, distributions like, uh, compress files was not compatible, uh, with how 6.

[00:09:25] 4. 3 handles. Uh, uncompressing zip files. The problem with this is in a lot of cases, um, there are developers who will do, I know I’ve done this, uh, I’m, I’m guilty of doing this. I, uh, I mean, I develop on a Mac. I’ve developed on a Mac for 20 years now. I have the command key tattoo to prove it. I, I, I’m, I’m a fan.

[00:09:52] Uh, I wouldn’t say I’m a fan boy, but I’m a fan. Uh, and, um, I, I have had to distribute a, a plugin kind of quick and dirty. And, uh, just kind of, you know, use the archive tools, zip something up, send it along to somebody, um, you know, for like a quick fix or whatever. Um, that quick fix. Won’t work under 6. 4. 3.

[00:10:16] If someone takes that zip file that I’ve, uh, you know, sent, uh, and decompress it, this has been recognized as a bug, but, uh, there were a few people, uh, arguing. In, uh, the whole core track ticket around this, uh, that, you know, we need to hold ourselves to a standard and, uh, people need to use, uh, continuous integration tools to, to distribute their plugins and all of this, like, um, People need to use the thing that I use.

[00:10:51] Uh, and, uh, if they did, uh, things would be better for everybody. And, uh, we’d all have flying cars and, uh, you know, walkable cities and, uh, yeah, yeah. Free don’t restrain me and I will solve all your problems with the computer. But in turn, I will restrain the way that you want to develop, because I think it is.

[00:11:20] It was like the whole, the whole argument that was happening about like, Uh, let’s not fix the bug and force people to do things the right way. Uh, like completely goes against the WordPress, like project ethos of backwards compatibility, uh, of like meeting people where they are trying to make things easy for people.

[00:11:46] And, uh, in. Dev circles, uh, specifically in like WordPress dev circles, uh, there is this kind of practice of, uh, doing it wrong. Uh, like, uh, that, that’s a refrain that has Contrary or like that other people are doing it wrong. That other people are doing it wrong. Like if, if you, if you want to do things a particular way, you must do it this way.

[00:12:11] Otherwise you are doing it wrong. I mean, the, the prime example of this, uh, and I, it doesn’t bother me. I know it bothers some people. Um, but the, the capital P dang it, like that function in. Uh, WordPress that makes sure that WordPress has a capital W and a capital P, no matter what, like, you know, if you don’t do it that way, you are doing it wrong.

[00:12:40] Uh, I, I see it and I go, okay, this person doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, but it doesn’t bother me so much that. I’m like, okay, like, you know, Oh, you must fix this. You’re a moron, whatever. I know. Uh, Tucker jokingly spells it all lowercase. He’s like, screw it. I’m spelling it. WordPress now all lowercase.

[00:13:00] Yeah. Um, there are autonomy. I will take it where I can find it. I think as WordPress grows, and I think that now that like, we’re in our 20th year of, um, doing all of this, um, you know, having these stupid conversations about, about why, like. Hey, everybody, we’re a project that preserves backwards compatibility.

[00:13:32] Surprise, surprise. Yeah. And by the way, a lot of people dev on max and, you know, I don’t really make custom plugins anymore because I left that world a long time ago because updates, licensing, all those themes to, uh, Oh, themes, the whole, the whole nine yards. Yeah. I did not know literally until yesterday or the day before, whatever day this was, that you, that there was a difference between zipping your file there or through some, you know, arcane WPC, I don’t know, just the command line, not the WordPress command line, but a command line, like, did I know that that was different?

[00:14:10] I did not. Um, so. Maybe that’s because I didn’t go to computer science school and, and as Courtney points out in the chat, and as Jason was trying to point out, this is even, uh, extensions, child themes, anything that is zipped, the basic premise of it is that you, you know, we upload our zip files for these things and it, you know, it unzips them like so.

[00:14:32] I can imagine just being in a certain phase in a site development and you’re like, Nope. And then you’re like, wait, what’s happening? I’m keeping everything up to date. Like I’m doing all my stuff. Like, especially because there is a, not really a push, but there’s definitely a culture of put all your customizations in plugins, right.

[00:14:52] Instead of modifying files and in hard code or whatnot. So like, if you’re putting your stuff in plugins, then. You know, you’re probably dealing with, you know, just kind of homespun plugins more often than plugins that need to go through, you know, the, the repository check or, you know, any of that. So you’re just, you know, building them for clients and.

[00:15:15] I mean, I don’t know how one would know that, to be honest, like, unless you are a, you know, like, super devy, like, I don’t, there’s so much to know within development, that understanding the intricacies of zip file archiving, like, I do not. Who knew it was, what kind of cardboard are you using to, to, to ship the product?

[00:15:37] You know, like, is it two thirds of an inch or is it one quarter of an inch? Cardboard? Yeah. Is it correlated? Is it not? Right. Whatever. It’s just like, right. Someone knows the weight, the weight association for a cardboard box, uh, you know, and the different widths of it or whatever it means it can hold whatever.

[00:15:54] I do not know that. So I just go to the store and buy. A, you know, a box, a box, a box, books in it and the bottom fell out. But I mean, that’s actually a really good analogy because. These devs are like, well, why didn’t you know about the width of the cardboard? You moron. And that’s mine’s made with art artesian paper, artesian paper that you can like sit here and do stuff with and then build the box with it.

[00:16:22] And then we decorated a certain way. Or we accidentally throw extra little bits into it that we weren’t aware of. Cause the machine that builds the box is putting these little bits inside there. And at the end you open the box and you pour the whole thing into the website and little bits of the stuff fall out, get in there and you know, now it’s For the record up the works, those files, they’re not in the file structure, so I don’t know where you have to look to find whatever tidbits that the, it’s, it’s the way that the internet works, the way the computers work.

[00:16:53] I know, but I like I, but yeah, like if there’s nothing in there, this is like the, you know, the, this is like, like a long time ago discovering the HD access file like a really long time ago, , right? Sure. Well guess I find my HD access file, like it’s. And then someone finally tells you, Oh, it’s hidden by default.

[00:17:13] You have to go look for it. You find, Oh, look, there it is. That I learned that, but it’s the same kind of thing. It’s like, there’s nothing there. So like, how would you even see it? You know what I mean? Like other than events in a bug, obviously some of those people knew that Mac zipping was far inferior to command line zipping, but like.

[00:17:37] That wasn’t even the point. What I really got confused about this issue with is that that wasn’t even actually the point of the, like the upgrades that they made, right? Like it wasn’t about blocking certain types of zip files, right? The, the thing that introduced the bug wasn’t intending to. Say you can’t unzip Mac files with extra stuff in it.

[00:18:00] Like that’s no one’s goal. So for some people to be in there being like, well, you just don’t know what you’re doing to use that. They have to have the headdress. You don’t know what you’re doing to, uh, because you’re not doing it because you’re doing it wrong. And then fighting to be like, well, I don’t know why we have to have a.

[00:18:19] A replacement for this. We shouldn’t fix it when it’s like, that wasn’t, but that wasn’t even the point. So like, why would you, why wouldn’t you fix it? It’s so interesting too, because you know, you actually have people, uh, core developers, um, you know, people who have like lead releases, people who have, uh, like.

[00:18:42] Uh, Aaron Jorban was in there like, yes, absolutely. This is a bug. We need to fix this bug and, uh, started working on patches, testing, all of this stuff to make sure that, um, you know, the release, uh, the next release, so WordPress whenever that manages to come out and hopefully it comes out soon, uh, and I understand that.

[00:19:06] Uh, they might give a little bit of breathing room. It may be like maybe next week, um, before we see this as somebody who works at a web host and, uh, you know, uh, Peter, we had this up on the screen earlier, uh, you know, premium plugins that, uh, he saved on his PC. No longer work with 6. 3 without. Downgraded WordPress, downgraded WordPress means insecure WordPress.

[00:19:32] Cause 6. 3, uh, 6. 4. 3 was a security fix or unzipping and re zipping locally. This, and re zipping locally. If you’re on a Mac. Peter is an experienced WordPress user, developer, et cetera. Uh, and, and he knows what needs to be done, but the people who, um, you know, at the hosting company I work at, like, um, you know, we have people writing in going, I don’t know why this doesn’t work anymore.

[00:20:06] Yeah, this is borrowed. Fix it. Yeah, but I think the interesting conversation actually not whether or not this should be fixed or whatever is, is also the conversation of when should this be fixed because there being a patch and a plugin. So there’s actually a plugin that patches it, right? So everyone can go install the plugin, you know, they funnily, and I hope they didn’t zip it on a Mac.

[00:20:31] Sorry, joke. Um, they are going to take that like, how do we like, it’s more work to like get a plugin out to people to like market a solution for a plugin than it would be in theory to like spin up a like a hotfix out like a 3. 1, 6. 4. 3. 1 or something like that, you know, or 0. 2. And then, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:55] Because the people who are having this problem who, by the way, are people who are keeping either have enabled auto updates for their, um, for their core software or they’re on a managed host who has done the update, or they are aware of that and are doing updates like this is not a segment like this won’t affect people who like aren’t updating, who aren’t paying attention to their site.

[00:21:18] So even that kind of, um, framing of, Oh, this won’t affect people cause they won’t notice. Cause everyone’s installing things through the plugin repo. It’s like, no, but actually the people who would be affected by this are the people who are not going through those because they’re dealing with their stash of, you know, premium plugins, or they’re doing their own homespun stuff or their, whatever it is they’re doing.

[00:21:41] Right. Like. That, and now they have to one, go figure out what the problem is to go through that entire GitHub track. It’s track that entire track, just dialogue, like see play. I don’t know what it’s so long, go through that whole thing to figure out that there is a plugin and then be like, go install this plugin in order to do the thing that they’re trying to do, like.

[00:22:05] Those are so many steps and this really just the idea that we like wouldn’t fix something quickly that isn’t so core to WordPress or we just be like, it’s fine to wait, um, is really disregarding is another way in my view that does gatekeep the internet because they’re like, Oh, just fix it with this.

[00:22:26] You know, whatever, blah, blah, blah, multi step process over here. And these other people don’t matter. And what it ends up doing is it just makes WordPress look bad. That’s it. Yeah. Makes WordPress like if you keep it up to date, it’s going to get broken. You know, if a, if a paid software or a SAS has an error, they fix that stuff immediately because the customers will leave.

[00:22:51] But our attitude in WordPress is like, Oh, well, DIY, it’ll happen when it happens, like, you know, that doesn’t breed confidence in a consumer. Right. And you, the hosts, like the hosts have to have that. Oh, it’s not really broken. It’s kind of broken. Just install this plugin. Like you’re doing this little dance that we’ve been working so hard to get away from that WordPress is awesome.

[00:23:16] Insecure or breaks easily, or, you know, is complicated. Like we’re just reinforcing that narrative for no reason, because we’re like, Oh, you should, we shouldn’t have to do an update for this. I’m just having this like really weird realization that whatever files you zip into the zip file that you do on whatever, whatever, you know, bespoke computer that you’re doing this on ultimately end up on somebody else’s website.

[00:23:43] Just willy nilly with no, like, um, screening. You mean like when you’re downloading plugins for stuff or like, through the, I’m a developer. I made some, some plugin or theme or whatever. And then I accidentally put like my, I don’t know, let’s just say like my social security number inside of a file on accident or something.

[00:24:03] Or I put in some text file of something that I, you know, my shopping list or whatever, that could essentially land on a bunch of people’s websites. If I’m like, well, I mean, and that’s, you know, that’s also an argument against, uh, sort of the non repo based plugins and, uh, you know, things you download from stuff like Envato or whatever, right.

[00:24:28] That’s always the catch 22 there. It’s like, Oh, you can do all this other kind of external ecosystem or like the second layer of the ecosystem for all that stuff. You download it from wherever it is, but. I mean, there’s a huge trust factor there, right? Like, especially when you can now really spin up websites and, um, I’ve been doing some deep dives on some like kind of edge plugins and, you know, I can tell when a text is written either by AI or by a non native speaker or like someone who hasn’t marketed whatever you just, whether it’s, you know, the chat or the, the change log or the Sales copy, you know, like, well that, you know, that’s just, that’s clearly like just sales copy or just like bullshit brain log stuff.

[00:25:13] So, you know, I’m, they’re still out there. Like, I think that we have really. As a, as a culture maybe? As a tech world? Everyone’s like, oh, everyone’s on the internet, but like, turns out there are still bad actors out there. You know, so you could, in theory, spin up an entire plugin site, do this whole thing, get a bunch of people to download it direct from your site.

[00:25:37] Upload it to their computers. Who’s paying attention to that? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Nobody, that’s a lot. I know this, I know this, this wasn’t the topic that we were wanting to discuss, but it sounds like we we’re starting to uncover some of the openness of, of WordPress’s distribution methods. I guess I, I think that it is.

[00:25:58] Because when you push people and, you know, obviously I understand all the difficulties the plugin team has had, but like, for example, when people were being pushed out of, you know, the plugin repo, if it becomes. Really just overloaded with clones, non useful data. You can’t find stuff in there. Then it inherently pushes people out.

[00:26:19] So in a way, even having that, just not having enough, I don’t know, attention, like care put into something like the plugin repo or the themes repo pushes people. Out of that sort of controlled, safer ecosystem and is the Wild West out there. Like what diligence do we all do necessarily on a new plugin that you might come along?

[00:26:46] And that’s us who are, you know, yeah, we’re probably doing like, you know, Oh, plugins that, you know, we’ve been around for 10 years or that we learned about at a WordCamp or. So one of the interesting things that I, I mean, I’ve known about this for a while, but one of the interesting things, uh, with, um, using, uh, zipped files from, from a Mac, from some other, as Jason said, bespoke computing solution, um, is, um, Like I, I know specifically, and I can call this out, uh, it’s, I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

[00:27:26] Uh, WP rocket, uh, specifically has, uh, a bunch of kind of like child plugins for WP rocket, uh, that, uh, and, and most people. Don’t need them, but the people that need them really need them. And, uh, they are just these little kind of one off things where it’s like, Oh, you’re hosting in this particular kind of hosting environment.

[00:27:52] Like we suppress having these things in your screen or, you know, like on your settings screen, we do this. We do that. And, and a lot of those, if you look at them, um, are like built outside of the repo, uh, they live, uh, effectively like in a GitHub repository, you can go grab them, whatever. Uh, but you know, say, um, you know, those are, uh, kind of made by their support staff and made by their developers to make sure.

[00:28:25] Uh, that customers can have the functionality that they need without having to put that code just into the plugin for everybody. Uh, and I, I do think that having, um, these little bespoke one off plugins is, is ultimately a good thing. I think that the, the response from the core developers of like, no, of course, we’re going to fix this bug.

[00:28:51] Um, And just because a few of you have a wild hair up your ass about the way that, uh, that max, uh, compress things and, uh, that there’s a, a. ds store directory and, and like, I don’t need that, uh, or, you know, the way particular, uh, file handles are written or, or whatever, like who. Cares who ultimately gives a crap, like, uh, sure.

[00:29:19] It’s a little extra cruff. It makes your, uh, WordPress install not so pristine, but like, if you want a pristine WordPress install, have WordPress with no plugins, just use the 2020 theme that, uh, is out the year that you started it and never put anything on there. Like everybody’s WordPress installs are.

[00:29:42] So fucking far from pristine, uh, that like reality that is so real, like 19 different sizes of one image. Come on. Look, even ours, you know, and I’ll speak for myself, but you know, like half the sites, I don’t log into them all the time. Some have auto enables, like they’re all in various. they’re living things, right?

[00:30:04] They’re like these, these dynamic things that are like, and we’ve got millions of plugins all the time updating and the core. So it’s like, they’re all in this sort of state of flux at all times. And if the, if those, those files are not in any way presenting any sort of security risk, I imagine the performance impact is non existent.

[00:30:24] Like, I don’t understand what the. With the actual issue would be with whatever like little like info file that Mac must be including in this thing like it’s it’s like an extra like an extra wrench or whatever in your Ikea box. You’re like, cool. Thanks. No big deal. Right? Like it’s not going to break everything.

[00:30:42] I don’t I don’t understand what the the point is, but I think the the key thing here is. the way that that information is received and what is done with that information, right? So in this particular ticket, you can see sort of what I would call the old wave and the new wave of devs dealing with things like this.

[00:31:05] And you can very sort of clearly see those two things. One is screw you. It’s not a problem. No one’s fixing it. Here’s a plug in if you want, blah, blah, blah. Uh, you’re not doing it right. Everything , everything you’re doing is lame. You probably don’t know what you’re doing. And then the other one is, gosh, you know, we’re, it’s important for us to preserve back compatibility, you know, for the last 20 years.

[00:31:25] It’s kind of our thing. And, uh, we’re, we’ll get on that and we’ll push effect. And, you know, there’s some ways to fix that. Like the attitude difference, the approach difference in that is, is so stark. And, yeah. Right now, maybe because we’re in a transition, right, time between old dev wave that is sort of hopefully aging out.

[00:31:48] And I mean this from a, all the tech people, all those, all the techno optimists, let’s call them. Um, and they’re, you know, they can take their money and they can go, you know, put in politics or whatever and whatever they’re trying to do. But, um, you know, maybe the kind of the, the. The younger people, the newer wave, the, I don’t want to use the word that I’m thinking of because it’s just so loaded, but honestly, like there is an awareness that has come into even tech and probably.

[00:32:21] WordPress is the, sort of, the leader in this, I would say, just because we have so many people that are users, right? This has been part of our, our community for a long time, is the breadth of people, from the basic user to a, you know, a serious core developer, right? And so we’ve always sort of had this dialogue, and we have much more.

[00:32:44] Attempts by the community to be inclusive, to be non gatekeeped, to call out gatekeeping when it is happening. And I see that happening, like you can, you can see that. That, that, not the conflict, but literally the transition, I think, in this ticket, which I think is really interesting. Um, that you can just kind of see who approaches.

[00:33:06] Yeah, you know, like don’t, don’t, don’t build a drag and drop web interface and then complain that people are, you have to use the command line to do the thing. It’s like, are you kidding me? Like, you know, this doesn’t make sense. But this doesn’t make sense. Like, Oh, okay. I need you to run this special zip command in, in the desktop.

[00:33:27] That’s going to remove all the dot files, all the underscore MacOS X files, all the, all this stuff. Right. But by the way, I want you to go and drag and drop that into this box that’s going to upload the file. It’s like, well, why didn’t I have to FTP it? I should have FTP it. Like, I don’t understand why I’m having to like.

[00:33:50] I don’t know, it’s point of the, this is, and you know, I think this is in tech larger, but that’s a great example of that rough transition part in WordPress, because we have that, we have devs being like, why aren’t you using the command line and then you have, on the other hand, you know, we’re making this user friendly, so you don’t ever have to touch a backend, you know, like, Let’s, and we’re all over here.

[00:34:13] Like, are you forgetting about devs? And then over here, these are just the developers. You still have the customer. Who’s like, I need to update the plugin 25 bucks off some website for my cat blog. And now I have no idea what to do. What am I supposed to do here? How do those people solve that problem?

[00:34:30] Where do they go? Like what’s funny is they end up in most cases, they end up going to their web host and going, Hey, what the hell is wrong? I need you to fix this. Right. And so then you have that information. You can say, here’s this, here’s that. And honestly, like. That is a really important component of this that I think hosting companies have really, even, you know, WordPress itself sort of gatekeeps WordPress from the hosting companies.

[00:35:00] And I think that that is, this is an example of how crucial The hosting companies are to being the face of WordPress. Like they are like, people don’t think, Oh, I’m using WordPress, blah, blah, blah. They think I’m using GoDaddy. Right. They don’t, they’re like, my site is on Bluehost. And when I talk, I don’t talk to a WordPress person.

[00:35:19] I log into Bluehost or I log into GoDaddy or like the dream host. And I talked to my dream host support person. Right. Like that is. They, that representation is so important, that connection. And WordPress is over here, like blah, blah, we don’t even care. Blah, blah.

[00:35:39] Oh man. Every show we have, I’m just like ending with my face palmed lately. So one of the things that Courtney brought in was, um, talking about a workaround plugin and I, I love in it, I love workarounds because workarounds, I’m Are literally just technical debt. It’s it, it, it is band aids it’s band aids with some band aids with some band aids on it.

[00:36:03] I love it. I love band aids because what happens is you walk up. Yeah. You walk up and you’re like, Whoa, this thing has 45 band aids on it. Cause no one like fix the root problem. And. Oh, that has never happened in WordPress before. We’ve noticed it in our software. Yeah. When, when you install that plugin, it’s great.

[00:36:24] It fixes the issue, but there are a few other plugins that, uh, I have seen over my time in WordPress that were supposed to be a little work around for an issue that I have found still running on sites. Uh, you know, five years, uh, eight years, whatever later, uh, so I came back with everyone who’s installed that and been like, Oh, by the way, don’t forget to turn that off.

[00:36:52] Or also like, what, what about like we could implement and say, Hey, in the next update that turns us on, it could throw up a little flag and check and be like, Hey, you have this workaround plugin. This fixes it. You can turn that off now. Like, that’d be really cool. But I don’t think that that’s going to happen.

[00:37:08] Yeah. When, when they, uh, if you had, if, if I recall correctly, and I’m sure I’ll get corrected in the comments. Um, but, uh, I remember when they were trying the new WordPress admin interface with the MP6 plugin. Uh, I remember that. Oh, Uh, once, once they actually rolled out the new interface, uh, they deactivated the MP6 plugin for you, like they said, yeah, you don’t need this anymore.

[00:37:45] Right. Because you’re like, So funny. I actually was talking about this yesterday, but I talked about my brother being in my space, right back in the day I’ve talked about it before. So when they were trying to, they were testing a new version, like it was like my space 2. 0 and my brother put my profile into it to test out like, Hey, this is what we’re going to launch.

[00:38:05] They shelved the project and never launched it because Rupert Murdoch, et cetera, et cetera. And my, my, my space profile was stuck. In the non existent profile 2. 0 forever. That was it. That was the end of my profile. I got stuck in the, the, whatever those nether regions are, uh, between a fix or a test and, you know, uh, Jason Cosper You got stuck in Rupert Murdoch’s nether regions.

[00:38:33] And that’s how we’re going to end the show. Oh, my Lord. That was good fun. I got fucking Rupert Murdoch’s and other regions. All right. Well, anyway, um, I do want to say that I, you know, Courtney mentioned there were some devs. Cost of, uh, Colin, um, as, as she called out, you know, that we’re being, I don’t, I didn’t want to just say respectful, honestly, like they were being respectful, they were being, um, taking the issue seriously, concerned about people’s needs.

[00:39:05] They stepped in, they really like, uh, sort of like, okay, let’s all solve this issue together. And that’s what I mean about sort of the new wave of, you know, like non gate. Kept internet, non gate kept WordPress, where it’s like, you know, not treating people as like peons or like people who don’t know anything versus like the developers.

[00:39:27] And you’re not, shouldn’t even be in this conversation, you and your zip files. Um, but so I, it’s so greatly appreciated when people respond that way and just. Just take other people’s problems seriously when you’re trying to solve a problem. That’s really it. That’s all that’s taking people’s concerns seriously.

[00:39:47] That’s it. Do, do I think that people should, uh, use continuous integration? Do I think that people should use best development practices? Yes. Do I not really, uh, like I, I can. Say one thing, I can say one thing and do something different. I can aspire to one day, um, start using, uh, you know, CI continuous integration stuff like on, uh, all of my plugins and development workflows.

[00:40:23] Uh, can I do like my, my friend Steve Grunwell and comment all my code really well and, and, and write. Uh, you know, tests for everything that I do. So yeah. Um, you know, could I, yes, I could, I could conceivably do a lot of things. Well, I probably not. I’m lazy and I just want to move on. Like, I hate, I hate to tell most people this, but the majority of developers out there, except the ones who absolutely have to, uh, stick to, to WordPress coding standards, because they are.

[00:41:00] Putting stuff into core that needs to have tests written for it. That has to preserve backwards compatibility. Those are really the only people who are doing things, uh, as close to perfect as possible there. Because otherwise there wouldn’t be this bug. So, you know, I mean, isn’t that the whole thing, bugs in software, like we’re all like iterations, like we’re all.

[00:41:26] Like, that’s, that’s okay. Making mistakes, like, that’s okay, right? We don’t all have to be perfect. We can try, we can learn. I mean, if things were, if things were perfect, this bug wouldn’t have been introduced in the first place. Exactly. So, maybe they should go back and check their code.

[00:41:48] Hey, happy birthday, Cusper, it’s a DevBranch for the birthday boy. What, what?

[00:41:57] Also, I just want to point out, um, the water background is pixelated because we are a DevBranch. Any way to be. The thumbnails, the thumbnails for the last, I don’t know, a hundred and something episodes were all, or not here, but you know, a hundred and something months or whatever, we’re all pixelated just because it was dev and I wanted to make it look dev.

[00:42:18] So we’re pixelating, we’re censoring the water, it’s dangerous, it has missions of revolution and, uh, and, uh, grandeur. Within it. So if you decode it, um, there’s a whole bunch of like things in there. So you should try. You can only do it on a Linux computer. It would do. Don’t, don’t try to use Winzip or whatever.

[00:42:38] Yeah. You have to do the command line. Good luck. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you very much for hanging out with us. Really appreciate it. We’re not going to be doing a, um, a thing after, but if you, if you do want to go in there and hang out and talk to each other, feel free to do so. Um, you can go, yeah, you can go over to our aftercoolerdaypwatercooler.

[00:42:56] com slash aftercooler and go hang out with other folks that aren’t us. Talk to y’all later. Have a good one.

[00:43:11] This is our outro. As you can tell, it’s not an outro that is pixelated, but maybe I shall pixelate it just to make sure we have something to talk about. Next episode. Talk to y’all later. Buh bye.