[00:00:00] Jason Tucker: This is episode number 468 of WPwatercooler uncurling WordPress 6. 4 I’m Jason Tucker go to my website, JasonTucker.blog, you can find all my links over there.
[00:00:26] Sé Reed: Hey, I’m Sé Reed! I don’t know what I’m doing here, or what you’re doing here, or what any of us are doing here, but here we are at Sé Reed Media!
[00:00:34] Jason Cosper: And y’all know who it is, it’s your boy, Jason Cosper, back at it again on the world’s most influential WordPress podcast.
[00:00:41] Jason Tucker: And speaking of those podcasts, go over the wherever it is you find great podcasts and you might find one of ours and hang out with us in our discord,
[00:00:50] Sé Reed: Yeah, you better!
[00:00:51] Jason Cosper: really popping off lately.
[00:00:53] Sé Reed: Popping off, and it’s not just because of me! I’m not the only
[00:00:58] Jason Tucker: Cause, cause they figured out how to install discord and now she’s in there talking with people and stuff. It’s been
[00:01:03] Jason Cosper: And Tucker who hates chat apps is
[00:01:08] Jason Tucker: especially slack.
[00:01:09] Jason Cosper: discord. Okay. Yeah. Okay.
[00:01:12] Jason Tucker: I like discord.
[00:01:13] Sé Reed: We’re bringing back a trillion I believe, as well, we’re bringing back Trillian in the form of Discord if you’re a Xennial or a Millennial or a sad Gen Xer, come on over. Gen Z also welcome, but I don’t know
[00:01:28] Jason Tucker: Just need to install the egg
[00:01:30] Sé Reed: I don’t have video
[00:01:30] Jason Tucker: the on the discord server.
[00:01:32] Jason Cosper: we’ve got a ton of sad Zennials up in the place.
[00:01:36] Sé Reed: we really don’t.
[00:01:37] Jason Cosper: Speaking of sad Zennials, Scott Kingsley Clark!
[00:01:42] Scott Kingsley Clark: It’s me.
[00:01:43] Sé Reed: he’s a straight Millennial. Sorry.
[00:01:47] Scott Kingsley Clark: Maybe the millennial part.
[00:01:50] Sé Reed: Yeah, sorry, I just read about the, that was an adjective specifically relating to the millennial component, insofar as that you were born in anyway, the years that are millennial. I’m going to stop talking now. Anyway, you’re back. What brings us here?
[00:02:09] Sé Reed: today we are I don’t know if y’all noticed, because things have been crazy, wild the latest version of WordPress released on Tuesday.
[00:02:25] Sé Reed: Did anybody catch it? It just flew by. I was
[00:02:29] Jason Tucker: after it was good.
[00:02:31] Sé Reed: there. I have so many thoughts on 6. 4, having had this be my first release. Lead experience, very likely my last
[00:02:40] Jason Tucker: So it was your fault is what you’re saying. Is that what’s happened here?
[00:02:43] Sé Reed: I am one of the team. According to some project leadership, yes, the community needed to catch some more things. But there was, there were some issues and if you’re listening to this, you probably were aware of those issues.
[00:02:57] Sé Reed: And those issues have interesting implications. In so many directions. Social implications, community implications, leadership implications, technological implications, in terms of literally how the,
[00:03:17] Jason Tucker: Who would have
[00:03:17] Sé Reed: turns out, it’s a many layered beast, this WordPress thing we got going on.
[00:03:22] Jason Cosper: to another
[00:03:24] Sé Reed: but I think this is a good time to get us all on the same page, we have the lovely Scott Kingsley Clark here with us today, and they are going to serve as our technological touchstone. In terms
[00:03:41] Jason Tucker: Touchstone
[00:03:43] Sé Reed: of for the technological part of the… Is fiasco too big of a word?
[00:03:51] Scott Kingsley Clark: I guess it depends on if you were impacted.
[00:03:57] Jason Cosper: All the time
[00:03:58] Jason Tucker: was
[00:03:59] Sé Reed: got one stern email from a client about the events calendar pro set kicking some sort of error that was like a new error that I believe was related to that. But other than that I’m fine.
[00:04:12] Jason Cosper: The events calendar folks were having problems. WooCommerce people were having problems. About 15 million people had updated to WordPress 6. 4 according to the download counter. Taking a consideration that some of those downloads may not actually be on active sites or whatever, but still around 15 million people were on 6.
[00:04:37] Jason Cosper: 4 within a day of its release.
[00:04:40] Sé Reed: mean we could write off a million of those as being like, what, test installs? I don’t know.
[00:04:44] Jason Tucker: Hopefully, hopefully their test installs.
[00:04:46] Sé Reed: Two million? I don’t know, like half? I don’t know, but that’s a lot of people in an immediate update position, because I’m not in that. All my clients are on managed hosting, and as far as I know, most managed hosts are not immediate updaters.
[00:05:02] Sé Reed: But, hence, no problems for me. But so actually in, in, in our discord for folks who aren’t aware and because this isn’t a dev branch, so we won’t be super like navel gazy and just assume that everybody is like up to date on what happened when WordPress 6. 4 shipped it shipped with an update to a library that. WordPress uses called requests and in requests for certain hosting configurations.
[00:05:39] Jason Cosper: So not all necessarily those 15 million people on WordPress 6. 4 were experiencing this problem, but a lot of them were, the Tiffany bridge in our discord I’ll just, her summary was really the best breakdown of this essentially for certain hosting configurations, the thing that closes the curl request got removed from.
[00:06:03] Jason Cosper: The request library. So any external requests would just hang out forever, stack up, bog down performance and fail to complete because somebody put in a one line pull request to the request library to solve some hyper specific problem that they were having with their intrusion detection system. One of the main users of that library repeatedly requested that he submit.
[00:06:28] Jason Cosper: Test for his pull request, he kept claiming he couldn’t, that it was too hard to test, so they merged it anyway.
[00:06:37] Scott Kingsley Clark: Like a little backstory there is like this impacted not necessarily every single WordPress install. It was a very specific range of curl versions. And if you were running like, for instance, PHP 7. 4, you were more than likely If you’re impacted by this or something below 7. 4, you’re more likely impacted by this.
[00:06:57] Scott Kingsley Clark: One of my sites was 7. 4. I encountered this on release day. Didn’t realize what it was. I was like, oh, must be a hosting blip. I’ll just update PHP because maybe my config got borked on my personal site. Updated PHP went away. Didn’t even think about it again. Until it clicked when I connected that occurrence with…
[00:07:15] Scott Kingsley Clark: A github issue that opened up
[00:07:17] Sé Reed: So wait, so what I’m hearing here is, if you’re on 7. 4 or below, it’s your fault. Sorry.
[00:07:26] Scott Kingsley Clark: So one of the
[00:07:27] Scott Kingsley Clark: With these kinds of like really important libraries is this specific one, to its credit, had lots of testing coverage. It covers the tests are on a matrix of many different PHP versions, even 7. 4. Lots of different things could have caught this. However, we’re talking about specific cURL versions, and when you’re talking about not just changing PHP versions, you’re actually talking about multiple different other pieces and other library versions to be able to test against.
[00:08:01] Scott Kingsley Clark: I think in the near future, we’re going to see new matrices added for different cURL versions, but there wasn’t multiple cURL versions. So the 7. 4 version that was tested and passed, all these things passed. That wasn’t impacted because it didn’t have that affected curl version.
[00:08:19] Sé Reed: The real kicker here is that you can’t test all the possible permutations of all the different versions of everybody’s library everywhere with, it’s like exponentially, it’s like trying to guess a password. There’s just exponentially different configurations that could be happening there.
[00:08:41] Sé Reed: Okay, you can test for XYZ, but you literally can’t test for every possibility. And,
[00:08:50] Jason Cosper: Right.
[00:08:50] Sé Reed: And if this seems to me, this is something that, that speaks to the greater project, is that these little bits of it. For example, curl, or the request library, or whatever it is. They are very ignored.
[00:09:06] Sé Reed: They are very much just these sort of little islands. And we’ve run into this problem with the recent discussions about PHP in general, and the wordpre I can never remember the right letters. It’s because it’s called Codesniffer, right? The P H P Codesniffer?
[00:09:23] Jason Cosper: phpcs.
[00:09:23] Sé Reed: W P C S, P H P C S, there’s too many letters.
[00:09:27] Sé Reed: And Codesniffer just makes me think of a dog every time, so I get distracted in my head. I’m like, oh, a dog, it’s a puppy. I know it’s terrible. ADHD for the win. But the point being is that there are these tiny little crucial parts of WordPress. Bits of technology holding up WordPress.
[00:09:52] Sé Reed: Also holding up the whole of the internet. But we don’t have to talk about all of that, but all these little parts of WordPress that are crucial, but neglected, and not only neglected, but because they’re neglected, when something does change there, or someone does pay attention, There’s really not enough structure, infrastructure, or institutional knowledge around it to even understand how it could be impacting everywhere, because not enough eyeballs are on it to say, oh that’s going to impact this particular setup, or whatever it might be, right?
[00:10:29] Sé Reed: So there’s not, you, some one person, two people, three people, which I believe there were three main people overseeing this area, right? They can’t have all that information. That’s not possible. I think this is really it’s problematic from a, I love that we use that word so often it’s problematic from a attention standpoint and A technology standpoint,
[00:11:02] Scott Kingsley Clark: one of the, one of the challenges I think with projects like the request library and everything else that the WordPress relies on, even PHP itself is underfunded. Underfunded or just really not funded at all?
[00:11:17] Scott Kingsley Clark: underfunded, close to, I don’t know, the current sponsorship level, but everyone in the PHP
[00:11:23] Sé Reed: Minimally,
[00:11:24] Scott Kingsley Clark: has been identifying this as a major issue.
[00:11:26] Scott Kingsley Clark: They’re not getting enough funding. And if the PHP library itself that everyone is using is underfunded, then you have to look at the libraries themselves built with PHP, like requests and even phpcs all the different. Tooling that all the developers across all these different plugins and companies, we use it at GoDaddy.
[00:11:46] Scott Kingsley Clark: We use it at Liquid Web when I was working there. Like we, we use all these different libraries to build stuff and these are not funded well at all. So
[00:11:56] Jason Cosper: It’s, I, there I dropped it into our private chat and there’s an xkcd comic about this because
[00:12:07] Sé Reed: There’s an XKCD comment for everything.
[00:12:10] Jason Cosper: absolutely, but it’s just A stack of a bunch of precarious blocks and down near the bottom, a very thin block that says a project, some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.
[00:12:23] Jason Cosper: And that’s all modern digital infrastructure. That is what this all comes down to is we have things like requests. We have like simple pie is another one that’s just in WordPress and has been like thanklessly. Maintained for all of these years and I,
[00:12:48] Sé Reed: It’s a house of cards, we’re building on a house of cards. This is why it’s so systemic, it’s like not just the technology, the house, I mean it’s not just the community that’s on a house of cards and built on this like crumbling facade. I feel like there’s that meme going around about ancient Rome, and how many times a day do you think about ancient Rome?
[00:13:07] Sé Reed: How many times a week? Have you all heard this one?
[00:13:10] Jason Cosper: yeah, it’s weird. Cause I only ever think about ancient Rome when somebody brings up that
[00:13:15] Sé Reed: Me too! Except for right now, I’m like, oh, it’s like that meme about ancient Rome. But except for the, everything is crumbling. Like it’s like building on top of the ruins, like the ruins are actively crumbling. It’s not even like ancient Rome when the buildings were like solid. It’s we, could
[00:13:35] Sé Reed: we are building
[00:13:36] Jason Tucker: PHP funding
[00:13:37] Sé Reed: on top of ruins.
[00:13:38] Sé Reed: What?
[00:13:39] Jason Tucker: So can we go back to the PHP funding side of things? So like the idea
[00:13:44] Sé Reed: get into that, Quagmire.
[00:13:46] Jason Tucker: A little bit when you go and buy a car, and then you go and license your car, you’re paying for the license. And the license is what hopefully throws some money into paying for the roads and the infrastructure and stuff.
[00:14:01] Jason Tucker: And then you have insurance, you have all these other things. The licensing part literally it’s in the name you’re being allowed to drive that car. And by being allowed to drive that car, you can drive it on the roads. As long as it’s a free road that you’re allowed to drive on. So looking at the PHP foundation, all these people are using PHP in their projects and no one’s really paying anything to it, but you go look on PHP, the php.
[00:14:29] Jason Tucker: foundations website, automatics on there, JetBrains is on there, CraftCMS is on there, like a whole bunch of different companies are listed on here. If it’s underfunded, then what’s going on here?
[00:14:45] Scott Kingsley Clark: like one of the challenges there is if you’re thinking about, let’s look at it from the top down. So the top is a developer chooses to use a library, chooses to use PHP and so on. So developer chooses to use WordPress. WordPress is funded. By all the people doing the work Automatic throws people time into there, all these different companies throw people time in, sponsoring, keeping it alive.
[00:15:10] Scott Kingsley Clark: Then the layer below that is all these libraries that we’re all using whether or not we recognize that we use them or specifically are using them for our own projects those themselves are being maintained by like you said, it’s like, it’s a house of cards, like every level, there’s another issue.
[00:15:30] Scott Kingsley Clark: So any level is susceptible to this. WordPress itself, you’ve got the libraries, you’ve got the people that are using libraries that are maybe Composer or NPM that rely on other libraries. All these things, like turtles all the way down, you
[00:15:44] Jason Cosper: Don’t even bring NPM into this, cause then you
[00:15:48] Scott Kingsley Clark: we’ve got problems.
[00:15:49] Jason Cosper: And
[00:15:50] Sé Reed: Oh Lordy.
[00:15:52] Jason Cosper: dependencies at any time I need to install something through NPM I have to immediately install 400 megs of packages just to be able to make my CSS smaller or some shit, it’s Oh my God.
[00:16:07] Sé Reed: I the thing is here though, is that we this is a great illustration of trickle down economics. There we go. Just to bring it around. It doesn’t work. The trickle down, not trickling. The money that’s coming into that top thing, that’s what I mean also about all those neglected parts, right?
[00:16:28] Sé Reed: Once you get down a few layers this has been something that a good friend of the show, Courtney Robertson, has been… Documenting and talking about for actively for at least a year, having gone to all of the various open source based the PHP conference, all these various open source conferences over the past year or so, or more, and being like, where’s WordPress?
[00:16:56] Sé Reed: Where is everybody? There’s no WordPress people there for these libraries that we are heavily dependent on. And this is you’ve got your people up here putting the money in and doing all the flashy stuff and putting their WordCamp advertising in. And then by the time you get down to this bottom part, it’s just not as flashy, right?
[00:17:15] Sé Reed: No one’s paying attention to those. So those things are hard to fund from a marketing perspective. And apparently… That whole the analogy of the commons, that’s what this becomes, right? The commons is down here and this is the same analogy that you were making Jason, is that everyone’s just riding on these roads, everyone’s just using this technology, and nothing’s getting to it, and not even sunlight to tell people that it’s degrading, right?
[00:17:46] Sé Reed: Because we’re not even if you’re driving on a road, you might notice that there are potholes. But the way that the technology is set up, we don’t notice those potholes until something happens like Tuesday, right? Where everything starts breaking and everyone’s like, why is this breaking? What tiny little library is this over here that we, is super crucial?
[00:18:07] Sé Reed: So that’s our pothole. To know that hey, this bridge is crumbling a little bit. We should probably do something with it.
[00:18:15] Jason Tucker: Yeah. Just looking at the, their financials.
[00:18:19] Sé Reed: Is this a PHP project?
[00:18:21] Jason Tucker: Yeah. They’re literally running off of a half, half a million bucks in their budget.
[00:18:27] Sé Reed: Being able to speak as someone who is also an open collect who has an open collective organization, the amounts collected there is really the important part. The estimated budget. That could go away at any time if people take away their annual pledges or anything like that. Really, I would say probably that total dispersed number, which is about 385, 000, that’s really the amount that you’re talking about.
[00:18:54] Sé Reed: Because the, just the way that it works with with in, it’s not all income.
[00:19:02] Scott Kingsley Clark: and there’s also 1, 657 contributors to the funding here
[00:19:09] Sé Reed: But that could be anywhere from, as
[00:19:10] Scott Kingsley Clark: more people using
[00:19:12] Sé Reed: Look at JetBrains getting up in there with the 200, 000. That is that’s awesome. Actually, JetBrains did more than automatic. I like this.
[00:19:24] Scott Kingsley Clark: I had a quick point to this as a company, when you choose to use a technology, It’s because you want to not have to build that technology yourself. So you choose to use WordPress. I don’t want to build my own CMS. I want to use WordPress. You choose to use a library like requests. I don’t want to go build this stuff in WordPress core.
[00:19:43] Scott Kingsley Clark: I want to use this library or whatever for your own project. So when you’re thinking about that as a company, at least this makes the most sense to show as an example, a company could either use a library to save money. Or build it themselves and maintain it. The cost of maintaining it over time, to deal with bugs and issues like that, may not be generalized, so you don’t see all the bugs, you’ll just encounter them yourself and deal with them as that happens over time.
[00:20:06] Scott Kingsley Clark: But that has a real cost. But when they choose to use a library, and not donate. to that library, or any of the libraries it depends on. I feel like that is a big neglect, because now you have this money that you would have to pay for, that you’ve chosen not to because, oh, someone else did it. So it’s like copy and paste.
[00:20:28] Scott Kingsley Clark: The problem here is now they’re not getting any of that money because you chose the free route. And just think everything is free. We don’t need to worry about it. And I’m sure they would, will hear about it if they need something like you won’t hear about it when they need something you probably won’t as a company, you should be proactive and choosing to Okay.
[00:20:50] Scott Kingsley Clark: fund all these things that you have actively chosen to use as a library instead of build yourself, do an internal audit and figure out what you have, how much would it cost to replace it?
[00:20:59] Scott Kingsley Clark: Now you’ve got your budget. Even a half of that budget or a quarter of that budget donated a year, would be more than a zero.
[00:21:08] Jason Cosper: year
[00:21:08] Sé Reed: Is I believe they have put that in the column called profit, and it is no longer a cost, it is now a money I can take home and not money I need to pay to someone else. And that’s the trade off, right? Because it’s just right there. Why not just take that?
[00:21:25] Sé Reed: Someone else will pay for it. This was a bigger problem in society in general, with this whole taxes thing. Would people pay for the roads if they didn’t have to pay for it with their in order to drive their car? If it wasn’t mandatory? Who’s opting in to give away their money for something that they could get for free?
[00:21:46] Sé Reed: I am. We are. But the corporations, especially the bigger ones they… There’s a real difficulty, even if, let’s just, let’s assume good intent, I love saying that these days, it’s real fun. Ring’s really authentic. But let’s assume good intent and say that these people don’t just they realize that it’s something they should be funding, but they just don’t…
[00:22:14] Sé Reed: They don’t even, at that point, know how to convey to the budget people, the accountants, the shareholders the value of that. That’s a big part of why we started the WPCC, so we could have a place to start to… And then they have a place to fund it because that is really the way that, especially in America that’s how support works. It’s basically money. People like what you’re doing. They want to give you money. That’s how that works. But the argument is not even there because people don’t even have that first part realizing that it’s a need, let alone the ability to then convince.
[00:22:59] Sé Reed: The people with the purse strings that it’s a need to pay for, right? Like it’s a need technologically, that’s already a struggle. Then on top of that need financially, like we’re not even there. This is it’s bonkers.
[00:23:14] Jason Cosper: Yeah to extend that analogy even further to keep running with that train of thought it’s very reminiscent of the American healthcare system where we have these like you basically are getting All this stuff like through your employer, like there are other countries that have a preventative socialized medicine that have a better rate of I’m going to, I guess I’m
[00:23:53] Sé Reed: better healing rate.
[00:23:55] Jason Cosper: A better healing rate, better life expectancy, all of the, all of these things, and effectively and maybe this is a stretch.
[00:24:04] Jason Cosper: I don’t know, but like all that we’re doing with our infrastructure of PHP and all of the dependencies and everything else is that we’re waiting for that GoFundMe to show up. We’re waiting for,
[00:24:24] Sé Reed: It’s exactly what it is. We need, we are literally doing GoFundMes for, that is exactly like like PHP, I don’t want to make light of a terminal disease, but like PHP has a terminal disease and we are literally putting together GoFundMes for it. You’re correct. That is a terrifying and sad, but also real
[00:24:45] Jason Tucker: And we’re using less and less of it as we replace it and change things
[00:24:49] Sé Reed: What, of PHP?
[00:24:51] Jason Tucker: stuff. Yeah
[00:24:52] Sé Reed: That’s, okay, so that’s an interesting angle, right? Is it like, is it part of a, not to get conspiracy theorists on us or anything, but is it part of a greater agenda to un PHP, if we’re talking specifically about WordPress, to un PHP the WordPress project? That doesn’t…
[00:25:11] Jason Tucker: PHP is a gasoline car and we’ve started buying electric cars
[00:25:16] Sé Reed: Are we in a hybrid right now, maybe? We’re in a
[00:25:18] Jason Tucker: And the electric cars don’t they don’t have to buy gas. So you don’t have to buy, you don’t have to take some of that tax money from the gas to help fund the roadways because
[00:25:28] Sé Reed: Now again, I believe that’s called profit, I think.
[00:25:32] Jason Tucker: but it doesn’t just come from the license that I use as an example.
[00:25:35] Jason Tucker: What I’m saying is it’s just we’re starting to do more things now, but the thing is if you look at peach, if you look at WordPress itself, it is a massive collection of libraries that are in there. There’s all sorts of stuff that’s being pulled in. All sorts of
[00:25:49] Sé Reed: and more even now, like
[00:25:51] Jason Tucker: are
[00:25:51] Sé Reed: font libraries.
[00:25:52] Jason Tucker: that as well.
[00:25:53] Jason Tucker: So yeah, it’s a, there, there’s a lot.
[00:25:56] Sé Reed: But that’s the thing, this isn’t just one roadway, right? So that’s where the analogy stops, because obviously we have more than one roadway, but it’s not just like one system. This is like, all the bridges, and all the connecting things, like it’s the ground itself is… is what we’re building this on and it’s not one road’s gonna go out and then we can like just fix that or something.
[00:26:20] Sé Reed: This is it’s systemic.
[00:26:24] Jason Tucker: Yeah.
[00:26:24] Sé Reed: This is very depressing lately in WordPress
[00:26:28] Sé Reed: That’s all I gotta say. Alright okay, we
[00:26:30] Scott Kingsley Clark: took PHP out though, like it doesn’t solve the funding problem. Like now it’s all shifted to all the React stuff and Node stuff.
[00:26:37] Jason Cosper: Yeah it just becomes someone else’s
[00:26:39] Sé Reed: is gonna pay for React, right? That’s a joke, because I hate Facebook.
[00:26:47] Jason Tucker: And Steven in the chat is saying for developers, the dependencies keep growing.
[00:26:54] Sé Reed: But does and all of this free stuff is happening and there’s no… Oh, that’s sad. There’s no other than maybe the WPCC or conversations like this I do not see a big push in general of awareness for these libraries. I there’s organizations like the Oakland Collective Foundation that are working to allow self help for that.
[00:27:21] Sé Reed: But this always, this obviously brings up governance. Everything always brings up freaking governance. But the, There’s no structure to how we can solve these problems. There’s not even a space to talk about these problems other than after the fact in a wildly fast emergency hotfix release cycle.
[00:27:47] Sé Reed: That’s how we’re dealing with stuff. And by the way,
[00:27:51] Jason Cosper: in
[00:27:53] Sé Reed: fixing that. Not a problem. I’m just saying if that’s another dependency. We’re not just dependent on these libraries. We’re also dependent on this weird sponsored corporate structure that, I don’t know, I don’t think it’s going away, but it could go away.
[00:28:12] Sé Reed: It could, it’s just another dependency, is my point. And it has, with it, all the struggles that come with that dependency. Can you bite the hand that is keeping you… Live, you cannot, right? Scott, can you solve this problem for us? Do
[00:28:32] Jason Tucker: Yeah you have a solution? Thank you
[00:28:35] Jason Tucker: How about what you were talking about in the chat, Scott, like the, this the idea of fight for the future and using those types of hours to to contribute to PHP curl or any other types of things. Can you expand on that a little bit
[00:28:52] Scott Kingsley Clark: So like why is it, I haven’t sussed this out to figure out if it counts for five for the future, but why would it be that a contribution to. A library that WordPress uses at the top level or the lower level, like a very basic level could be if you were to contribute to one of those libraries, why would that not count towards you contributing to WordPress in the same way that you’re contributing to WordPress, because that is helping the ecosystem, like how is that not helping WordPress by feeding the ecosystem it relies on?
[00:29:27] Scott Kingsley Clark: I would love to see that possibly. Expand it out to say Hey, we would love you to contribute to WordPress, but also, Hey, these projects need love too. So if you’re not really liking WordPress itself, like you don’t want to deal with all the contribution stuff and deal with PHP or whatever, you can use your time to invest in the other libraries that we depend on.
[00:29:50] Scott Kingsley Clark: And those libraries could use your help and funding and
[00:29:53] Jason Tucker: deal with their contribution stuff?
[00:29:56] Scott Kingsley Clark: deal with theirs.
[00:29:57] Sé Reed: Poison.
[00:29:58] Scott Kingsley Clark: It is significantly easier to get something into some of those libraries than it is to get into WordPress.
[00:30:03] Sé Reed: I guess it’s pretty easy to get something into the request library and learn from it.
[00:30:07] Scott Kingsley Clark: It’s easy to get a highly impactful thing in there. I wouldn’t even know
[00:30:14] Scott Kingsley Clark: can introduce a bug.
[00:30:15] Sé Reed: look, today, and we have to go now but today someone posted in, this is just the disparity of where we’re doing all this stuff, because I wouldn’t even have any clue. I don’t even know where that, I went and looked at that pull request that, where that, Where the change was made.
[00:30:33] Sé Reed: And then re regressed or whatever you call it when you put the pull, pull request back. But like the, there’s buried in some like tiny GitHub, like 10 branches out from something. And literally this morning I got a pinging again from Courtney Brenda, the show about a post in.
[00:30:55] Sé Reed: A new issue in a repo for WPOrg 2022, which is the current place that we are doing all of the site development for WordPress. org, definitely still 2022. The description says, this is for block themes. It’s, there’s no correlation that this is where that stuff would happen. But for the post was about a new page or a new way to surface some of the Slack. Channels that are available for contributors. Luckily, Courtney’s paying attention, was able to link me up because the marketing team is, has been working on a contributor onboarding flow. And just on Wednesday, we created a new page that has like. The instructions, but we’re over here doing this contributor flow, and this other person’s over in this tiny GitHub repo, like 10 pages over, making a comment, and it’s we’re talking about literally the exact same thing, and I’ve got three GitHub issues active and open over here, and they’re talking about over here, and there’s no connection, other than Courtney, who’s literally holding the project together
[00:32:04] Jason Tucker: the human API,
[00:32:05] Sé Reed: with all her hands and like with
[00:32:08] Jason Cosper: So
[00:32:10] Jason Tucker: the cred.
[00:32:11] Sé Reed: yeah she’s basically holding the whole thing together when I say hi Courtney when I say you know the tape and string I actually mean Courtney the point is like
[00:32:21] Jason Cosper: I
[00:32:24] Sé Reed: anyone even supposed to know that’s something that needs help?
[00:32:29] Sé Reed: It’s buried the, we can’t even find the stuff for the main pages of the website that we are working on as the marketing team. How is it, a tiny little library that’s having there’s a whole discussion that’s been going on in 6. 4 about the Gutenberg release. issue, like the Gutenberg number that should be going into the each release, like which most updated version of Gutenberg which gets updated like what every two weeks, every week or something, like super, like wild, fast paced updating, and there’s this ongoing discussion about which one of those libraries should go in and how it should be applied, and it’s the same conversation like you have to be paying attention to not just the WordPress core, but also the Gutenberg repo, and also this other one over here, and apparently the React library, and also all of the PHP stuff etc.
[00:33:27] Sé Reed: Like, when we say House of Cards… It’s a big house of cards, and this is not, there is not a simple solution to this. And I don’t know what, I don’t know what we should do. I’m tired of feeling like I don’t know what we should do. Anyway we have to end on a fairly timely note today, because we have an announcement.
[00:33:54] Sé Reed: But Scott, if you had anything else you wanted to say before… They wanted to close out with.
[00:34:00] Scott Kingsley Clark: Yeah, like just to recap, WordPress has lots of attention and support for funding. There’s plugins, there’s all the dependencies, libraries, everything else, PHP itself, all these different things could also use the love. So I’d love to keep our minds open to possibilities of how can we, as good WordPress community and industry help support all these things that we also rely on.
[00:34:25] Scott Kingsley Clark: The tooling. Especially the things that aren’t shipped, but the things that we use to build that kind of stuff is important.
[00:34:35] Sé Reed: Let’s do this. Who wants to make the announcement?
[00:34:40] Jason Cosper: Tucker.
[00:34:40] Sé Reed: Tucker?
[00:34:41] Jason Tucker: Sure. Okay. I think my phone’s off. I can’t do my…
[00:34:46] Jason Tucker: so we we do a lot of discussions here on WPwatercooler during the show and we’ve we started doing using Discord as our way of just having a an open place for people to just come and talk and hang out and everything, all tech space. And so we thought we would open up something new that we’re calling Aftercooler.
[00:35:06] Jason Tucker: So if you go to day water core.com/after cooler, or if you’re already in our Discord, you can just go and find it under the mouth sounds section and you can go hang out in there. It’s audio base not recorded. Hop in, say hi, talk.
[00:35:23] Sé Reed: a safe space.
[00:35:24] Jason Tucker: be fun.
[00:35:26] Sé Reed: We’ll be in there after the show in a couple of minutes. We’re open already and we’ll we’ll say hi over there.
[00:35:33] Jason Tucker: and hang out.
[00:35:34] Sé Reed: Yes, and you can pledge all your time.
[00:35:37] Jason Tucker: here is our outro. Go over to.
[00:35:47] Jason Tucker: There, we would really appreciate it. And come hang out with us in our discord. Talk to y’all later. You have a good one. Bye bye.
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