EP482 – Gutenberg It’s Complicated

[00:00:00] Jason Tucker: So number 482 of WPwatercooler Gutenberg, it’s

[00:00:13] Se Reed: It’s complicated,

[00:00:17] Jason Tucker: I’m Jason Tucker. I have a website, jasontucker. blog. You can go take a look at it.

[00:00:23] Se Reed: can and should. I’m Sé Reed. I am at Sé Reed Media on most of the things, even the things be done.

[00:00:32] 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 monkey paw of a WordPress podcast.

[00:00:41] Jason Tucker: And speaking of that, go find us wherever it is. You can find great podcasts and come hang out with us in our discord at watercoolerslack. lol. Can,

[00:00:52] Se Reed: so good. It got me with monkeypaw, Cosper, right off the bat. He just started it right away.

[00:01:00] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:01:01] Se Reed: I have two things to just say about just the moment before we move into the topic.

[00:01:08] Jason Tucker: can a third one be introducing Courtney? Yay.

[00:01:21] Se Reed: friend of the show, and Rolodex memory of the show, Courtney Robertson.

[00:01:29] Courtney Robertson: Hey friends,

[00:01:31]

[00:01:31] Courtney Robertson: Tell you about Sé’s thoughts about the media library dating back to the first year of the show?

[00:01:37] Se Reed: could probably recite what’s funny is I was about to say you could recite my evolving step, my evolving take on it, but it hasn’t changed because the media library hasn’t changed. Okay. This is not about the media library. I just, I want to say two things. One, I have a Pusheen cup today.

[00:01:55] Se Reed: For those of you who could not see, I always have this cup, but I remembered when I just got here, why I don’t use it is because it’s only the back of the cup facing the other person. I don’t get this. Is it a left handers person cup? I, maybe that is, it’s for left handed people. I’m going to be trying to drink with my left hand today over the microphone, so if I clunk, I apologize.

[00:02:19] Se Reed: So I’m not

[00:02:19] Courtney Robertson: holding a mug from WordCamp Ventura that has, it’s a mason jar with a handle. Cosper brought some

[00:02:29] Se Reed: Mountain Dew Zero. This totally

[00:02:31] Courtney Robertson: to the show and

[00:02:32] Se Reed: remember Root Beer Xevia, Xevia

[00:02:37] Se Reed: they would talk about their drinks

[00:02:40] Jason Tucker: by the way, all sponsored.

[00:02:41] Se Reed: don’t remember? No, I don’t. I don’t remember it either. Okay. Shoot. Has anyone done the double thumbs down? Because I just discovered what it does. I don’t know if you, I discovered this week what it does. Anyway it

[00:03:01] Jason Cosper: save it for later in the show.

[00:03:03] Se Reed: Yeah, I won’t do it now. But I wanted to say,

[00:03:05] Courtney Robertson: people are so lost.

[00:03:25] Se Reed: A wardrobe shift out, but this is a really comfortable sweater.

[00:03:28] Se Reed: But today I was reflecting on how it is WordPress birthday time again. Yeah. Yep.

[00:03:35] Se Reed: thinking how different this year has been last year and I just thought that was interesting. That’s all. It’s a nostalgic thought I’d share with folks about last year and our 20th anniversary project and our high hopes and oh, and this year how dashed they’ve been.

[00:03:51] Jason Cosper: It’s Word, WordPress is going to be old enough to drink and boy, do we all need it. It

[00:03:57] Jason Tucker: And they can pay

[00:03:58] Jason Tucker: for

[00:03:58] Courtney Robertson: has been, in most countries not named USA for three plus years,

[00:04:05] Se Reed: yeah, but

[00:04:06] Courtney Robertson: countries I think do like beer and cider at 16 and liquor at 18 or something

[00:04:12] Se Reed: WordPress was born here in the U. S., so I feel like it’s a citizen, and 21’s a big deal. Look, it’s obeyed most of the other adolescent stages, so let’s hope in four more years, frontal lobe stabilizes a little bit. Exactly. That’s where I’m going with this. It’s complicated.

[00:04:33] Courtney Robertson: all

[00:04:37] Se Reed: thought we should have The reason I brought my friend of the show, Ms.

[00:04:40] Se Reed: Courtney Robertson, on today is because there was so much

[00:04:44] Courtney Robertson: us

[00:04:49] Se Reed: that, that stemmed really from a single tweet, a single sad, resigned,

[00:04:55] Courtney Robertson: Almost 87, 000 views now, tweet.

[00:04:59] Se Reed: 000?

[00:05:00] Courtney Robertson: 87 almost.

[00:05:02] Se Reed: Oh, I’m sorry, 87, 000.

[00:05:04] Courtney Robertson: 000 people.

[00:05:06] Se Reed: Yeah, how many likes? Because it had a lot of likes. Does anyone check that ratio?

[00:05:11] Courtney Robertson: Should we share the message that you’re referring to on the

[00:05:14] Se Reed: Yes. Longtime contributor Ari, who I’ve not met, but Courtney, you have Ari’s great.

[00:05:24] Se Reed: That he gives up

[00:05:26] Se Reed: It’s just, this is just so the captures the zeitgeist of the moment right now. It is unbelievable.

[00:05:34] Courtney Robertson: Let me give a little background on Ari.

[00:05:38] Se Reed: Please do.

[00:05:39] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, ARI is, so folks know about this, ARI is the one that took lead originally on the font library API work, so if you go through core posts and you look at that, ARI was the one contributing to that. ARI has a long time Yoast contributor, was specifically at Yoast the company.

[00:05:59] Courtney Robertson: in core for quite some time doing a good bit of work, I believe, on Gutenberg, not just font library APIs. And I got a chance to meet Ari at WordCamp EU. Last year. Yeah. Last year. Briefly. And yeah, now that we’re past pandemic, there’s been a couple of WordCamp Europe’s that I’ve gotten a chance to be at.

[00:06:23] Courtney Robertson: And so I got to meet Ari there and Ari also is now working for Mr. Yoast, not Yoast the company, but Mr. Yoast as in through Amelia Capital and is sponsored that way. So Ari wrote a tweet that says I give up. I can no longer contribute to Gutenberg. I can’t understand our code anymore. At this stage, it’s alien to me, and it keeps getting more complex instead of simpler.

[00:06:49] Courtney Robertson: I’m wasting too much time trying to understand what we do.

[00:06:55] Jason Cosper: Yeah. And you said he’s he’s been working on the font API. It’s not like he’s coming in. Fresh to any of this Ari has been working on this stuff. Yeah. Elbows deep for quite some time. And I’m imagine how hard things are for a new contributor when long time contributors are like, I don’t get any of this.

[00:07:29] Courtney Robertson: Yeah I believe Ari had just taken several months away from, at least Gutenberg might have taken that time away from contributing. So

[00:07:40] Se Reed: everything.

[00:07:42] Courtney Robertson: three months,

[00:07:43] Se Reed: And had had amnesia and

[00:07:48] Courtney Robertson: he probably still knows a good bit of React. I don’t think he’s lost the knowledge of the programming language. There’s a couple of factors that we can dig into about what ARI’s main points are. A super short summary, and we can then let this evolve into seeing how the community responded. A super short summary is that let’s say that you just came back from an extended vacation or a sabbatical or whatever your reason is for

[00:08:15] Se Reed: that’s a naughty word here.

[00:08:16] Courtney Robertson: And

[00:08:17] Se Reed: naughty word. Wow.

[00:08:18] Courtney Robertson: back and you start digging in. Your skills as a dev might be fractions of a second a little slow because you’ve been away for a bit, which is fine. But now it’s time to get back in and get up to speed. And so what do you need? You need to know What file that you want to open, so that was part one of this big issue, is locating which file because we have more and more dependencies?

[00:08:46] Courtney Robertson: Or what is the right word that I’m looking for, Cosper, about when we have abstractions? Abstractions.

[00:08:54] Se Reed: I think it’s the the events calendar method of building out, right? You just put one line in each file.

[00:09:03] Courtney Robertson: version of, So as part of and just to give folks a little bit of background on this, like the level and layer of things that need to be installed in order to make Gutenberg run in order to develop Gutenberg, in order to test Gutenberg you have Node. js for the people who are like watching and listening who aren’t developers you can.

[00:09:39] Jason Cosper: Have Node. js install all of your dependencies for you. And it’ll just be like, Hey I guess it’s time to go make a pot of coffee because I’m going to wait for the next 10 minutes while Node. js installs all this stuff. I work do some work with the WordPress hosting team.

[00:10:03] Jason Cosper: And. The whole thing, like when setting up a test environment, like the test runner that WordPress hosts run running an individual, like one of those tests, every time that there’s a code change, which is what that project does. Does those individual test runs can go for 10 to 20 minutes depending on what needs to be installed and run to test those code changes.

[00:10:37] Jason Cosper: It’s a lot,

[00:10:40] Courtney Robertson: Now, update npm. Great, you have issues. Update npm. But it’s more than that. It is also in that if someone says, oh, it’s this one line of code, that’s great. It’s only one line of code. But where do you find that one line of code? It’s In this area, but oh, because of abstractions, you have to dig another layer deeper, over to this other place to find the thing.

[00:11:09] Courtney Robertson: So that’s step one. But how do you find your way around this maze? Dev sees inline documentation for that purpose, but we’re not doing a lot of the inline documentation as it would be along the way. Not saying we’re not doing any, we’re not doing what would have helped Ari to avoid feeling the way that he feels, if you read into more of the messages around what Ari has shared.

[00:11:36] Courtney Robertson: So we’re not doing the inline documentation that would point people to why this is doing this, where is the place that this is dependent on, and so it’s making it harder for people that are even skilled in React. To find the thing that they need to find

[00:11:55] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:11:56] Courtney Robertson: fixing that one issue. So that’s part of all of this.

[00:12:00] Se Reed: okay, so obscurity in general of the actual code structure is one thing, but I think one of the other big things tech in general is always it’s this giant river, and it’s streaming, and if you get out of it, say, I don’t know, to have a child, or to take care of a relative or take a break, take a vacation, a lot of things, or another contributor serve in a war, get drafted into a war and then come back and try to figure out how PHP has changed.

[00:12:35] Se Reed: The tech river moves, right? And the important thing has always been in tech, Across the board, whether it’s like custom made stuff or large systems, is that people will be able to understand. What they’re looking at. And so if someone cannot leave for two to three months or six months, what that really means to me is that

[00:13:01] Courtney Robertson: the it’s documentation and double click a

[00:13:06] Se Reed: speaking as a fan of changelogs.

[00:13:08]

[00:13:09] Courtney Robertson: The

[00:13:09] Se Reed: I see a variety of change logs and understanding the difference between one line of change, this thing, and an explanation of what actually changed, so you can get a real sense of how the different versions have evolved. It makes a huge difference in under even being able to understand if those changes apply to the code that you’re dealing with. I have if I haven’t updated or used a plugin in a while. I try to go in and read the changelog and be like, okay, what features have they added? What fixes have they added? Because that maybe I had to do a workaround before for something else. I can’t read that changelog to understand what’s happening, it’s like I have to start all over again on even just with a plugin.

[00:13:58] Se Reed: But

[00:13:59] Courtney Robertson: I would say though, I just want to share that I was thinking about what’s the changelog of Gutenberg as you’re talking? And it basically tells you to go over and look at stuff in GitHub. What I would actually point to is just dropped into our show chat here, the link to the Gutenberg 18.

[00:14:17] Courtney Robertson: 2 release, and that functions in that way a bit. When I think about the changelogs and how I would turn those at the events calendar into actual release content for. The customers that are developers to read and understand what just changed. That does exist, so I don’t want to say that it’s not.

[00:14:38] Courtney Robertson: It’s that inline documentation is really the issue, because we saw another message from Riyad that came out. So yeah, we have leading on this 18. 2 release, which is great. Damien’s a devrel at WP Engine. And so we see, here’s the information of what just changed in Gutenberg 18. 2. For those that need some clarification Gutenberg plugin is released every other week, pretty much like clockwork.

[00:15:06] Courtney Robertson: And all of this features after when we get close to the next core release. features that are out in the published version of the Gutenberg plugin get merged to core for the next big release. And that’s the way that this works. So people can run leading edge Gutenberg. People could run the Gutenberg plugin and test it.

[00:15:26] Courtney Robertson: That’s not really what ARI’s issue is seeing from this side of it. What ARI’s issue is in the code.

[00:15:34] Se Reed: The thing, that’s nice, but if you have that level of documentation and change happening every two weeks, it doesn’t really matter how amazing your documentation is. Plus there’s two things here. The people reading the Gutenberg change log, whatever it is what’s new in Gutenberg, that’s not customers, that’s not users, that’s not even WordPress developers who are building sites for people.

[00:16:08] Se Reed: That is literally core developers. Do we need the like designy one with here’s your logo and all that stuff that we do for the, here’s the new version of WordPress here’s the pretty headers and all that to show you the stuff I don’t even know if that’s what’s important.

[00:16:26] Se Reed: I would love to see some statistics on those being written. If that’s not helpful to someone who is actually working on the code, then I’m not really sure who it’s helpful to, because. I’m not reading that because whatever goes into Gutenberg is going to get pulled into WordPress and then I’m going to read that iteration of it because that is the iteration that’s going to impact my work and what I’m working on.

[00:16:51] Se Reed: So going to the, speaking of abstraction, going out to the level of Gutenberg, that definitely is going to apply to plugin developers, primarily, I would say, right? So that they can see what’s coming down the pike. But what I’ve heard from every single plugin developer that I’ve ever talked to about this is that, It is impossible to keep up with the level of change that is happening, no matter how it’s presented.

[00:17:20] Se Reed: If it’s not documented well in line code, if it’s being presented in a nice post, whatever it is, releasing so much information every two weeks and having extreme rapid code iteration is It’s really hard to keep up. That is a whitewater, like fast moving river. And if you get out of that river, it is going to be like a mile down the bank before you’ve even walked to your car.

[00:17:51] Jason Cosper: So I am with you a little bit there, say, however the inline documentation, and this is where developers get tripped up. It’s basically you are being asked to decipher what the hell this code does you are basically you instead of say, like walking around a neighborhood with clear street signs and signs on the buildings of what everything is, you’re just thrown into like dirt roads, no signs.

[00:18:35] Jason Cosper: And you’ve maybe got a map, but it’s a hand drawn map and you only know the area. So you’re like, wait, is this the right road that I’m turning on? What

[00:18:49] Se Reed: that a street or an alley?

[00:18:52] Jason Cosper: Am I going the right way here? What is, and you might have to backtrack, you might have to, like having documentation in the actual code, which is a thing that you know, because Gutenberg specifically has been moving.

[00:19:13] Jason Cosper: Aggressively and adding all of these new features trying to basically get to the place where page builders all the various page building like plugins out there the ones that paved the way, the beaver builders, the Divi Elementor, et cetera, that, that have one up on some of the usability.

[00:19:41] Se Reed: have five years.

[00:19:43] Jason Cosper: Yeah they have so

[00:19:44] Se Reed: up.

[00:19:45] Jason Cosper: Yeah, they have,

[00:19:46] Se Reed: to make up for five years of not being there, right? And get it, get, just cram it all in. I really feel that. That is absolutely what it feels like.

[00:19:59] Jason Cosper: It is irresponsible though, to be like, Hey, we’re going to build all of these new features and we are going to go ahead and add this and Oh, look at this cool new thing we’re doing and everything else and just it’s, to me, it’s irresponsible to, to have. poorly documented code in there where a developer who you want to keep building the future versions of this thing that you were trying to build to basically not at least stick up a road sign saying Hey that thing you’re looking for, go this way, or here is what this little bit of code does or what it’s supposed to do.

[00:20:48] Jason Cosper: So you don’t spend a shitload of time trying to. Figure out am I on the right path or am I just chasing waterfalls?

[00:21:00] Se Reed: so Nick here, and yeah, so he’s saying that inline docs explain decisions that have already been made, right? I actually really disagree with that. I do not think that is what inline docs should be doing. That has nothing to do with decisions. Inline docs are labeling things. Just like what, what were saying.

[00:21:19] Se Reed: Like these are sign signs and explanation. Not explanations of decisions. Just like yesterday I was changing a Google API, right? And I stick in stuff in my functions. I’m like, this is the Google API for this particular maps thing like. I explained what it was. So if someone’s looking through there, they’ll be like, oh, what’s this Google API code for?

[00:21:46] Se Reed: Look, I just told you it’s right there. It says nothing about why we’re using that API or what the decision process was for that API. It’s just saying, this is what this is that is here. And I, so I disagree that inline docs should explain decisions. I don’t think that’s something that Belongs in documentation.

[00:22:08] Se Reed: I just think it’s about labeling and explaining what is happening

[00:22:15] Courtney Robertson: I don’t know that we want to split hairs too much on if it’s like explaining a decision about why a file points over to somewhere else or not just that it does the job. Here is why this is abstracted and where you can go for the rest of it. To that end in terms of other documentation can we show Riyadh’s message?

[00:22:35] Courtney Robertson: So Riyadh saw this and Riyadh is one of the Gutenberg, I don’t know his technical title, but he is full time in Gutenberg working on things. And so during all of this conversation

[00:22:49] Se Reed: Sponsored, sponsored, contributor,

[00:22:52] Courtney Robertson: yes. Automatic.

[00:22:56] Se Reed: okay, just checking.

[00:22:58] Courtney Robertson: So Riyadh said, hey you don’t understand something on Gutenberg’s code base, leave a reply to this thread and we’ll try to do my best to clarify it.

[00:23:08] Courtney Robertson: So again I’m assuming Riyadh may not be English first. This could be interpreted in two ways. It could be, oh, I see that we have some people that, that are confused. And I’m trying to be helpful. Or, it could be seen as tailspin of, no, this way is correct. And so we have a couple of related things.

[00:23:36] Courtney Robertson: Also a former guest on the show, Triple J, John James Jacobi, who is a long time core contributor chimed in. Riyadh’s message, and said, why don’t you document? That doesn’t sound like he’s interpreting it as Riyadh being helpful, it sounds like JJJ was indicating you’re trying to control the story, and say that you made the right decisions along the way.

[00:24:04] Courtney Robertson: As you look through a lot of Riyadh’s, yeah one of Jay’s posts Triple J’s post says, asking for feedback and then just defending yourself is the best way to waste everyone’s time. So

[00:24:16] Se Reed: Here’s the thing,

[00:24:17] Courtney Robertson: of ways that this could go and so if you look through Riyadh’s messaging, he points to already published dev docs and already created resources on LearnWP, which are helpful and good, except that let’s look at this chain.

[00:24:34] Courtney Robertson: We have inline documentation, then we get to the release posts that I shared, one from core. I’m the audience that looks at the core release posts to help assess what inlearn needs to be updated or does the docs team we’re the audience of receiving that information so that we know all of the things that need to get updated.

[00:24:52] Courtney Robertson: Also, for people that are testing Gutenberg thoroughly I run the Gutenberg plugin on my site. I do read these types of things and it helps me get things ready for releases. The inline documentation is for the devs that are actively building, that their main role is to build Gutenberg. And so when inline documentation isn’t right, of course it’s going to be hard for an experienced person that just took some time off.

[00:25:17] Courtney Robertson: But it’s also going to be even that much harder for the occasional contributor to find the one little thing. How much more do they have to search if they are just even an occasional contributor? Not even a an occasional contribution, impossible. And I might argue, one might argue, maybe I wouldn’t argue, but one might argue that that could be intentional there’s been a lot of discussion about the marketing team the WordPress marketing team, which is being disbanded.

[00:25:49] Se Reed: I don’t know if we haven’t really talked about that on the show. It’s a bit of an emotional topic for me. But there was a lot of, there is. There continues to be an extensive amount of marketing work for wordpress. org, the open source project, that does not happen on open on wordpress. org properties. And when one considers that the predominant number of full time Gutenberg developers are, in fact, sponsored by the same company, and one has seen the evidence and the behavior that It shows that discussions do happen on repositories and in slacks that are not open to non employees. One might then begin to wonder if perhaps that documentation exists, even, or if those explanations in that discussion is happening.

[00:26:44] Se Reed: It’s just not happening right now. within the WordPress project itself. And so for the full time folks working on it who are sponsored by Automatic, perhaps they feel a need to have that level. And answering questions in a Twitter feed, Twitter thread, which seems like a really wildly bizarre place to address stuff. in my documentation that almost seems patronizing it’s not just Oh, you have a problem? Let me help you. It’s not like he was asking for help figuring out some resources to learn how to code properly, right? He’s making a fundamental, Ari is making a fundamental observation about patterns and the state the actual codebase and the ability of people who are not automaticians to contribute. And I gotta say, it’s just, it’s not great, because Gutenberg is not even really within the WordPress source projects sphere. It’s not, it is, but it isn’t. It exists in this grey area of not anything bigger than WordPress, right? Matt Mullenweg co founder of WordPress, project has talked about this, right?

[00:28:20] Se Reed: He’s talked about how he thinks Gutenberg will be bigger than WordPress. We’ve talked about it on the show. Gutenberg is used by Drupal. So

[00:28:30] Courtney Robertson: just saw a post from Dries founder of Drupal this past week, and they’re talking about the next iteration. And they call theirs the Instead of calling it like a page builder or something, they call it like the layout builder,

[00:28:45]

[00:28:45] Courtney Robertson: Which I thought was interesting. And they’re they’re at a decision making process point right now in the Drupal project about moving that forward.

[00:28:53] Courtney Robertson: Right now I’m not sure that Gutenberg is fully integrated into their layout builder. But I think that they’re looking at either a more complete adoption of Gutenberg or. There is a competitor to that one, I think was the name of it. There’s a couple I just saw on his post. Dries has a recent post, if you’ve heard of Dries, you can find his blog and read about that.

[00:29:22] Courtney Robertson: But I thought it was pretty interesting that there’s still in that, should we fully adopt it or not. How should we do this? And to that end, I don’t know if we have it too handy here in the links of tweet conversations that went on, but I shared one that my coworker, Drew James, longtime Quark committer had

[00:29:41] Se Reed: Yeah, this one got interesting So Drew and I know each other. We don’t work in the same department. Occasionally we chat. Both of us are voices in. The Twitter space that are from our own experience of contributing to WordPress and not representing our employer. I say this because we then both got into a conversation in this thread that kind of works with Matt.

[00:30:03] Courtney Robertson: So Drew’s post here, a lot of standards and practices for WordPress core development relaxed around 5. 0 to allow for easier iteration and innovation in the Gutenberg project. After seven years of development, isn’t it time to reprioritize those standards? Matt did respond in this one asking for some clarification, and Drew iterated about the 80 20 rule of 80 percent of the users

[00:30:28] Se Reed: 80 20 rule. I want to talk about that.

[00:30:32] Courtney Robertson: let’s bring that back.

[00:30:33] Courtney Robertson: Also, let’s do inline documentation. Let’s make sure that we’re accessible by default. those type of points. And I thought that they were pretty solid. It also got into a side conversation that stemmed out of all of this. That I saw Jorben participate in as well, and I thought points were handled. I will say, I think that as we’re seeing all of this conversation unfold, people have handled it very factual and responsibly, I feel like.

[00:31:02] Courtney Robertson: Would I have

[00:31:03] Se Reed: like a bunch of hardcore devs

[00:31:05] Courtney Robertson: to come across?

[00:31:06] Se Reed: wait, it’s a bunch of hardcore devs talking about inline documentation and inline, a document, which is amazing, first of all, but like inline documentation is a long standing contentious point within developers world and lore anyway, just because it’s always my thing.

[00:31:24] Se Reed: Do you document do you document your code properly? Like, how do you document your code? And Some of that side Some of the side combo I wanted to point out with Matt there, though, was that the conversation evolved somewhere between Drew, Jorben, and I jumped in a little bit on it too, was what are we doing about four leads? There used to be core leads like Mason and Helen and a few others, and there’s a page in the core handbook about some of this.

[00:31:56] Courtney Robertson: These are now seen primarily as historical roles, and Matt made mention to having a variety of non automaticians named as release leads. People were then asking for clarification about that, and then Matt responded that they were he views release leads as the people that are in the noteworthy contributor, there was like a photo of four faces in there of who Matt would deem as the release leads, and there was a, I basically was just asking for, can we update the page in the core handbook, and can we be consistent then and how we show this in the about page?

[00:32:36] Courtney Robertson: Like I’m not making a huge issue out of some of these side parts of the conversation,

[00:32:42] Se Reed: It’s all

[00:32:43] Courtney Robertson: side conversations related to the Gutenberg conversation too.

[00:32:49] Se Reed: you know what,

[00:32:49] Jason Cosper: It’s all fair requests.

[00:32:55] Se Reed: what Drew and, to be honest, Ari is asking for is, and I hate to say this, word, it’s governance. It doesn’t even have to be governance that isn’t the project, like it’s not external governance, just policies. It’s having policies that people know about and that we follow. That’s what it is. That’s all that governance doesn’t have to be this political revolution come for blood kind of deal. That’s really not what it’s supposed to be about. This is about, this is the project.

[00:33:28] Se Reed: These are its policies, these are what we do like we, like when WordPress is in violation of its own stated philosophies no one knows what to do with this we don’t know where to put it in our brains, and I think that is what is causing the current level of said aforementioned problems.

[00:33:49] Se Reed: existential crisis, because that 80 20 rule, which I have checked, is still on the website, and maybe now no longer will be there it’ll just get disappeared off the internet. I’ve checked it a few times, the about page on the org site, just to see if it’s been being disappeared slowly but surely, but the 80 20 rule, which is that the things that should be in core should be useful and used by 80 percent of the users, and there have been some wild things put into core I don’t know, let’s just pick an uncontroversial one, like Duotone, that have not format is the most known one of them all. Post format long

[00:34:36] Se Reed: post formats was,

[00:34:38] Jason Tucker: So the people in the back can hear you.

[00:34:39] Se Reed: standing, that was probably way before an 80 20 rule even existed. And second of all, the post formats could be used by 80 because of just the variation of the post formats, it could be used by 80%. is no way that 80 percent of a website builder market is all going to use the same design choice.

[00:35:04] Se Reed: On an image. That’s just preposterous. That is literally bonkersauce. 80%, okay, this is what it says. Rule of thumb. That’s interesting. I don’t know that it said that before. But the rule of, maybe it did. The rule of thumb is that the core should provide features that 80 percent or more of end users will actually appreciate and use.

[00:35:25] Se Reed: That’s close enough to what I remember it as, to not contest it. But I don’t know if that applies to Duotone. I certainly don’t think it applies to things like the footnote block. But, don’t think the the title of that header clean, lean and mean even applies to think about the conversation we’re having

[00:35:44] Se Reed: Yeah, we’re like, it’s not clean, mean, and lean. This is the problem. We are not living up to our own values, our own stated values. In all areas of the project. And that includes Gutenberg. If Gutenberg is meant to be open, and we’re gonna have all these people contributing to it, and it’s even bigger than WordPress, because it’s this revolutionary block editor that you can use everywhere, why on earth would we be making it more and more obscure?

[00:36:14] Se Reed: There is no explanation for that. That is aligned with our stated values and policies as a project. Does. Not. Compute.

[00:36:29] Jason Cosper: now, okay. I’ll ask this for all of us, cause we’ve been around a while, but I’ll specifically ask Courtney and I’m not you can say pass on this if you want to, but do you feel that some of the less commented code that would be going into some WordPress components today would have made it into an earlier version of WordPress, say 3.

[00:37:06] Jason Cosper: 0, 4. 0. Any of those branches do any of you feel like if somebody turned around and put in a patch that they wouldn’t get it just thrown back in the track ticket, if it was not documented.

[00:37:27] Se Reed: I don’t know about docu Oh, this is Courtney after that, sorry. Go ahead.

[00:37:31] Courtney Robertson: get started. Love you, Sé! I’m thinking about one This is not necessarily going back to pre Gutenberg, but even during the Gutenberg release cycle, I just saw, That Aruba shared a message recently, that Aruba’s message was Oh look, somebody else besides me submitted an idea for duplicate post.

[00:38:01] Jason Tucker: Thanks for tuning in

[00:38:11] Courtney Robertson: button available, so that if you want to clone your post, you can easily do The person is employed by Automattic. I’ve already internally raised the issue to I’ve raised to an internal Automattician to say, Red flag!

[00:38:27] Courtney Robertson: I see that here is where Aruba already originally logged the idea. And I’ve seen that Anne has recently commented on Aruba’s logged idea within the past day. I called out that, When I shared this with somebody that I trust that is an automatic employee to say this doesn’t help the look of things when folks are calling this out, I said, this doesn’t, when you see a man at automatic submit the very same idea, and now it’s already in line to be shipped into 6.

[00:39:04] Courtney Robertson: 6 that, that’s certainly not helpful, whether that was intentional or not. We need to recognize that the idea Aruba had logged two years ago is related to this, in the process of that. And why is it now easier to do as opposed to two years in Gutenberg, two years ago in Gutenberg? Why was it declined when Aruba submitted it?

[00:39:28] Courtney Robertson: Is it a sponsored, unsponsored, a gender thing? In this case I’m reluctant to think that there was any cultural racial ideas to this, just because I don’t know this particular automation employee, but he doesn’t strike me as like being a typical North American white dude getting his way. Sorry, Tucker and Cosper, but yeah, there’s that.

[00:39:52] Courtney Robertson: So I

[00:39:53] Jason Cosper: No, that’s fine.

[00:39:53] Courtney Robertson: a racial issue, but it’s a, I do see it as maybe a, Sponsored, unsponsored, and possibly a gender issue in terms of initial perception of Aruba’s message versus what’s getting shipped. I could be mistaken, but I just I share those concerns with the people that I trust to make sure that Aruba does get credited on this and to say, this is not helpful for Gutenberg while everything’s being called out right now.

[00:40:20] Courtney Robertson: This is not a benefit to saying we’re listening and we care is to pick

[00:40:26] Se Reed: mean, screw listening and we care. How about we are open and we accept contributions from people just like we say we do because we’re an open source project instead of being a complete elitist gatekept thing that’s only available to more and more full time sponsored employees from one company. Ding. There’s that.

[00:40:48] Se Reed: Yeah, I really think it has a there’s, I, there’s, there is no way that there is not, there is at all times a gender role, not a gender role thing, but like a gender disparity at play, and that really is prevalent just in every interaction, especially with, within suggestions and tech forums like this.

[00:41:10] Se Reed: 100 percent that. But in terms of why this feature is suddenly useful, and an automatician might be jumping in there and popping it in that has, to me, a lot more to do with WordPress. com and what it’s trying to be to

[00:41:25] Courtney Robertson: It’s going back to the less Calypso interface,

[00:41:28] Se Reed: Yeah, exactly.

[00:41:30] Courtney Robertson: the native org interface.

[00:41:32] Se Reed: Which means that it is going to try to be that the software needs to be better.

[00:41:40] Se Reed: Surprise, surprise. And things like duplicating posts, which definitely 80 percent of users might use and find useful, versus, say, I don’t know, again, Duotone. The idea that is now useful to, Automatic slash WordPress. com. And that is why it’s prioritization is happening. That to me makes more sense than anyone even.

[00:42:06] Se Reed: Thought about Aruba, what had been happening the likelihood that they were like, I don’t think in this case it was like, let’s steal that idea or anything. It was just like a, oh, we need this feature now, so we’re just going to go ahead and put it in there. Because it’s really these issues and these discussions that emerge on the public open source repos. A lot of them feel like they have been previously discussed. I know that’s definitely the case for a lot of the quote unquote proposals that get put out by some groups, like for example, the MediaCorp proposal that was put out by the director of the project, Josefa, who just, Put onto the marketing blog that the marketing team was changing, and this was a proposal, but a proposal that’s not a proposal because it’s a proposal that’s happening, and had been in discussion apparently, and whatever, but not discussed with the team, not discussed openly, and now is being posted for comments and feedback?

[00:43:06] Courtney Robertson: And I’m going to

[00:43:07] Se Reed: But not really, because it’s already happening. So again, I’m pulling that back to there is a discussion happening that is not being documented. And so whether the the decisions might be being documented in the core posts, the what’s new in Gutenberg, they’re not being documented in the inline documentation, because even the things aren’t even being labeled in the inline documentation.

[00:43:33] Se Reed: But I don’t think that it’s, I do think that it is the same problem in both areas. I think that this is systemic, and I think that the number of people running up against this wall of where are these conversations happening, and who’s making these decisions, and who’s driving the train that we’re on that’s what we all keep hitting up against.

[00:44:00] Se Reed: And you know what, when you hit up against that and you’re like I can’t get any further. The next car is locked, so I can’t see who’s driving the locomotive. You know what happens? You get off the train. That’s what happens. And I think that is a intentional feature and not a bug. And I think that a lot of us. of us want to approach it as if it’s a bug and we want to fix it. And we want to say, Hey, here’s all the ways we could do this better. But if the goal is not in fact to do that better, then maybe we are all just wasting our time, like Jake Tripp said. So many big thoughts and feelings. It’s been a week of Oh, in the house, sorry.

[00:44:54]

[00:45:01] Courtney Robertson: Message Ari put out is, okay, we’ve had this many views on your message. How do we. we, at this point, because it got so much coverage, can we take that back to the official spaces and see any actionable change come out of this?

[00:45:20] Courtney Robertson: And I’m still stewing on that thought.

[00:45:23] Se Reed: Me looking around, oh no, I don’t see, but I’m here anyway, so I guess I have some sort of like vain hope that with enough of us. Speaking up with enough of the ecosystem that, let’s be real, this is not a one company ecosystem, okay? As much as some of us might like to think that it is not. That is I actually looked it up recently.

[00:45:48] Se Reed: WordPress is a, I believe it’s 567 billion dollar ecosystem. Anyone? It’s a big number, folks. And you know what? That’s not all one company. As much as that one company wants to think that it’s all them. I guess there is a political revolutionary message. of all there’s more of us than there are of them. Maybe? Because I don’t know. And also hired soldiers are never as good as soldiers who are volunteering out of passion. That’s all I’m saying. So it’s up to us, right? We all see the writing on the wall, or the lack of writing in the documentation. The lack of writing on the code, we should say.

[00:46:35] Se Reed: And we all know that it’s there. We’re all reading these tweets. We all see the same thing.

[00:46:42] Jason Tucker: Do you guys feel that the idea of this is that because of the fact that Gutenberg is doing what it’s doing, that people have then continued on and even probably even doubled and tripled down on alternative. Page builders and stuff like that, where those are still prevalent. And it’s just we’re still using Divi.

[00:47:03] Jason Tucker: We’re still using Bbuilder. We’re still using this. We’re still using that. And they’re like, Oh yeah. But when I write a blog post, I accidentally use Gutenberg to write it.

[00:47:13] Se Reed: I use, I, for all my client sites, even ones where I’m using other page builders, I’m using the block editor on posts. It just it’s, because the block editor is great for styling text layout, right? It’s better than a Word doc. It’s better than Google, right? A Google doc for laying out a document or a page.

[00:47:34] Se Reed: But, And that is different from abstracting again into an entire site. Those are that’s a more philosophical discussion about the site editor in general. But I think Gutenberg is on its own track. It is on its own train. It is being run Fast and hot and quick and WordPress is just gulping it down.

[00:47:59] Se Reed: Literally, whatever Gutenberg shoves in, WordPress is taking. And that sounded really way more odd than I intended it to, me. But that’s what’s happening. There’s been this ongoing discussion with every release. It’s oh, which version of the latest Gutenberg are we gonna Put in here and it’s oh, is it, we’re taking this latest version or this latest version?

[00:48:22] Se Reed: And there have been multiple problems with releases that are probably connected to that with the 0. 1, 0. 2 thing being skipped. I feel like there’s, I don’t know, maybe there’s not a connection there, but I feel like there’s a connection there in terms of the, Input level of Gutenberg at the very last minute that has definitely derailed multiple releases for WordPress because something that is brand new in Gutenberg broke.

[00:48:52] Se Reed: But the policy is to put the absolute latest cutting edge version. That comes out like in it’s like something nuts. Like at the release candidate one or something like that’s when they’re like, okay, now we won’t take in any new Gutenberg code. What are you wild?

[00:49:14] Se Reed: That’s why so many of them, they’ve added extra betas, Gutenberg is getting new code coming hot off the printer and then just being just sucked right in, like without any time for processing or even testing properly.

[00:49:31] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, Brian Kordes absorption into the project or quote unquote discussion.

[00:49:37] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, Brian Kordes has been very eager to call out Oh, and for the audio listeners, my dog has joined the show. She is a little white Maltipoo, and she’s sitting on my lap so that she doesn’t bark if a neighbor is getting a delivery of something, I don’t know. So Brian Quartz has been calling out, let’s do a full release that solely focuses on polish and improvements that doesn’t add new features that, you know what if we do a release where the whole point is to improve Inline documentation and accessibility, adding no new features just continuing to improve these areas of the project that we know we absolutely need to tweak further.

[00:50:22] Se Reed: And

[00:50:22] Courtney Robertson: that idea is starting to get a little more traction, but we also understand why that It’s hard to do, and contributors be contributors, they will pick and choose what they wish to work on. Sometimes that is true when you are both sponsored and unsponsored. If you are wildly passionate about post formats, the way that Cosper and I are, and you decide you want to get post formats working with the block theme, okay off you go ahead, contribute, and when it’s ready, it will work.

[00:50:50] Courtney Robertson: It will, but I also see the value in saying, we’re going to take a couple of releases and just focus on. Inline docs, accessibility the things that we’re all crying out for to have those specific areas to improve. And I think if we did that, we would lose news cycle hype about how great WordPress is potentially.

[00:51:14] Courtney Robertson: But we would get internal, in the community, influencer bubble people to say, Wow, this is so helpful, so beneficial. And I would love to see that type of thing come from this situation. Where maybe we do really look inwardly and Not ship more features, not rush on to phase three Gutenberg, dashboard, media, library, all the things.

[00:51:41] Courtney Robertson: Gutenberg’s coming for the rest of WordPress and we know that, but let’s not leave it so that eventually all of WordPress is Gutenberg and all of WordPress is missing inline documentation and is not accessible. We can’t have that as an editing experience. We can’t have that as a experience.

[00:51:59] Se Reed: we have that. Right now, just to frame it out. So we do not want to keep that is what that is.

[00:52:06] Courtney Robertson: We don’t have it for everything. So for instance we still have the classic editor plug in available and it helps people that have Need screen readers, especially. They can have an accessible experience by installing the classic editor and writing posts that way. It’s an option. It’s not a good option.

[00:52:26] Courtney Robertson: A lot of the other parts of WordPress core’s code that is not a Gutenberg experience, I’m venturing to guess, although I should do my homework and go read and look. I’m guessing that there is some more additional pointers in the inline documentation for folks in non Gutenberg parts of WordPress right now.

[00:52:45] Se Reed: Yeah. It would be nice to have everyone. I think that is maybe the intention that I’ve heard expressed from Josefa in the past. Although the problem is last year, the Polish episode Polish release, which by the way, Polish is not the same. Polishing features is not the same thing as a release that focuses on documentation and accessibility and ensuring that contributors are being kept up to date like that.

[00:53:14] Se Reed: Those are not the same thing. But last year for the 6. 4 release, it was both touted as the underrepresented contributor release and the Polishing release. So that was really bad. Again, maybe intentional, maybe not where we’re like, oh, we’re not going to work on as many new features because.

[00:53:39] Se Reed: Maybe we don’t want underrepresented contributors to be weighing in on those features as much. I don’t know. There’s some more gatekeeping for you but the gatekeeping is real. And it

[00:53:51] Jason Cosper: And, asking underrepresented people especially specifically female representing presenting folks to clean shit up.

[00:54:08] Se Reed: it’s

[00:54:08] Jason Cosper: Come on.

[00:54:09] Se Reed: I got so upset about that. I was like, really, this is a clean and polished one for the, and at that point we were calling it, I think we ended up calling it women and non binary or it was at that point. And I was like, the women and non binary release squad is focusing on cleaning and polishing.

[00:54:23] Se Reed: That’s great. Cool.

[00:54:25] Jason Cosper: and thought about that.

[00:54:27] Jason Cosper: To, to rewind for half a second to Courtney pointing out that basically people being told for better accessibility, you can install the classic editor and just use the classic editor. That’s like saying, Hey, I know that there are all of these sidewalks around here and we have some folks who need curb cuts where the curb dips, so they can get down.

[00:54:54] Jason Cosper: But just a little ways down, there’s a driveway you can just roll down that instead,

[00:55:00] Se Reed: And then just be in the street for a minute, you’ll be fine.

[00:55:03] Jason Cosper: right? No, no curb cuts, make everybody a first class citizen because eventually everybody is going to need accessibility. You, I, everyone here, everyone listening, everyone watching

[00:55:19] Se Reed: Us all our old millennials are gonna need screen readers. Come on.

[00:55:24] Jason Cosper: On a long enough timeline, you are going to need accessibility features too, like accessibility is coming for you. You are going to,

[00:55:36] Se Reed: That would be an amazing t shirt. Another t shirt exclusive here at WordCamp.

[00:55:41] Jason Cosper: yeah please Who are we? Watercooler. She’s

[00:55:46] Jason Cosper: Start treating accessibility It’s only 11

[00:55:50] Jason Tucker: years cause

[00:55:51] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:55:52] Jason Tucker: been 11 years. Say you’re fine.

[00:55:54] Se Reed: you’ll learn my name too, eventually. That’s good. We’re doing well here. Anyway, we love you all, and I think it’s been a

[00:55:59] Courtney Robertson: We can just call you another Jason, and that would simplify

[00:56:02] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

[00:56:03] Se Reed: know, right?

[00:56:04] Jason Tucker: It’s her middle name.

[00:56:05] Se Reed: Jason. I’m trying. All right. We gotta go. We love you. Hang out with us in our Slack. Thanks for coming on and talking.

[00:56:14] Courtney Robertson: Wait, what?

[00:56:15] Se Reed: What? It’s our watercoolerslack. lol. Huh.

[00:56:19] Courtney Robertson: Gotcha. I think I’ll find my way

[00:56:21] Se Reed: It’s, if thanks for coming on and helping us dissect the complicated relationship status between Gutenberg and WordPress.

[00:56:31] Se Reed: And shout out to Cosper for the title because I love it. As an elder millennial who existed in the relationship, it’s not at the time when Facebook had it, I didn’t actually ever use it. Wished I had you never know. I wish they had it now. It’d be better.

[00:56:52] Jason Tucker: Y’all have a good one.

[00:56:53] Se Reed: Goodbye.

[00:56:56] Jason Tucker: Go over to our website at apwatercooler. com slash subscribe to this content right here. We’d really appreciate it. You can find us wherever it is that the internet has us post these things and come hang out with us over there. We would appreciate it.

[00:57:09] Jason Tucker: If you like this stuff subscribe. If you didn’t like this stuff, then post about it on socials cause it’s good. See y’all later. Bye bye.

[00:57:18] Se Reed: Free and independent.

[00:57:20] Jason Tucker: So number 482 of WPwatercooler Gutenberg, it’s

[00:57:34] Se Reed: It’s complicated,

[00:57:38] Jason Tucker: I’m Jason Tucker. I have a website, jasontucker. blog. You can go take a look at it.

[00:57:44] Se Reed: can and should. I’m Sé Reed. I am at Sé Reed Media on most of the things, even the things be done.

[00:57:53] 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 monkey paw of a WordPress podcast.

[00:58:02] Jason Tucker: And speaking of that, go find us wherever it is. You can find great podcasts and come hang out with us in our discord at watercoolerslack. lol. Can,

[00:58:13] Se Reed: so good. It got me with monkeypaw, Cosper, right off the bat. He just started it right away.

[00:58:20] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[00:58:22] Se Reed: I have two things to just say, uh, about just the moment before we move into the topic.

[00:58:29] Jason Tucker: can a third one be introducing Courtney? Yay.

[00:58:42] Se Reed: friend of the show, and Rolodex memory of the show, Courtney Robertson.

[00:58:50] Courtney Robertson: Hey friends,

[00:58:52] Se Reed: Uh,

[00:58:52] Courtney Robertson: tell you about Sé’s thoughts about the media library dating back to the first year of the show?

[00:58:57] Se Reed: could probably recite, like, You know, what’s funny is I was about to say you could recite my evolving step, my evolving, like, um, you know, take on it, but it hasn’t changed because the media library hasn’t changed. Okay. This is not about the media library. I just, I want to say two things. One, I have a Pusheen cup today.

[00:59:16] Se Reed: For those of you who could not see, I always have this cup, but I remembered when I just got here, why I don’t use it is because it’s only the back of the cup facing the other person. I don’t get this. Like, is it a left handers person cup? I, maybe that is, it’s for left handed people. I’m going to be trying to drink with my left hand today over the microphone, so if I clunk, I apologize.

[00:59:40] Se Reed: So I’m not

[00:59:40] Courtney Robertson: holding a mug from WordCamp Ventura that has, it’s a mason jar with a handle. Um, Cosper brought some

[00:59:50] Se Reed: Mountain Dew Zero. This totally

[00:59:52] Courtney Robertson: to the show and

[00:59:53] Se Reed: remember that old,

[00:59:54] Courtney Robertson: Root Beer Xevia, Xevia

[00:59:58] Se Reed: they would talk about their drinks

[01:00:01] Jason Tucker: by the way, all sponsored.

[01:00:02] Se Reed: don’t remember? No, I don’t. I don’t remember it either. Um, okay. Shoot. Has anyone done the double thumbs down? Because I just discovered what it does. I don’t know if you, I discovered this week what it does. Anyway, um, it

[01:00:22] Jason Cosper: save it for later in the show.

[01:00:24] Se Reed: Yeah, I won’t do it now. But I wanted to say,

[01:00:26] Courtney Robertson: people are so lost.

[01:00:46] Se Reed: A wardrobe shift out, but this is a really comfortable sweater.

[01:00:49] Se Reed: But today I was reflecting on how it is WordPress birthday time again. Um,

[01:00:55] Jason Tucker: yeah. Yep.

[01:00:56] Se Reed: thinking how different this year has been last year and I just thought that was interesting. That’s all. It’s a nostalgic thought I thought I’d share with folks about last year and our 20th anniversary project and our high hopes and oh, and this year how dashed they’ve been.

[01:01:12] Jason Cosper: It’s, you know, Word, WordPress is going to be old enough to drink and boy, do we all need it. It

[01:01:18] Jason Tucker: And they can pay

[01:01:19] Jason Tucker: for

[01:01:19] Courtney Robertson: has been, in most countries not named USA for three plus years,

[01:01:26] Se Reed: yeah, but

[01:01:27] Courtney Robertson: countries I think do, do like beer and cider at 16 and liquor at 18 or something

[01:01:33] Se Reed: WordPress was born here in the U. S., so I feel like it’s a citizen, and like, 21’s a big deal. Look, it’s obeyed most of the other adolescent, uh, like, stages, so let’s hope in four more years, frontal lobe stabilizes a little bit. Exactly. That’s where I’m going with this. It’s complicated.

[01:01:54] Courtney Robertson: all

[01:01:58] Se Reed: thought we should have The reason I brought my friend of the show, Ms.

[01:02:01] Se Reed: Courtney Robertson, on, uh, today is because, um, there was so much

[01:02:05] Courtney Robertson: us

[01:02:10] Se Reed: that, that stemmed really from a single tweet, a single sad, resigned,

[01:02:16] Courtney Robertson: Almost 87, 000 views now, tweet.

[01:02:20] Se Reed: 000?

[01:02:21] Courtney Robertson: 87 almost.

[01:02:23] Se Reed: Oh, I’m sorry, 87, 000.

[01:02:25] Courtney Robertson: 000 people.

[01:02:27] Se Reed: Yeah, how many likes? Because it had a lot of likes. Does anyone check that ratio?

[01:02:32] Courtney Robertson: Should we share the message that you’re referring to on the

[01:02:35] Se Reed: Yes. So, um, uh, longtime contributor Ari, who I’ve not met, but Courtney, you have, uh,

[01:02:43] Courtney Robertson: Ari’s great.

[01:02:45] Se Reed: uh, that he gives up

[01:02:47] Se Reed: It’s just, this is just so like, like the captures the zeitgeist of the moment right now. It is unbelievable.

[01:02:55] Courtney Robertson: So, let me give a little background on Ari.

[01:02:58] Se Reed: Please do.

[01:03:00] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, ARI is, so folks know about this, ARI is the one that took lead originally on the font library API work, so if you go through core posts and you look at that, ARI was the one contributing to that. ARI has a long time Yoast contributor, was specifically at Yoast the company.

[01:03:20] Courtney Robertson: in core for quite some time, um, doing a good bit of work, I believe, on Gutenberg, not just font library APIs. And I got a chance to meet Ari, uh, at WordCamp EU. Last year. Yeah. Last year. Um, briefly. And yeah, now that we’re past pandemic, there’s been a couple of WordCamp Europe’s that I’ve gotten a chance to be at.

[01:03:44] Courtney Robertson: And so I got to meet Ari there and Ari also is now working for Mr. Yoast, not Yoast the company, but Mr. Yoast as in, uh, through Amelia Capital and is sponsored that way. So Ari wrote a tweet that says, uh, I give up. I can no longer contribute to Gutenberg. I can’t understand our code anymore. At this stage, it’s alien to me, and it keeps getting more complex instead of simpler.

[01:04:10] Courtney Robertson: I’m wasting too much time trying to understand what we do.

[01:04:16] Jason Cosper: Yeah. And, and, and you said he’s, I mean, you know, he’s been working on the, on the font API. It’s not like he’s coming in. Fresh to any of this, uh, Ari has been working on this stuff. Yeah. Elbows deep for quite some time. And, uh, I’m, you know, imagine how hard things are for a new contributor when long time contributors are like, I don’t get any of this.

[01:04:50] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, so, um, I believe Ari had just taken several months away from, at least Gutenberg might have taken that time away from contributing. So

[01:05:01] Se Reed: everything.

[01:05:03] Courtney Robertson: three months,

[01:05:04] Se Reed: And had, uh, had amnesia and

[01:05:09] Courtney Robertson: he probably still knows a good bit of React. I don’t think he’s lost the knowledge of the programming language. Um, there’s a couple of factors that we can dig into about what ARI’s main points are. A super short summary, and we can then let this evolve into seeing how the community responded. A super short summary is that Um, let’s say that you just came back from an extended vacation or a sabbatical or, well, whatever your reason is for

[01:05:36] Se Reed: that’s a naughty word here.

[01:05:37] Courtney Robertson: And

[01:05:38] Se Reed: naughty word. Wow.

[01:05:39] Courtney Robertson: back and you start digging in. Your skills as a dev might be fractions of a second a little slow because you’ve been away for a bit, which is fine. But now it’s time to get back in and get up to speed. And so what do you need? You need to know What file that you want to open, so that was part one of this big issue, is locating which file because we have more and more, um, dependencies?

[01:06:07] Courtney Robertson: Or what is the right word that I’m looking for, Cosper, about when we have abstractions? Abstractions.

[01:06:15] Se Reed: I think it’s the, uh, the events calendar method of building out, right? You just put one line in each file.

[01:06:24] Courtney Robertson: version of, so,

[01:06:27] Jason Cosper: So as, as, as part of, and, and just to kind of give folks a little bit of background on this, like the level and layer of things that need to be installed in order to, uh, Um, make Gutenberg run in order to develop Gutenberg, in order to test Gutenberg, like, you know, you have, uh, you know, Node. js, uh, for the people who are like watching and listening, uh, who aren’t developers, uh, you can.

[01:07:00] Jason Cosper: Have Node. js like install all of your dependencies for you. And like, it’ll just be like, Hey, well, I guess it’s time to go make a pot of coffee because, uh, I’m going to wait for the next 10 minutes while Node. js like installs all this stuff. Uh, I, um, you know, work, um, do some work with, uh, the WordPress hosting team.

[01:07:24] Jason Cosper: Uh, and. Um, the whole thing, like when setting up, uh, a test environment, like the test runner, uh, that WordPress hosts run, um, I mean, running, uh, an individual, like one of those tests, every time that there’s a code change, which is what that project does. Does, uh, those individual test runs can go for, uh, you know, 10 to 20 minutes depending on, uh, what needs to be, you know, installed and, and run to like test those code changes.

[01:07:58] Jason Cosper: It’s a lot,

[01:08:01] Courtney Robertson: Now, update npm. Great, you have issues. Update npm. But it’s more than that. It is also in that, uh, you know, if someone says, oh, it’s this one line of code, that’s great. It’s only one line of code. But where do you find that one line of code? Well, it’s In this area, but oh, because of abstractions, you have to dig another layer deeper, another layer deeper, another layer deeper, over to this other place to find the thing.

[01:08:30] Courtney Robertson: So that’s step one. But how do you find your way around this maze? Dev sees inline documentation for that purpose, but we’re not doing a lot of the inline documentation as it would be along the way. Not saying we’re not doing any, we’re not doing what would have helped Ari to avoid feeling the way that he feels, if you read into more of the messages around what Ari has shared.

[01:08:57] Courtney Robertson: So we’re not doing the inline documentation, um, that would point people to why this is doing this, where is the place that this is dependent on, and so it’s making it harder for people that are even skilled in React. To find the thing that they need to find

[01:09:16] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[01:09:17] Courtney Robertson: fixing that one issue. So that’s part of all of this.

[01:09:21] Se Reed: okay, so obscurity in general of the actual code structure is one thing, but I think one of the other big things, um, you know, tech in general is always like, it’s this giant river, and it’s streaming, and if you get out of it, say, I don’t know, to have a child, or, you know, to take care of a relative or take, take a break, take a vacation, a lot of things, or like, uh, uh, another contributor, you know, serve in a war, get drafted, uh, into a war and then come back and try to figure out how PHP has changed.

[01:09:55] Se Reed: Like, the tech river moves, moves, right? And the important thing has always been in tech, Across the board, whether it’s like custom made stuff or large systems, is that people will be able to understand. What they’re looking at. Right? And so if someone cannot leave for two to three months or six months, what that really means to me is that

[01:10:22] Courtney Robertson: the, uh,

[01:10:23] Se Reed: it’s documentation and, you know,

[01:10:26] Courtney Robertson: double click a

[01:10:27] Se Reed: speaking as a fan of changelogs.

[01:10:29] Se Reed: Uh,

[01:10:30] Courtney Robertson: the

[01:10:30] Se Reed: I, I, I see a, a variety of change logs and understanding the difference between one line of change, this thing, and an explanation of what actually changed, so you can get a real sense of how the different versions have evolved. It, it makes a huge difference in under even being able to understand if those changes apply to the code that you’re dealing with. I have, you know, if I haven’t updated or used a plugin in a while. You know, I try to go in and read the changelog and be like, okay, what features have they added? What fixes have they added? Because that maybe I had to do a workaround before for something else. I can’t read that changelog to understand what’s happening, it’s like I have to start all over again on even, even just with a plugin.

[01:11:19] Se Reed: But the,

[01:11:19] Courtney Robertson: I would, I would say though, I just want to share that, um, I was thinking about, well, what’s the changelog of Gutenberg as you’re talking? And it basically tells you to go over and look at stuff in GitHub. What I would actually point to is just dropped into our show chat here, the link to the Gutenberg 18.

[01:11:38] Courtney Robertson: 2 release, and that functions in that way a bit. Um, when I think about the changelogs and how I would turn those at the events calendar into, um, actual release content for. The customers that are developers to read and understand what just changed. That does exist, so I don’t want to say that it’s not.

[01:11:58] Courtney Robertson: It’s that inline documentation is really the issue, because um, we saw another message from Riyad that came out. So yeah, we have leading on this 18. 2 release, which is great. Damien’s a devrel at WP Engine. And so we see, here’s the information of what just changed in Gutenberg 18. 2. For those that need some clarification, um, Gutenberg plugin is released every other week, pretty much like clockwork.

[01:12:27] Courtney Robertson: And all of this features after, um, when we get close to the next core release. features that are out in the published version of the Gutenberg plugin get merged to core for the next big release. And that’s kind of the way that this works. So people can run leading edge Gutenberg. People could run the Gutenberg plugin and test it.

[01:12:47] Courtney Robertson: That’s not really what ARI’s issue is, is seeing from this side of it. What ARI’s issue is, is in the code.

[01:12:55] Se Reed: right, well, I mean, the thing, that’s nice, but if you have that level of documentation and change happening every two weeks, it doesn’t really matter how amazing your, your, your documentation is. Plus there’s, there’s two things here. The people reading the Gutenberg change log, whatever it is, you know, what’s new in Gutenberg, that’s not customers, that’s not users, that’s not even WordPress developers who are building sites for people.

[01:13:29] Se Reed: That is literally core developers. So, you know, do we need the like designy one with like, here’s, you know, your logo and all that stuff that we do for the, here’s the new version of WordPress, like, here’s the pretty headers and all that to show you the stuff, like, I don’t even know if that’s what’s important.

[01:13:47] Se Reed: I would love to see some statistics on those being written. Like, if that’s not helpful to someone who is actually working on the code, then I’m not really sure who it’s helpful to, because. I’m not reading that because whatever goes into Gutenberg is going to get pulled into WordPress and then I’m going to read that iteration of it because that is the iteration that’s going to impact my work and what I’m working on.

[01:14:12] Se Reed: So going to the, speaking of abstraction, going out to the level of, You know, Gutenberg, that definitely is going to apply to plugin developers, primarily, I would say, right? So that they can kind of see what’s coming down the pike. But what I’ve heard from every single plugin developer that I’ve ever talked to about this is that, It is impossible to keep up with the level of change that is happening, no matter how it’s presented.

[01:14:41] Se Reed: If it’s not documented well in line code, if it’s being presented in a nice post, whatever it is, releasing so much information every two weeks and having extreme rapid code iteration is It’s really hard to keep up. Like that is a whitewater, like fast moving river. And if you get out of that river, it is going to be like, you know, a mile down the bank before you’ve even, you know, walked to your car.

[01:15:12] Jason Cosper: So I, I am with you a little bit there, say, however, um, the, the inline documentation, and this is, this is where, uh, developers get tripped up. It’s, it’s basically like, uh, you are being asked to decipher what the hell this code does, uh, you are, uh, basically, uh, you Uh, instead of say, like walking around, uh, you know, a neighborhood with clear street signs and, you know, signs on the buildings of what everything is, you’re just thrown into like dirt roads, no signs.

[01:15:55] Jason Cosper: Uh, and you’ve kind of maybe got a map, but it’s a hand drawn map and you only sort of know the area. So you’re like, wait, is this the right road that I’m turning on? Like what

[01:16:10] Se Reed: that a street or an alley?

[01:16:13] Jason Cosper: Am I, am I going the right way here? Like what is, and you know, you might have to backtrack, you might have to, like having documentation in the actual code, which is a thing that, uh, you know, because, uh, Gutenberg specifically has been moving.

[01:16:34] Jason Cosper: So, uh, aggressively and adding all of these new features, uh, you know, trying to basically, uh, get to the place where, uh, page builders, uh, all the, the various page building like plugins out there, uh, the ones that paved the way, the beaver builders, the Divi, you know, uh, Elementor, et cetera, that, that have, um, uh, one up on, you know, some of the usability.

[01:17:02] Se Reed: have like five years.

[01:17:03] Jason Cosper: Yeah, they have, they have so

[01:17:05] Se Reed: up.

[01:17:06] Jason Cosper: Yeah, they have,

[01:17:07] Se Reed: to make up for five years of not, not being there, right? Like, and, and get it, get, just cram it all in. I, I really feel that. That is absolutely what it feels like.

[01:17:20] Jason Cosper: it is, it is irresponsible though, to be like, Hey, we’re going to build all of these new features and we are going to go ahead and, uh, you know, add this and, you know, Oh, look at this cool new thing we’re doing and, uh, you know, everything else and just, uh, it’s, to me, it’s irresponsible to, to have. poorly documented code in there where a developer who you want to keep building the future versions of this thing that you were trying to build, uh, to basically not at least stick up a road sign saying like, Hey, you know, that thing you’re looking for, like go this way, or, you know, here, here is what this little bit of code does or what it’s supposed to do.

[01:18:09] Jason Cosper: So you don’t spend a shitload of time trying to. You know, figure out like, am I on the right path or am I, you know, just chasing waterfalls?

[01:18:21] Se Reed: so Nick here, and yeah, so he’s saying that inline docs explain decisions that have already been made, right? I actually really disagree with that. I do not think that is what inline docs should be doing. That has nothing to do with decisions. Inline docs are labeling things. Just like what, what were saying.

[01:18:40] Se Reed: Like these are sign signs and explanation. Not, not, not explanations of decisions. Just like yesterday I was, you know, changing a Google API, right? And I stick in stuff in my functions. I’m like, this is the Google API for this particular maps thing like. I explained what it was. So if someone’s looking through there, they’ll be like, oh, what’s this, you know, Google API code for?

[01:19:07] Se Reed: Well, look, I just told you it’s right there. It says nothing about, you know, why we’re using that API or what the decision process was for that API. It’s just saying, this is what this is that is here. And I, so I, I kind of disagree that inline docs should explain decisions. I don’t think that’s something that Belongs in documentation.

[01:19:29] Se Reed: I just think it’s about labeling and explaining what is happening

[01:19:36] Courtney Robertson: I don’t know that we want to split hairs too much on if it’s like explaining a decision about why a file points over to somewhere else or not just that it does the job. Here is why this is abstracted and where you can go for the rest of it. To that end, you know, in terms of other documentation, um, can we show Riyadh’s message?

[01:19:56] Courtney Robertson: So Riyadh saw this and Riyadh is one of the Gutenberg, I don’t know his technical title, but he is, um, full time in Gutenberg working on things. And so during all of this conversation

[01:20:09] Se Reed: Sponsored, sponsored, contributor,

[01:20:12] Courtney Robertson: yes. Um, Automatic.

[01:20:17] Se Reed: okay, just checking.

[01:20:19] Courtney Robertson: So Riyadh said, hey, uh, you don’t understand something on Gutenberg’s code base, leave a reply to this thread and we’ll try to do my best to clarify it.

[01:20:28] Courtney Robertson: Um, so again, I, I’m assuming Riyadh may not be English first. Um, this could be interpreted in two ways. It could be, oh, I see that we have, um, some people that, that are confused. And so, um, I’m trying to be helpful. Or, it could be seen as tailspin of, um, no, this way is correct. And so we have a couple of related things.

[01:20:56] Courtney Robertson: So, also, uh, a former guest on the show, Triple J, John James Jacobi, who is a long time core contributor, um, chimed in. Riyadh’s message, and said, why don’t you document? That doesn’t sound like, uh, he’s interpreting it as Riyadh being helpful, it sounds like JJJ was sort of indicating, um, you’re trying to control the story, and say that you made the right decisions along the way.

[01:21:25] Courtney Robertson: As you look through a lot of Riyadh’s, yeah, uh, one of Jay’s posts, uh, Triple J’s post says, asking for feedback and then just defending yourself is the best way to waste everyone’s time. So

[01:21:37] Se Reed: know, here’s the thing,

[01:21:38] Courtney Robertson: of ways that this could go and so if you look through Riyadh’s messaging, he points to already published dev docs and already created resources on LearnWP, which are helpful and good, except that Um, let’s, let’s look at this chain.

[01:21:55] Courtney Robertson: We have inline documentation, then we get to the release posts that I shared, one from core. I’m the audience that looks at the core release posts to help assess what inlearn needs to be updated or does the docs team, like, we’re the audience of receiving that information so that we know all of the things that need to get updated.

[01:22:13] Courtney Robertson: Also, for people that are testing Gutenberg thoroughly, like, I run the Gutenberg plugin on my site. I do read these types of things and it helps me get things ready for releases. The inline documentation is for the devs that are actively building, that their main role is to build Gutenberg. And so when inline documentation isn’t right, of course it’s going to be hard for an experienced person that just took some time off.

[01:22:38] Courtney Robertson: But it’s also going to be even that much harder for the occasional contributor to find the one little thing. How much more do they have to search if they are just even an occasional contributor? Not even a, like,

[01:22:50] Se Reed: an occasional contribution, impossible. And, you know, I might argue, one might argue, maybe I wouldn’t argue, but one might argue that, um, that could be intentional you know, there’s been a lot of discussion about the marketing team, uh, the WordPress marketing team, which is being disbanded.

[01:23:10] Se Reed: I don’t know if, you know, we haven’t really talked about that on the show. It’s a bit of an emotional topic for me. Uh, but there was a lot of, there is. There continues to be an extensive amount of marketing work for wordpress. org, the open source project, that does not happen on open, uh, on wordpress. org properties. And when one considers that the predominant number of full time Gutenberg developers are, in fact, sponsored by the same company, and one has seen the evidence and the behavior that It shows that discussions do happen on repositories and in slacks that are not open to non employees. Um, one might then begin to wonder if perhaps that documentation exists, even, or if those explanations in that discussion is happening.

[01:24:05] Se Reed: It’s just not happening right now. within the WordPress project itself. And so for the full time folks working on it who are sponsored by Automatic, perhaps they feel a need to have that level. And answering questions in a Twitter feed, Twitter thread, which seems like a really wildly bizarre place to address stuff. in my documentation, um, that almost seems patronizing, you know, like, it’s not just like, Oh, you have a problem? Let me, let me help you. It’s not like he was asking for like, you know, help figuring out some resources to learn how to code properly, right? Like, he’s making a fundamental, Ari is making a fundamental observation about patterns and the state of the actual codebase and the ability of people who are not automaticians to contribute. And, you know, I gotta say, it’s just, it’s not great, because Gutenberg is not even really within the WordPress source projects sphere. It’s not, it is, but it isn’t. It exists sort of in this grey area of, you know, not, like, anything bigger than WordPress, right? Matt Mullenweg, uh, co founder of WordPress, project has talked about this, right?

[01:25:41] Se Reed: He’s talked about how he thinks Gutenberg will be bigger than WordPress. We’ve talked about it on the show. Um, Gutenberg is used by Drupal. So

[01:25:51] Courtney Robertson: just saw a post from Dries, uh, founder of Drupal this past week, and they’re talking about the next iteration. And they call theirs the Instead of calling it like a page builder or something, they call it like the layout builder,

[01:26:06] Se Reed: Mm

[01:26:06] Courtney Robertson: which I thought was interesting. And they’re, uh, they’re at a decision making process point right now in the Drupal project about moving that forward.

[01:26:14] Courtney Robertson: I mean, right now I’m not sure that Gutenberg is fully integrated into their layout builder. Um, but I think that they’re looking at, um, either a more complete adoption of Gutenberg or. There is a competitor to that one, I think was the name of it. There’s a couple I just saw on his post. So, Dries has a recent post, if you’ve heard of Dries, you can find his blog and read about that.

[01:26:43] Courtney Robertson: But I thought it was pretty interesting, um, that there’s still in that, should we fully adopt it or not. How should we do this? And to that end, I don’t know if we have it too handy here in the, the links of tweet conversations that went on, but I shared one that, um, my coworker, Drew James, longtime Quark committer had

[01:27:02] Se Reed: Yeah, this one got interesting, uh,

[01:27:05] Courtney Robertson: So Drew and I know each other. We don’t work in the same department. Occasionally we chat. Both of us are voices in. The Twitter space that are from our own experience of contributing to WordPress and not representing our employer. I say this because we then both got into a conversation in this thread that kind of works with Matt.

[01:27:24] Courtney Robertson: Um, so Drew’s post here, a lot of standards and practices for WordPress core development relaxed around 5. 0 to allow for easier iteration and innovation in the Gutenberg project. After seven years of development, isn’t it time to reprioritize those standards? Matt did respond in this one, um, kind of asking for some clarification, and Drew iterated about the 80 20 rule of, uh, 80 percent of the users

[01:27:49] Se Reed: 80 20 rule. I want to talk about that.

[01:27:53] Courtney Robertson: let’s bring that back.

[01:27:54] Courtney Robertson: Also, let’s do inline documentation. Let’s make sure that we’re accessible by default. those type of points. And I thought that they were pretty solid. It also got into a side conversation that stemmed out of all of this. Uh, that I saw Jorben participate in as well, and I thought points were handled. I will say, I think that, that as we’re seeing all of this, this conversation unfold, people have handled it very, um, factual and responsibly, I feel like.

[01:28:23] Courtney Robertson: I mean, would I have

[01:28:24] Se Reed: like a bunch of hardcore devs

[01:28:26] Courtney Robertson: to come across?

[01:28:27] Se Reed: wait, it’s a bunch of hardcore devs talking about inline documentation and inline, a document, which is amazing, first of all, but like inline documentation is kind of a long standing contentious point within developers world and lore anyway, just because, You know, it’s always my thing.

[01:28:45] Se Reed: Do you document, you know, do you document your code properly? Like, how do you document your code? Like, and so, I mean,

[01:28:52] Courtney Robertson: Some of that side Some of the side combo I wanted to kind of point out with Matt there, though, was that, um, the conversation evolved somewhere between Drew, Jorben, and I kind of jumped in a little bit on it too, was, uh, what are we doing about, like, four leads? There used to be core leads like Mason and Helen and a few others, and there’s a page in the, in the core handbook about some of this.

[01:29:17] Courtney Robertson: Um, these are now seen primarily as historical roles, and Matt made mention to having a variety of non automaticians named as release leads. People were then asking for clarification about that, and then Matt kind of responded that they were, Um, he views release leads as the people that are in the noteworthy contributor, there was like a, a photo of four faces in there, um, of who Matt would deem as the release leads, and so, there was a, I basically was just asking for, can we update the, the page in the core handbook, and, Um, can we be consistent then and how we show this in the about page?

[01:29:57] Courtney Robertson: You know, like I’m not making a huge issue out of some of these side parts of the conversation,

[01:30:03] Se Reed: It’s all

[01:30:04] Courtney Robertson: side conversations related to the Gutenberg conversation too.

[01:30:10] Se Reed: you know what,

[01:30:10] Jason Cosper: It’s all fair requests.

[01:30:16] Se Reed: what Drew and, to be honest, Ari is asking for is, and I hate to say this, word, it’s governance. It doesn’t even have to be governance that isn’t the project, like it’s not external governance, just policies. It’s having policies that people know about and that we follow. That’s what it is. That’s all that, like, governance doesn’t have to be this, like, political revolution, like, you know, come for blood kind of deal. That’s, that’s really not what it’s supposed to be about. This is about, this is the project.

[01:30:49] Se Reed: These are its policies, these are what we do, you know, like we, like, when, when WordPress is in violation of its own stated philosophies, like, no one knows what to do with this, like, we don’t, we don’t know where to put it in our brains, and I think that is what is causing the current level of said aforementioned problems.

[01:31:10] Se Reed: existential crisis, because that 80 20 rule, which I have checked, is still on the website, and maybe now no longer will be there, um, it’ll just get disappeared off the internet. I’ve checked it a few times, the about page on the org site, just to see if it’s been, you know, being disappeared slowly but surely, but the 80 20 rule, which is that the things that should be in core should be useful and used by 80 percent of the users, and there have been some wild things put into core, like, I don’t know, let’s just pick an uncontroversial one, like Duotone, that have not, like, there is no,

[01:31:48] Courtney Robertson: format is the most known one of them all. Well, post format, long, long

[01:31:57] Se Reed: post formats was,

[01:31:58] Jason Tucker: So the people in the back can hear you.

[01:32:00] Se Reed: standing, that was probably way before an 80 20 rule even existed. And second of all, the post formats could be used by 80, you know what I mean? Like, because of just the variation of the post formats, it could be used by 80%. is no way that 80 percent of a website builder market is all going to use the same design choice.

[01:32:25] Se Reed: On an image. Like that’s just, that’s just preposterous. Like that is literally, um, bonkersauce. 80%, okay, this is what it says. Rule of thumb, rule of thumb. That’s interesting. I don’t know that it said that before. But the rule of, maybe it did. The rule of thumb is that the core should provide features that 80 percent or more of end users will actually appreciate and use.

[01:32:46] Se Reed: Um, that’s close enough to what I remember it as, to not contest it. But I don’t know if that applies to Duotone. I certainly don’t think it applies to things like the footnote block. Um, but, you know.

[01:32:57] Jason Cosper: don’t think the, uh, the title of that header clean, lean and mean even applies to, I mean, think about the conversation we’re having

[01:33:05] Se Reed: Yeah, we’re like, it’s not clean, mean, and lean. Like, this is the problem. We are not, we are not living up to our own values, our own stated values. In all areas of the project. And that includes Gutenberg. Like, if Gutenberg is meant to be open, and we’re gonna have all these people contributing to it, and it’s even bigger than WordPress, because it’s this revolutionary, uh, block editor that you can use everywhere, why on earth would we be making it more and more obscure?

[01:33:35] Se Reed: There is no explanation for that. That is aligned with our stated values and policies as a, as a project. Does. Not. Compute.

[01:33:50] Jason Cosper: now, okay. Uh, I’ll ask this for all of us, cause we’ve been around a while, but I’ll specifically ask Courtney, uh, and, and I’m not, uh, you, you, you can say pass on this if you want to, but do you feel that, uh, some of the, uh, less commented code that would be going into some WordPress components today would would have made it into, uh, an earlier version of WordPress, say, uh, 3.

[01:34:27] Jason Cosper: 0, 4. 0. Uh, any, any of those branches do, do any of you feel like, uh, if, if somebody turned around and put in, uh, you know, uh, a patch that they wouldn’t get it just thrown back, uh, you know, in the track ticket, if it was not documented.

[01:34:48] Se Reed: I don’t know about docu Oh, this is Courtney after that, sorry. Go ahead.

[01:34:52] Courtney Robertson: get started. Love you, Sé! So, um, I’m thinking about one This is not necessarily going back to pre Gutenberg, but even during the Gutenberg release cycle, I just saw, um That Aruba shared a message recently, that Aruba’s message was, um, Oh look, somebody else besides me submitted an idea for duplicate post.

[01:35:22] Jason Tucker: Thanks for tuning in

[01:35:32] Courtney Robertson: button available, so that if you want to clone your post, you can easily do so, um, The person is employed by Automattic. I’ve already internally raised the issue to, like, I’ve raised to an internal Automattician to say, Red flag!

[01:35:48] Courtney Robertson: I see that here is where Aruba already originally logged the idea. And I’ve seen that Anne has recently commented on Aruba’s logged idea within the past day. Um, I called out that, When I shared this with somebody that I trust that is an automatic employee to say, you know, this doesn’t help the look of things, uh, when folks are calling this out, I said, this doesn’t, when you see a man at automatic submit the very same idea, and now it’s already in line to be shipped into 6.

[01:36:25] Courtney Robertson: 6, um, that, that’s certainly not helpful, whether that was intentional or not. We need to recognize that the idea Aruba had logged two years ago is related to this, in the process of that. Um, and so, why is it now easier to do as opposed to two years in Gutenberg, two years ago in Gutenberg? Why was it declined when Aruba submitted it?

[01:36:49] Courtney Robertson: Is it a, um, sponsored, unsponsored, a gender thing? In this case I’m reluctant to think that there was any, uh, cultural racial ideas to this, just because I don’t know this particular automation employee, but he doesn’t strike me as like being a typical North American white dude getting his way. Um, uh, sorry, Tucker and Cosper, but, uh, yeah, there’s that.

[01:37:13] Courtney Robertson: So I

[01:37:14] Jason Cosper: No, that’s fine.

[01:37:14] Courtney Robertson: a racial issue, but it’s a, I do see it as maybe a, Sponsored, unsponsored, and possibly a gender issue in terms of, um, initial perception of Aruba’s message versus what’s getting shipped. I could be mistaken, but I just, I, I share those concerns with the people that I trust to make sure that Aruba does get credited on this and to say, this is not helpful for Gutenberg while everything’s being called out right now.

[01:37:40] Courtney Robertson: This is not a benefit to Uh, saying we’re listening and we care is to, to pick

[01:37:47] Se Reed: mean, screw listening and we care. How about we are open and we accept contributions from people just like we say we do because we’re an open source project instead of being a complete elitist gatekept thing that’s only available to more and more full time sponsored employees from one company. Ding. Uh, there’s that.

[01:38:09] Se Reed: Yeah, I really think it has a, you know, there’s, I, there’s, there is no way that there is not, there is at all times a gender role, not a gender role thing, but like a gender disparity at play, and that really is, is prevalent just in every interaction, especially with, within suggestions and tech forums like this.

[01:38:30] Se Reed: So, 100 percent that. But in terms of why this feature is suddenly useful, and an automatician might be jumping in there and popping it in, uh, that has, to me, a lot more to do with WordPress. com and what it’s trying to be to

[01:38:46] Courtney Robertson: It’s going back to the less Calypso interface,

[01:38:49] Se Reed: Yeah, exactly.

[01:38:51] Courtney Robertson: the native org interface.

[01:38:53] Se Reed: Right, which means that it is going to try to be, um, you know, that the software needs to be better.

[01:39:01] Se Reed: Surprise, surprise. And things like duplicating posts, which definitely 80 percent of users might use and find useful, versus, say, I don’t know, again, Duotone. Um, the, the idea that that is now useful to, Automatic slash WordPress. com. And that is why it’s prioritization is happening. That to me makes more sense than anyone even.

[01:39:27] Se Reed: Thought about Aruba, what had been happening, like, the likelihood that they were like, I don’t think in this case it was like, let’s steal that idea or anything. It was just like a, oh, we need this feature now, so we’re just going to go ahead and put it in there. Because it’s really these, these issues and these discussions that emerge on, on the public open source repos. A lot of them feel like they have been previously discussed. Um, I know that’s definitely the case for a lot of the quote unquote proposals that get put out by some groups, like for example, the MediaCorp proposal that was put out by the director of the project, Josefa, who, uh, just, Put onto the marketing blog that the marketing team was changing, and this was a proposal, but a proposal that’s not a proposal because it’s a proposal that’s happening, and had been in discussion apparently, and whatever, but not discussed with the team, not discussed openly, and now is being posted for comments and feedback?

[01:40:27] Courtney Robertson: And I’m going to

[01:40:28] Se Reed: But not really, because it’s already happening. So again, I’m pulling that back to there is a discussion happening that is not being documented. And so whether the, you know, the decisions might be being documented in the core posts, the what’s new in Gutenberg, they’re not being documented in the inline documentation, because even the things aren’t even being labeled in the inline documentation.

[01:40:54] Se Reed: But I don’t think that it’s, I do think that it is the same problem in both areas. I think that this is systemic, and I think that the number of people running up against this wall of where are these conversations happening, and who’s making these decisions, and who’s driving the train that we’re on, um, that’s what we all keep hitting up against.

[01:41:21] Se Reed: And you know what, when you hit up against that and you’re like, Well, I can’t get any further. The next car is locked, so I can’t see who’s driving the locomotive. You know what happens? You get off the train. That’s what happens. And I think that that is a intentional, uh, feature and not a bug. And I think that a lot of us. of us want to approach it as if it’s a bug and we want to fix it. And we want to say, Hey, here’s all the ways we could do this better. But if the goal is not in fact to do that better, then maybe we are all just wasting our time, like Jake Tripp said. Mmm,

[01:42:05] Courtney Robertson: So many big thoughts and feelings. It’s, it’s been a week of like, uh,

[01:42:12] Se Reed: oh, oh, in the house, sorry.

[01:42:15] Jason Tucker: Um,

[01:42:22] Courtney Robertson: message Ari put out is, okay, we’ve had this many views on your message. How do we. we, at this point, because it got so much coverage, can we take that back to the official spaces and see any actionable change come out of this?

[01:42:41] Courtney Robertson: And I’m still stewing on that thought.

[01:42:44] Se Reed: Me looking around, oh no, I don’t see, but I’m here anyway, so I guess I have some sort of like vain hope that with enough of us. Uh, speaking up with enough of the ecosystem that, let’s be real, this is not a one company ecosystem, okay? As much as some of us might like to think that it is, it is not. That is, uh, I actually looked it up recently.

[01:43:09] Se Reed: WordPress is a, I believe it’s 567 billion dollar ecosystem. Anyone? It’s a big number, folks. Um, and you know what? That’s not all one company. As much as that one company wants to think that it’s all them. So, you know, I guess there is a political revolutionary message. of all, you know, there’s more of us than there are of them. Maybe? Because, you know, I don’t know. And also hired soldiers are never as good as soldiers who are volunteering out of passion. That’s all I’m saying. So it’s up, it’s up to us, right? We, we, we all see the writing on the wall, or the lack of writing in the documentation. The lack of writing on the code, we should say.

[01:43:56] Se Reed: Uh, and we all know that it’s there. We’re all reading these tweets. We all see the same thing.

[01:44:03] Jason Tucker: Do you guys feel that the, the idea of this is that because of the fact that Gutenberg is doing what it’s doing, that people have then continued on and even probably even doubled and tripled down on alternative. you know, page builders and, and stuff like that, where those are still prevalent. And it’s just like, we’re still using Divi.

[01:44:24] Jason Tucker: We’re still using Bbuilder. We’re still using this. We’re still using that. And they’re like, Oh yeah. But when I write a blog post, I accidentally use Gutenberg to write it.

[01:44:34] Se Reed: I mean, I use, I, for all my client sites, even ones where I’m using other page builders, I’m using the block editor on posts. It just, you know, it’s, because the block editor is great for styling text layout, right? It’s better than a Word doc. It’s better than Google, right? A Google doc for laying out a document or a page.

[01:44:55] Se Reed: But, And that is different from abstracting again into an entire site. Those are, you know, that that’s a that’s a more philosophical discussion about the site editor in general. But I think, you know, Gutenberg is on its own track. It is on its own train. It is being run Fast and hot and quick and, um, WordPress is just gulping it down.

[01:45:20] Se Reed: Like, literally, whatever Gutenberg shoves in, WordPress is taking. And that sounded really way more, um, odd than I intended it to, me. Um, but like, that’s what’s happening. Like, there’s been this ongoing discussion with every release. It’s like, oh, which version of the latest Gutenberg are we gonna, uh, Put in here and it’s like, oh, is it, we’re taking this latest version or this latest version?

[01:45:43] Se Reed: Like, like, and, and there have been multiple problems with releases that are probably connected to that with the 0. 1, 0. 2 thing being skipped. Like, I, I feel like there’s, I don’t know, maybe there’s not a connection there, but I feel like there’s a connection there in terms of the, the, Input level of Gutenberg at the very last minute that has definitely derailed multiple releases for WordPress because something that is brand new in Gutenberg broke.

[01:46:13] Se Reed: I mean, like, but, but the policy is to put the absolute latest cutting edge version. That comes out like in like, it’s like something nuts. Like at, at the release candidate one or something like that, like that’s when they’re like, okay, now we won’t take in any new Gutenberg code. Like, what are you wild?

[01:46:34] Se Reed: Like, that’s why so many of them, they’ve added extra betas, Gutenberg is getting new code coming hot off the printer and then just being just sucked right in, like without any time for processing or even testing properly.

[01:46:52] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, Brian Kordes, um,

[01:46:53] Se Reed: absorption into the project or quote unquote discussion.

[01:46:58] Courtney Robertson: Yeah, Brian Kordes, uh, has been very eager to call out, um, Oh, and for the audio listeners, my dog has joined the show. She is a little white Maltipoo, and she’s sitting on my lap so that she doesn’t bark if a neighbor is getting a delivery of something, I don’t know. Um, so Brian Quartz has been calling out, let’s do a, a, a full release that solely focuses on polish and improvements, um, that doesn’t add new features that, you know, what if we, what if we do a release where the whole point is to improve Inline documentation and accessibility, adding no new features, uh, just continuing to improve these areas of the project that we know we absolutely need to tweak further.

[01:47:42] Se Reed: And

[01:47:43] Courtney Robertson: that idea is starting to get a little more traction, but we also understand why that It’s hard to do, and contributors be contributors, they will pick and choose what they wish to work on. Sometimes that is true when you are, um, both sponsored and unsponsored. If you are wildly passionate about post formats, the way that Cosper and I are, and you decide you want to get post formats working with the block theme, okay, well, off you go, go ahead, contribute, and when it’s ready, it will work.

[01:48:11] Courtney Robertson: It will, but I also see the value in saying, we’re going to take a couple of releases and just focus on. Inline docs, accessibility, you know, the, the things that we’re all crying out for, um, to have those specific areas to improve. And I think if we did that, we would lose news cycle hype about how great WordPress is potentially.

[01:48:35] Courtney Robertson: But we would get internal, in the community, influencer bubble people to say, Wow, this is so helpful, so beneficial. And I would love to see that type of thing come from this situation. Um, where maybe we do really look inwardly and not Not ship more features, not rush on to phase three Gutenberg, dashboard, media, library, all the things.

[01:49:01] Courtney Robertson: Um, you know, Gutenberg’s coming for the rest of WordPress and we know that, but let’s not leave it so that eventually all of WordPress is Gutenberg and all of WordPress is missing inline documentation and is not accessible. We can’t have that as an editing experience. We can’t have that as a experience.

[01:49:20] Se Reed: we have that. Right now, just to frame it out. So we, we do not want to keep that is what that is.

[01:49:27] Courtney Robertson: Um, we don’t have it for everything. So for instance, You know, we still have the classic editor plug in available and it helps people that have Need screen readers, especially. Um, they can have an accessible experience by installing the classic editor and writing posts that way. It’s an option. It’s not a good option.

[01:49:47] Courtney Robertson: A lot of the other parts of WordPress core’s code that is not a Gutenberg experience, I’m venturing to guess, although I should do my homework and go read and look. I’m guessing that there is some more additional pointers in the inline documentation for folks in non Gutenberg parts of WordPress right now.

[01:50:06] Se Reed: Yeah. Well, I mean, it would be nice to have everyone. I think, I think that is maybe the intention that I’ve heard expressed from Josefa in the past. Although the problem is last year, the Polish episode, um, Polish release, which by the way, Polish is not the same. Polishing features is not the same thing as a release that focuses on documentation and, you know, accessibility and ensuring that contributors are, you know, being kept up to date like that.

[01:50:35] Se Reed: Those are not the same thing. But last year for the 6. 4 release, it was both touted as the underrepresented contributor release and the Polishing release. So that, that was, that was really bad. Um, well, again, maybe intentional, maybe not where we’re like, oh, we’re not going to work on as many new features because.

[01:51:00] Se Reed: Maybe we don’t want underrepresented contributors to be weighing in on those features as much. I don’t know. There’s some more gatekeeping for you, but, but the, the gatekeeping is real. And it

[01:51:12] Jason Cosper: And, and, uh, asking underrepresented, uh, people, uh, uh, especially, uh, specifically female representing, uh, you know, presenting folks to clean shit up.

[01:51:28] Se Reed: it’s

[01:51:29] Jason Cosper: Come on.

[01:51:30] Se Reed: I got so upset about that. I was like, really, this is a clean and polished one for the, and at that point we were calling it, I think we ended up calling it women and non binary or it was at that point. And I was like, the women and non binary release squad is focusing on cleaning and polishing.

[01:51:44] Se Reed: That’s great. Cool.

[01:51:46] Jason Cosper: and, uh,

[01:51:47] Se Reed: thought about that.

[01:51:48] Jason Cosper: To, to rewind for, for half a second to, to Courtney pointing out that, that basically, uh, people being told for better accessibility, you can install the classic editor and just use the classic editor. That’s like saying, Hey, I know that there are all of these sidewalks around here and we have some folks, uh, who need curb cuts, uh, where the curb dips, so they can get down.

[01:52:14] Jason Cosper: But, uh, just a little ways down, there’s a driveway you can, you can just, you know, roll down that instead,

[01:52:21] Se Reed: And then just be in the street for a minute, you’ll be fine.

[01:52:24] Jason Cosper: right? No, no curb cuts, like make everybody a first class citizen because eventually everybody is going to need accessibility. You, I, everyone here, everyone listening, everyone watching

[01:52:40] Se Reed: Us all, all our old millennials are gonna need screen readers. Like, come on.

[01:52:45] Jason Cosper: on a, on a long enough timeline, you are going to need accessibility features too, like accessibility is coming for you. You are going to,

[01:52:57] Se Reed: That would be an amazing t shirt. Another t shirt exclusive here at WordCamp.

[01:53:02] Jason Cosper: yeah, like, please like

[01:53:04] Se Reed: Who are we? Watercooler. She’s

[01:53:06] Jason Cosper: start treating, start treating accessibility as,

[01:53:10] Jason Tucker: It’s only 11

[01:53:11] Jason Tucker: years cause

[01:53:12] Jason Cosper: Yeah.

[01:53:13] Jason Tucker: been 11 years. Say you’re fine.

[01:53:15] Se Reed: you’ll learn my name too, eventually. That’s good. We’re doing well here. Anyway, we love you all, and I think it’s been a

[01:53:20] Courtney Robertson: We can just call you another Jason, and that would simplify

[01:53:23] Jason Tucker: Yeah.

[01:53:24] Se Reed: know, right?

[01:53:25] Jason Tucker: It’s her middle name.

[01:53:26] Se Reed: Jason. I’m trying. All right. We gotta go. We love you. Hang out with us in our Slack. Um, thanks for coming on and talking.

[01:53:35] Courtney Robertson: Wait, what?

[01:53:36] Se Reed: What? It’s our watercoolerslack. lol. Uh huh.

[01:53:40] Courtney Robertson: Gotcha. I think I’ll find my way

[01:53:42] Se Reed: Um, it’s, if you know, you know, you know? Um, thanks for coming on and helping us dissect the complicated relationship status between uh, Gutenberg and WordPress.

[01:53:52] Se Reed: And uh, shout out to Cosper for the title because I love it. Um, as an elder millennial who existed in the relationship, it’s not, I mean, at the time when Facebook had it, I didn’t actually ever use it. Kind of wished I had, but you know, you never know. I wish they had it now. It’d be better.

[01:54:13] Jason Tucker: Y’all have a good one.

[01:54:14] Se Reed: Goodbye.

[01:54:17] Jason Tucker: So, go over to our website at apwatercooler. com slash subscribe to subscribe to this content right here. We’d really appreciate it. You can find us wherever it is that, uh, the internet has us, uh, post these things and come hang out with us over there. We would appreciate it.

[01:54:30] Jason Tucker: If you like this stuff, um, subscribe. If you didn’t like this stuff, then post about it on socials cause, um, you know, it’s good. See y’all later. Bye bye.

[01:54:39] Se Reed: Free and independent.