Livre d'Or

so, this post has been seriously nagging at the back of my head a lot, and i hope you'll forgive me both a) coming back to it three weeks later, and b) commenting despite that awkward tension between private person and site-owner that happens sometimes. (i'm commenting as denise because this is more of the site-owner sort of thing, but in case anybody else stumbles across this comment, liv and i mutually read each other as private-people and have known each other for ages, which is how i came across the post in the first case; i don't usually make it a habit of jumping into posts where people are discussing DW!)

you make some totally valid observations, don't get me wrong, and i'm not going to argue that there aren't some (many) things we're falling down on, but ever since i read this post, two things have been really bothering me, and i'd like to address them.

first, we are absolutely not underpaying people, at least not in the way you mean it. obviously i can't discuss individual financial data or specific salaries, but we actually only have one fulltime staff member: everyone else is being paid a retainer to be on call for specific situations, or is being paid with the expectation of only a certain number of hours per week. we pay at or above market rate for the location in which people are employed, the number of hours people are expected to work, and the nature of the position, and we've done so since the moment we first took on paid staff, even in the months when we had zero income. we are absolutely not taking advantage of people's idealism and commitment to the project. if we hire somebody, we pay them at least what they could make in an equivalent job. if we were willing to compromise on that, we could have more paid staff. we're not willing to compromise on that. we don't (legally can't without making some sweeping changes, due to many factors that are boring and tedious to get into) offer benefits, and there are fairly complex situations revolving around the fact the US tax code is a nightmare, and we'd love to be able to pay people above market rate, but the only people being dramatically underpaid are me and mark. (i'm making below-entry-level salary; mark isn't being paid a regular salary at all.)

second, i think that saying the site's not in active development is a vastly unfair assessment. yes, there are a lot of big things that haven't been finished yet, and many of them are very noticeable and wanted very badly, but specific features not being finished yet doesn't mean nothing gets finished at all. if you look back at news posts, you'll see that we do release new features (at what i think is frankly a pretty impressive rate, given that we essentially have one staff programmer who not only does her own projects but also spends up to half her time per week reviewing and committing other people's code) -- the last release had the reply-by-email feature, for instance. sure, it's not huge and showy, but it was a lot of work (that represented around five to six weeks of person-hours due to the technical debt involved) and it's a feature that a lot of people had been requesting.

we try to have something new, not just ("just" being the wrong word but you know what i mean!) bugfixes, in every push. sometimes we fail! sometimes the things are tiny usability improvements that some people might consider bugfixes, not feature development! sometimes the things are so tiny that they're barely noticeable! but we do try. we've got another few major features that are on-tap and close to being releasable. we've implemented over half the suggestions that have been accepted through the dw_suggestions process. we've resolved over 250 bugs since the beginning of the year (and that number's probably low, since bugzilla broke their search-by-date with the latest release). development moves slowly in some cases, but it does move.

the problem is, yes, that we're understaffed, and (as i just said in a comment to another one of your posts) it's very hard to release major, sweeping features with a primarily-volunteer team. yes, if we had a million-dollar budget, we could do a lot more. we're limited by a number of constraints, including staffing, budget, the difficulty of working entirely remotely, the fact everybody's doing a bunch of different jobs all at once, the lack of a fulltime technical manager, the lack of someone dedicated solely to frontend development instead of doing frontend development as one tiny bit of her job, the lack of anybody (volunteer or not) doing UI design, the crushing technical debt we're still making payments on, and (quite honestly) the disability considerations of both the site ownership team and many of the volunteers. (i've been limited to about two hours a day of typing time for at least the past six months, for instance; i violate that limitation way too often, but my orthopedist would be much happier if i'd shut my laptop and locked it in a drawer for that six months. it has curtailed a lot.)

likewise, as i also said in that other comment, the fact that we have so many newcomers also slows development pace. i do not think this is a bad thing! i think it's great that we have so many beginners (to perl, to working on a webapp of this size, or to programming entirely), and i think it's probably one of the more significant things we've accomplished! especially since newcomers are the best people to spot the "missing stair", where we've worked around something for so long that we just gloss straight over how sub-optimal it is, or to spot the holes in our process documentation or the gaps in our tools; we get at least as much benefit out of the talents and perspectives of newcomers as we put in. but that approach does slow things down, in how much time experienced people have to spend coaching and tutoring, and it does mean that some weeks and months, the bulk of our person-hours comes from people who don't have the experience necessary to implement the really showy things.

are the things we're still lacking really lacking in some cases? yes, absolutely. have we been unable to get to many of the things i really, really, really want, that i think we need in order to attract users, and that people desperately miss when they're using the site? yes, absolutely. are there a double dozen workflows that could be improved so goddamn much? yes, absolutely.

are some of those missing features, usability disasters, half-finished projects, and giant gaps in our featureset quite frankly bloody embarrassing sometimes? yes, absolutely. yes. absolutely, wholeheartedly, a thousand times over, and i cringe sometimes that we can't get things done faster, and i could keep a team of fifty people busy for the next five years with all the things that need to get done. but i really don't think it's accurate to say "slow to release major features or fully complete some open projects" equals "not in active development".