Reminder: This is a wiki! Edit and refactor at will.

Pattern: Treating tasks and projects with extreme care: as a work of art and model of practice.
Foil: Routine releases, with the general shape of considered design and implementation, but little interest in dotting i's and crossing t's, closing open questions and discussions, updating incoming links, wrapping a long-term effort with a thorough report that serves as future reference.
Chats: Carefree examples; Corrolates with perfectionism; who designs when things are 'done', continuous updates vs infrequent release; maintainership of dialogue and feedback vs of only critical security vulns; corrolates with how projects and services are later wound down and stopped; delegation + response times; porosity + professionalism

Chats[edit]

Carefree examples[edit]

Project - getting a link to article-talk on mobile: For 4+ years this just didn't exist. No links to talk, despite it being one of the first features requested. Devs came up with a series of reasons why mobile readers shouldn't be shown talk pages (confusing, harder to display, invites spam?, hard to navigate away from?), then reasons why logged-in users of the app shouldn't be shown them (hard to render discussions w/ long indents, more edge cases expecting desktop-like layout), then reasons why logged-in users shouldn't be shown a link to the desktop-view of talk pages, which is what they were all going to anyway in their browsers (no space to include the link in the clean mobile layout? I lost the thread here); By 2017 a link was added, hidden in the footer (this pattern recurs later, below). The initial link only worked on English WP, and only in the main namespace; it simply prepended "Talk:" to the article title, rather than moving from namespace N to namespace N+1. start-166318-end was filed. This was an obvious bug w/ simple fix, leading to a broken link on every non-English App pageview.; 18 months later, someone comments "Is there any development about that? That embarrasses us in the world!"; 2 months later, a patch is submitted. It fixes the vast majority of cases, but still fails to fix some edge cases. Two other devs reject the patch, though it would improve on the status quo.; 2 months later, a new contributor finds the bug and comments on it with enthusiasm. They also find the gerrit discussion about the patch and comment there asking implicitly how they can contribute. The reply is "Will open a PR in our Github repo when we fix it." That contributor never engages further with the dev community.; Another 8 months later the patch is abandoned without comment. At this point people were talking about adding links to Talk pages "properly", i.e. in a more prominent place in the app.; Another 14 months later, after 44 months during which these Talk links were displayed but broken in the footers of all non-English-mainspace pages, this is finally implemented -- with little fanfare.

design chats