"Say thank you. Report bugs."

2022-05-10 | @Acidus

There is a great gem of advice which StackSmith wrote that I don't want to get lost in this recent discussion about software size and the "philosophy" of CLI programs from the 1970s.

Say thank you. Report bugs. Write great software yourself, with as many lines of code as you feel appropriate, if that's your thing.

StackSmith's post

We need more of this. Providing criticism can be helpful, but consider more positive things you can do to help.

Say "thank you"

Someone worked hard, most likely out of love, building the Gemini client or server or service you are using. Consider dropping them a note to say thank you. Trust me, it helps a lot.

Report Bugs

Reporting bugs is a awesome way you can help make something you use better. It's easy, and you don't need to be a programmer. Simply tell the developer, step-by-step, what you do, what happened, and what you expected to happen.

Here are some bugs I've filed:

Buran treats "mailto:" links as Gemini links with relative URLs

Buran crashes on app launch without internet access

Buran displaying same image for URL despite different query string

Buran not reloading dynamically generated images

Buran not using selected "dark" theme on startup

Security Issue: Elaho executes HTML tags in text/plain responses

Security issue: Gemtext link with a 'javascript:' URI execute JS when clicked in Elaho

Remove GUS Search Provider. Capsule is no longer active

Pressing "UP" button appends query string to parent URL

Write Software

If you are able to, and you want something to be different, write software. But only after doing the first two.