I've been away from the Kos for a little while and the last time I was here, still on the older version, there was the occasional diary about how people were fed up over DK4 and were going to TTFN or GBCW. As a professional web developer I'd like to share my opinion on the new site.
Absolutely beautiful. I'm a huge fan, the aesthetics are really nice, the feature set is good, the stability is great. It's a beautiful visual refresh that I'm sure is much more than meets the eye.
We've come to depend upon the internet for a large part of our lives, to socialize, gather information, organize, share our deepest sorrow and our greatest triumphs. There is a group of people diligently working to make sure that the wonderful online communities have beautiful, functional, stable places to spend their time and do the important stuff they want to do.
Web development is a thankless job mostly though, the developers toil mostly behind the scene, the great mass of their code lying behind the interface. As a user it may be hard to imagine, but here is a simple analogy:
Imagine I asked you to build me a car. You go to work, you balance design concerns with practical engineering concerns, you spend countless hours running crash tests to make sure that if I'm in an accident I'm nice and safe. You build a powerful new engine that sips gas but gives back plenty of power. You've poured your soul into it, you've worked long hard months to make the car wonderful. And finally the day comes for you to deliver it to me.
I look at the car and say, "I hate the color, I'm not going to drive this ugly beast"
You are devestated.
This is the soul crushing existence of a web developer. Except instead of building 1 car for 1 person, we are trying to build 1 website for thousands or millions of users, each with competing ideas about how things should look and work. And most of the work we do is stuff you will never see. And we are normally pretty happy to listen to feedback and change up stuff when its clear that something isn't working or could work better.
But the "woe is me" users who want to jump ship because of a color off here or a content block there. I have one thing to say to those people jumping ship.
GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE.
And to the team that brought the new DK4 to life, congratulations. It's an incredible piece of software and you should be proud, take the time to fine tune and bug squash and make it shine, and those whining users will slink back. Because at the end of the day, we are here to help the communities we serve. We are trying to build beautiful forums for thought, and we have concerns beyond the colors. We want to build high-quality, fault tolerant, feature rich, stable software.
That's my $.02 as a web developer. Back to the grind, back to a user base who will never appreciate the amount of work it takes to make sure that they can easily publish their thoughts and feelings. Back to being overworked and underappreciated. Back to the majority of human interaction being someone complaining about something.