@b0rk
Yourself 🙂

@b0rk oh what good stuff

there's also a lot of non-programming-specific answers to this, things like people who make sure everyone gets a chance to talk, or people who make it clear that the community does not stand for hateful bullshit

@b0rk
Transitioned from 1 - 8 - 4 - 5 - 2.
Certified Grumpiness achieved \o/

@b0rk i think it'd be funny if they were just a rubber duck on a desk but it might be less helpful as an inclusion than something else

@b0rk The community leader/wayfinder - "if you have that question, you want to talk to [this person] in [that forum]."

@b0rk

The Breaker of All Things. They go where no fuzzer can and show your program is not correct HERE.

@b0rk The archaeologist or historian (usually moonlights as a forensic spelunker).

@b0rk the forum moderator, who manages the space where you can find all these people (and pushes back on the "people who make programming harder" folks)?

@b0rk you forgot the burnout

@b0rk the community organizer! i did hack&&tell with @apg, for example

@b0rk the helpdesk archeologist. „Ah. In May of 2018 an architect running CentOS tried something similar and ran into a bug. Let me dig up the ticket.”

@b0rk

The fellow newbie who learns alongside you.

@b0rk the code reviewer, who reviews every new pr thoroughly and quickly.
The scope manager, who violently slashes scope and keeps your pm at bay.
Also shout-out to the QA staff who make sure our fuckups don't hit prod 🎉

@b0rk the Julia Evans.

@b0rk the "loud old-timer"

figure labeled "old": "X never works!"

figure labeled "new": thinks "maybe I should change jobs"

@b0rk maybe “the willing pair”?
When asked “do you know how/why..” they often respond with “I’m not sure, but I’d love to help figure it with you”. Followed by much learning by both.

@b0rk The Blogger - converts mysterious technical wisdom into understandable, three-step solutions

@b0rk Oh bugger, do you think you should replace X with, idk, XYZ because X means something now??

You forgot to draw yourself in the last frame ;) But srsly, someone who inspires with a positive attitude. Programming discourse can be full of negativity. Like, The Coding Train videos made me happy and inspired me to try new stuff.

@b0rk since you're using X, problably a joking entry from the Wayland/Xorg "wars"?

@b0rk The debugger: "please show me the stack trace and all the details of your setup, I will get to the bottom of this"

@b0rk the hole finder: "hay can you talk through your plan for X? I'd like to understand it so I know what to plan for Y"
...
"how are we dealing with bad thing A?"

"Oh @&#%$"

@b0rk The mentor, maybe? The somewhat experienced guy who is asked for advice how to approach/solve something? He’ll ask the right questions gives some ideas and stuff to look into, helps you to get back on track.

@b0rk the zine author who explains so well 😊

@b0rk

newbie "what's this thing"
Experienced dev: "oh we're going on an adventure, congrats you're part of the lucky ten thousand"

https://xkcd.com/1053/

@b0rk I'm trying to get down to 200 browser tabs!!!

@b0rk screeners

"Well I never saw this issue but it sounds terrible and I think I heard other people with a similar issue last week. Better mark it high priority"

@b0rk The translator "My people don't speak English, I'm going to translate/explain it to/in Spanish", "Now I learn it, I will write how to do this with R if you come from Python"

@b0rk I love this!

@b0rk this is so cute, it’s my favourite comic you’ve done :^)

@b0rk

The tester: I am not sure but this is how I would test your solution!

@b0rk The rage refactor guy/gal. Somebody has a problem so this person spends the next 24 hours fixing the problem for good.

@b0rk not sure what to call them. But always appreciated the presence of people who question (usually in a design review) the why of things and every little assumption being made in the design (assuming other people know x or other assumptions). They can be tiring, but in a good way.

@b0rk The quiz writers: https://hachyderm.io/@shafik/110968979182957281

and cursed code posters: https://hachyderm.io/@shafik/110770752177238000

🧐

@b0rk i am tab girl!! :3

@b0rk the „let me draw a quick picture on a whiteboard“ colleague

@b0rk The good boss/manager.

The person that supports you and keep all those distractions away from you so you can do your programming job more efficiently and with more joy.

@b0rk @neurothing The UAT guy who runs through all of the weird edge cases to make sure your code works properly!

@b0rk Damn Elon naming their website like that. Can't think of anything else now.

@b0rk people who write well detailed bug reports, with exact steps to reproduce the problem, attach all relevant logs, and keep the report up to date as new versions of the software get relased

(yes, most of the hard tasks in code I touch is fixing bugs, not writing new code)

@b0rk the head first diver. “I dunno how this works lets figure it out together!”

@b0rk the artist, who draws comic stripes to explain complex programming concepts 😄

@b0rk I am Tab Gurl for sure, and learn so much from my beloved loud newbies when we say "let's figure it out together" (probably how all those tabs got opened) so I'd add the partner in crime or interlocutor or similar

@b0rk
the enabling lead

"Let's double your estimate so you have time to research this"

@b0rk @jtonline The Pragmatist

“Look, stop using X. Even its creators say it’s a failure and shouldn’t be included in modern windowed Linux distributions.”

@b0rk The Librarian

Coworker: "I'm gonna have to build a tool to do this cumbersome task"
Librarian: "Wait, use this library that does exactly that!"

@b0rk

- Donations
- Project support (encouragement, gh stars etc.)
- Translators
- Naggers (define easier XD)

@b0rk "This refused to work, and here's 482 different classic problems I tried solving before finding this really obscure one."

@b0rk the zinester / popularizer / youtuber?

@b0rk The SCM Knower:

"I think I broke my git/hg/p4..."
"Oh! It's just a graph, all you need to do is..."

@b0rk the Enlightened Layabout

“Oh you don’t need to do <complicated thing> we can just do <simple thing> instead”

@b0rk The person who patiently listens to you explain an issue you are having just to have you figure it out by talking through it. We thought of putting a dummy in an office for this purpose.

@b0rk people who add good logging so bugs are easier to track down as they happen. Thanks folks!

all the replies to this are SO good

@b0rk the “you can do it, I believe in you”

@b0rk This feels like a solid counterpart to the Being Glue post that’s been going around

@b0rk I love this.

Also: the Deep Diver, whose eyes light up upon encountering a problem that most other people walk away from, who then dives deeply into it, and comes back enthusiastic and ready to infodump on it.

@b0rk There's people who just make stuff look fun. Kind of like the people who demonstrations at science museums for kids.

The Showcasers?

@b0rk Feeling personally attacked right now 😂

@b0rk How many of those do you self-identify with?

@b0rk the wild ones that push things to their limit to make them do things outside their immediate use case and open your horizons (how to think outside the box).

@b0rk at this point I'm pretty sure I'm a "tool builder"

Hard to test before pushing to the cloud? i made a tool for that. Same tool also troubleshoots failed flows!

internal only, oc (cause it wouldn't help anyone else much anyway)

@b0rk the "glue engineer": "yes! you can totally convert a video signal from outer space into a 3D model for the pico8! you will need these 200 tools and this 700 line script, but it's totally doable!"

@b0rk the Database administrator: "did you know that with this index here and this index there your code will run 100 times faster?" - "Wow I had no idea I was making inefficient database queries!!! Thanks!"

@b0rk @raineer Generalizer/Communicator? “Hmm, the problem you described is a lot like this problem we solved on another project. Let’s improve that solution to be more general instead of building a totally new thing to maintain.”

Actually on second thought, developers hate this kind person…

@b0rk how about the teacher? I’ve learned so much from your comics and also videos by people like Corey Schafer.

@b0rk nice :) but calling it "X" hits a bit different these days :D

@b0rk the active rubber-duck. “Talk me through what you think it’s doing, I’m gonna ask lots of questions.” (And after one of your answers you’re gonna go “ooooh and that’s why it’s not working.”)

@b0rk @deadprogram I’m the “just use Postgres” fella.

@b0rk In terms of internal / external team members, there is the internal facilitator:

X: "Argh, I need an account on Z to do that..."
Facilitator: "Ah, good to know - I asked Janet, she's on that team, should not be long."

@b0rk the cardboard cutout. The person who's just here listening to you ranting about your code

@b0rk
"You should talk to X about it!"

@b0rk The bug reporter who writes up an extremely clear description of the problem and provides a perfectly succinct reproduction case

@b0rk the detective: "I know we still haven't found the cause of this mystery bug, but I think we're close! Here's a document that explains what we've tried so far."

@b0rk it’s me, tab girl

@b0rk And there is also the guide:

X: "How can we implement feature Z in this system?"
Guide: "Oh, that's actually easy. We just need to add components A and B, similar to what we did with *click* *scroll* here, but take extra care of *click* *click* this problem. If we do it the other way, then *click* that property no longer holds for feature Y."

@b0rk Janitors for keeping the office a clean and healthy place to work.

All the other service workers in your day to day life.

The people who are just really nice, who makes other people feel better (like a capybara).

@b0rk "check out this weird bug" is my love language.

@b0rk
The chaos gremlin - "what happens if I X?", doing the bizarre things so the rest of us know why not to.

I love this @b0rk!

@gedankenstuecke - I think you’re “read the whole internet”!!

@b0rk Sigh. I have been so distorted by negativity that I was afraid this was sarcasm. That aside, it is quite good.

@b0rk the thesaurus: “Yeah you can use X, but Y and Z also exist and make these tradeoffs to solve the same problem differently”

@b0rk the eraser who deletes stuff you never needed to know about anyway

@b0rk The untangler.

Finds and unifies multiple implementations of the same thing and straightens out your project's old spaghetti code.

A good day is producing -1000 readable LOC.

@b0rk yes, it does seem somewhat ironic that "the textbook author" is not in the bottom-right panel. But maybe "the zine maker" should be :)

@b0rk the innocent destroyer 😂 those people who press one button and the bridge collapses, godzilla rises, the terminator comes alive again... I absolutely love to go to those people "hey can you try something for me?" and then everything falls apart which just worked perfectly :)

@b0rk the testing guru;

"I don't know how to test this."

"Don't worry, we can pair on the problem, and come up with something to verify behaviour, and guard against regressions."

@b0rk The Clarifier
The person who asks “What are you trying to accomplish?”, making you realize there’s an easier way.

@b0rk With apologies (and due credit to you for the original): For #HPC the answer is obvious!
(Forgive our bias.)

@b0rk My favourite variant on the grumpy old-timer/read-entire-internet is the "Other Tool Fanatic" who says "Oh right! That part of X was COMPLETELY INSPIRED by Y, which had a cool model that..."

@b0rk This almost feels like an 3x3 grid: levels of knowledge of this tool, levels of knowledge of other tools, with empty squares for the middle/high sides of "other tools". So perhaps "The inspiration" or "The Person Who Did The Same Thing in a Different Way"?

@b0rk the one who knows who knows... The networker

@b0rk a spelunker / muck raker; someone who's prepared to keep going deeper and deeper into a bug to find out it's true cause.

@b0rk the QA, I found a bug for you here is the list of steps to reproduce it and a stack trace of the crash.

@b0rk maybe too similar to the tool builder, but i nominate The Librarian (who spends their time writing reusable code snippets or libraries that other people can reach for).

@b0rk The original coder ?

@b0rk the theorist - "here's a list of papers you may need to familiarize yourself with to fully understand the set of concepts behind this seemingly simple procedure"

@b0rk your own past self for writing clear and well commented code!

@b0rk i strive to be all of these folks whenever possible