@b0rk the big picture person: "how does X work?" Is followed by "what is the problem you're solving?" Then "why are you trying to solve that?"

@b0rk The sharer – I've found this excellent content about X that I've vetted for value from our point of view so you can grow as a professional with minimal effort

@b0rk the connector! She knows what everyone in the community works on so when someone asks "How do I do X" she answers "I think you should ask Y". If you want a living example, that'd be https://twitter.com/webchick :)

@b0rk the brave dumb question asker! "Hey, what does XYZ stand for? I've never heard that one before." [second person's thought bubble: "oh, thank goodness, I thought I was the only one who didn't know what XYZ stood for!"] #programming

@b0rk so good ideas!

One kind of person who helps me a lot is someone I can ping with any weird behavior I can't figure out, or any design problem, and they will take a few minutes during their day to look at it with me.
They won't have the answer right away, but we complement each other very well, they ask good questions, point flaws and suggest ideas that'll make the solution appear in no time, sometimes just by explaining the problem to them.

@b0rk Died at "Tab girl." 🤣

@b0rk @mamsell The Good-Bugreport-Writer and the one that opens a PR fixing said bug just a minute later.

@b0rk my favorite is the unashamed old timer, which is the exactly same as the loud newbie except they have like 20 years of experience and they're really good at what they do (because none of us will ever know everything)

@b0rk
"The tester"
"The deployment automator"
"The community" (some tools have a really nice community around them to ask questions, DBT and Dagster come to mind)

@b0rk
A: How does this work?
B: I don't know, let's find out together!

@b0rk the UX expert? "That snazzy complicated code you wrote is awesome for advance level users, but 95% of our users need something much simpler."

@b0rk Reading this like an alignment chart and I'm at least 4 of them. It may need "The tinkerer: I've tried this _stupid thing_ on my free time **for fun**, here's what I learned about the tool"

@b0rk the zine producer (you!)

@b0rk the "this code is so old and ugly. I'm going to refactor it, so it becomes easier to understand" person.

@b0rk the patient AI LLM

@b0rk The shoulder to cry on/support team: - "don't worry that you introduced a bug that invalidates 2 years of work, let me tell you about the time I accidentally muddled up the northern and southern hemispheres"

@b0rk the unifier "hey, this two tools do the exact same thing, why not put them together"

@b0rk the archeologist,
there is no documentation, and nobody knows what X should do. But by experience and connecting interaction patterns with business processes they can not only answer the what, but also the why

@b0rk the Complimenter. “You did an amazing job figuring out that ___________ ! Thank you.”

Praise is a turbo booster for excellence, regardless of industry or discipline.

@b0rk I'm the question answerer 🥰 I fucking love sharing knowledge, it's great, if you ask me a question and I'm not actively in pain or something, I'm gonna answer it to the best of my ability, I love being helpful its so fun 😁

@b0rk "I'm fresh out of school and I am going to use this heap sort for 6 values instead of a bubble sort!"

@b0rk

Software testing engineer :ms_wink:

@b0rk not to depressing but as the venerable Tanya Reilly pointed out, mostly women!

@b0rk Thanks for such a POSITIVE cartoon. Indeed, this is true. I have encountered them all and I hope I am all of them once in a while. Who are you missing? Not sure, but maybe the supportive end-user?

@b0rk The Mentior:
{hmmm, I bet newbie would want to know how to do this for themself}
"Hey, newbie, wanna learn a thing?"

@b0rk the Pattern Matcher.

> “Nice! Another bug closed!”
< “Here’s how these last ten bugs all have the same root… how can we solve this class of problems for good?”

@b0rk The Connector

I want to learn more about X.

I know someone that can tell you a lot more about it. Let me introduce you...

@b0rk seems someone already suggested The Connector. Should have expanded the post first....

@b0rk hope you don't mind, I'm adding more descriptive alt text so all viewers can more fully enjoy this great comic!

@b0rk ooooooh! I looooove this! I especially like those who are tool builders and bug chroniclers. Their value is so highly leveraged that it’s amazeballer!

@b0rk The "happy shooter": Let me tell you about this idea that looked sooo smart and how I ended up following it and shooting myself in the foot in a VERY sophisticated way.

@b0rk The Spelunker:

“What happens if I do this, the documentation doesn’t say.”

“I dunno, lets look at the code.”

@b0rk

- "The clear communicator"
> Let me state my core problem, rather than my idea for a solution...

@b0rk I'd maybe add the tester. the people who try and break things just so it's fixed and doesn't break when others use it, the people who LOVE finding and disclousing bugs to the devs (confession: me)

@b0rk The "Gives No Fucks for Appearances" old timer who asks the question *everyone* is thinking -- "How does X work?" -- but is afraid to ask for fear of looking like they don't know what they're doing.

@b0rk Role models.

@b0rk The "Fucks Up But Owns It" coder... Makes a bad design/implantation mistake, but owns the mistake so that the focus is on fixing the problem rather than finger-pointing

@b0rk The person from outside your cultural assumptions. "Some people only have one name! Also, there are surnames with only 2 letters!" [Looking at you, Medicare! We had a patient whose claim kept getting kicked back and it turned out the problem was his surname only had 3 letters, and the minimum was 5. The "correct" answer was to enter "Doe00" in the last name field.]

@b0rk I always liked the "glue" folks: https://noidea.dog/glue

@b0rk
i humbly submit this entry

cheerleader: you are almost there, you can do this.

@b0rk the speed freak. "that change you added introduced 10x perf regression in prod. let's run it on benchmark and flamegraph profiler to find the hotspot... yup, you're instantiating a heavy object in a hot loop, and you can fix this by rewriting this using arrays."

these folks make a difference in core languages, libraries, and systems where perf affects a lot of people

@b0rk I would say technical writer because that is their job title. documentarian sounds somewhat pejorative

@b0rk
The "firefighting guardian": while you still only think "it smells weird on the production system but why..." these types come out of nowhere and say: "buckle up and get your hacking gear... See that smoke over there? That's the glibglob subsystem catching fire... Well need strong coffee and even stronger script foo regex to avoid the worst... But don't panic! We'll walk through this together!"

@b0rk This misses what was/is most important for me:

The reviewer: "I read your code yesterday and here are all the great ways that you can improve it."

Invaluable!

@b0rk most of these are also applicable on work teams, maybe even groups of people more broadly, but definitely also learning cohorts

@b0rk

May I use this in a lecture? Is there a CC-license or similar?

@b0rk that's a lovely Bingo card to hand out to folks during communications training or something similar!

@b0rk

- the deleter: "We don't need this code anymore, I'll remove it and any future confusion it could cause"

- the facilator: "I hear you know about X: can I schedule you into the internal education schedule in three weeks time to share about it?"

@b0rk I recently had the "wait! Did you think about x before moving on?" and I loved it. I didn't and it in the end wasn't relevant but I am happy to have spend the 10m to reread.

This is very true.

@b0rk Is this....is this what a healthy team is supposed to look like 🥲

@b0rk The Explainee. A non-programmer who will listen patiently while you explain in very simple terms what your code is supposed to do, enabling you to figure out why it's not doing that. (In my case, usually either a missing ")" or a missing ";".)

@b0rk This makes me happy. Somebody posted a link of anti-programmer types the other day, and I was nearly half of them. However, I'm a bunch of these ones too, so hopefully it nearly balances out

@b0rk the forum response completionist: "great answers everyone! Just a little note about X you might not know, for context: [five paragraphs of everything you could want to know about X]"

@b0rk That's very good. I think mine would be something like "Every time I do X I always forget that I also have to do A, B, and C. I know, I'll write a Perl script to do it for me and then we'll never get that wrong again"

@b0rk the tech evangelist who says "Hey, maybe we should consider the implications and ethics of our work".... if they exist!

@b0rk the context giver!
"here are some systems and practices that surround how and why X was designed and developed the way it was"

(sorry if this is already a reply, there are so many!)

@b0rk
The Glue
https://noidea.dog/glue

@b0rk
The client who knows what they need; and can describe it clearly.

I once built a very complex database to do invoicing for a construction company. They loved the result, primarily because they knew exactly what they wanted before we started.

@b0rk the Therapist. “Oh yeah, that’s a bad problem. Really bad. But we’ll fix it, and it’ll be ok. On a related note, did you ever hear about the time where someone added a single comment to a header file and broke the whole OS?”

@b0rk The senior senior. Quietly working in the background to have a grand architecture ready whenever the juniors arrive.

@b0rk
Maybe the last one is the original developer of x?

@b0rk the unit tester

@b0rk
The "what if" wizard. The person on the team who throws out failure modes or thorny corner cases the rest of us didn't consider.

@b0rk The livestreamers.

"So, H and I are going to set up this mastodon server together and then keep the video up as an archive. Sorry for all the cursing that's likely to happen."

@b0rk yes yes YES all of these people are my favorite people (and I have been or aspire to be them all at various times!)

@b0rk The computer science professor who taught your intro programming course and explained things like "what is a variable" and "how a for-loop works"...

@b0rk The Listener? The person you can (and want to, because they’re nice) always talk to about your challenges, and you figure out the solution yourself in the process.

@b0rk The cartoonist who replaces 6 paragraphs of extremely dense manpage-ese with one clean, thoughtful, accurate drawing.

That person is aces and should be fit in there somewhere.

@b0rk
> some people who make programming easier
> (who am I missing?)

The constructive reviewer.
Puts effort in explaining problematic consequences of the code, without being condescending. Recognizes good work.

@b0rk I'll admit to my own sins - I'm a little of many of those, but the one I am that's not there is the disorganized historian. "Hey, I've got this weird error..." "I've seen that before! Hang on, let me search my email/OneNote/folder of random documentation..." (Ask Me About My Inbox That Dated Back 17 Years Until Work Made Me Clean It Up, So It's Now A OneNote Problem...)

@b0rk 200 tabs is rookie numbers.

Just sayin'.

@b0rk my @torproject colleague Pierov (https://pierov.org), who's the quantum superposition of all these people💜🧅

@b0rk@social.jvns.ca I'm the tab girl :3

@b0rk Janitor. I always enjoyed having someone who likes to do boring repository / code maintenance to relax. Makes everything neater, and makes it easier for us ADHD devs who would burn out on it.

@b0rk I'm a blend of Loud Noob, Documentarian, and Read The Entire Internet.

Don't let me near code, tho 🤣

@b0rk how about the Test Writer?

The one that writer clear tests that illustrate how things are supposed to work (as opposed to how they are working)