Developer-user relationships and its strange curiosities
We love users. They make us all smiles and cheers if they like our program or product. They endorse our project and maybe even contribute to it. They cherish our work and make us feel needed and our work worthwhile. Without them, developing wouldn’t be half the fun.
Yet, we hate them. Users are often stupid, insight-less, negligent, annoying bastards. They make our days horrible by forcing us to build in yet another input check. They make us stretch to ever more high-flying solutions to fulfill their needs, even though we might have seen enough of the framework by the time the alpha was released.
This paradox remains unsolved and riddled in the brains of many a programmer (or developer of anything for that matter). This will be an attempt at trying to understand, why it is exactly that users have this very unique feel about them.
The loving, endorsing user gives us a homey feeling because we have a task to live up to – make that person happy. Help him get along. Helping is nice. Being nice is… well nice, I guess. And while being nice and all, we might find that wicked cool workaround for a tricky programming question that really challenges our minds in the kind of way that makes you want to work all day on it. This type of user might even be the reason we are doing the work we do. They may have brought our minds to the problem they are facing – one that we share but never noticed. Thereby, they support our creativity and imagination, make us innovative thinkers.
The opposite is the evil, mean-faced user writing nasty mails that my first ever alpha 1 was buggy and it’d need 1000 more features to be usable. In giving us the scope of what may lie ahead of us in order live up to our own goals (after all, we want to bring it to a good release!), they make us feel small, incapable and overworked. Seeing you still have to write 100000 lines of code is not exactly a pleasant experience. In trying to fulfill a thank-less user’s feature request, we might reach a boundary which is not easily crossable – in our heads or in our programming capabilities. The framework may run out of solutions, or those left might be so ugly and lengthy we are scared to try them. This is the horrid, negative user, that makes us want to delete the project irreversibly from our HDD.
Without a user, our life were meaningless, with one it can be ever so much harder. Feel it yourself? Comment pls.
First of all, I cant believe the first comment to this blog post is a feature request 0_o
Second, I totally relate to what you are saying here, two types of users, and the relationship you have with them. And that’s interesting because I ‘only’ code website applications, well, I work on the Drupal project and maintain a couple of modules there, but nothing to do with ‘real’ applications.
In any case, I try to focus on the creative, helping, nice bug reporting users out there, rather than the „Doesn’t work“ bug reporting ones, mainly because who knows, perhaps that clueless user who is now anoying you, in a couple of years might learn and be a useful asset to every project he feels like helping =)
If you are curious, you can read the most discouraging comment I’ve ever had to put up with. Funny though, the community came back and supported me emotionally by responding, and I felt more a part of it because of his comment than ever, so something good came out of it surprisingly =)
Keeping a hopeful attitude in this regard really helps me out in these situations, and talking to others in the community is always positive – so keep up the good work!
Hi
Would it be possible to use gmail notifier with normal rss with clickable titles?
I can’t find that anywhere,.
Danke.
yes I know there was something like this – but don’t recall the name anymore… Maybe search google for this? some hints: gmail-notifier, cgmail, checkgmail