Software Design

In the strange, pathetic society we live in, avoiding fight and conflict at all costs is often mistaken for being empathetic, and the woke bullshit has even made it a virtue. Following in this devious way of thinking, the ability to compromise has wrongly been associated with open-mindness and tolerance. It’s neither of those things. People who care, fight On an individual and collective level, people have conflicting interests. The rich want to pay less taxes.
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The core basics of design are to know for whom you design, that is who are the users of your solution, what they expect and what they need. It is also necessary to assess if the actual user of your product is the one you designed it for in the first place, that is, who is missing from your user base, to avoid the survivor bias . This is unfortunately overlooked in FLOSS and it is often not well regarded to collect user data.
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There is this mantra that I have been hearing too much in my life : “don’t reinvent the wheel”. People mean that as a metaphor trying to discourage you from redoing something that is already done, and by that they actually want you to use whatever software application or library instead of coding your own, as if it was automatically a time and resource saver. It’s not. First of all, despite its apparent common sense, this statement is incredibly ignorant : the wheel has been reinvented many times, typically for the sake of performance.
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The opensource ecosystem is keen on its mantras. One of them is that being an opensource dev/maintainer is a thankless unpaid job. And while that may sound like a selfless act of benevolence, there is another way of reading it : a selfish way of avoiding professional responsibility, while still exerting some amount of power and decision. Which is the egg and which is the chicken then ? It may not matter, but the quasi-hagiographic founding myths of opensource need to stop.
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As a designer, your job is to match someone’s needs/problems with a solution. The tricky part is, this someone is not necessarily the client you are talking with and who pays you, it could be a third party that you only know of through your paying client. As an engineer, the particular kind of design you do aims toward technical solutions, so you might produce plans, blueprints, calculations and prototypes to carry on with that goal.
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I have been using WordPress as a CMS (content management system) for almost 10 years now. When I dug into it, I knew nothing about PHP, SQL, CSS, programmation and servers. That was one year after I switched from Windows Vista to Linux Ubuntu. I remember the big selling point of WordPress was its “15 min installation with no coding knowledge”. Slowly, I began hacking my WP theme with PHP template tags, because it didn’t do what I wanted.
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