hot take, FOSS development
If you have copious amounts of time (and interest) to work on FOSS for free, probably the most impactful thing you can do with that time is to build accessible unopinionated development tools - tools that save people who want to make their own things *a lot* of time and work without imposing a particular design or objective on them.
This will do a lot more to actually make it *possible* for marginalized folks to get involved with software development (and, to a degree FOSS) than an 'outreach campaign' for your high-spoons project (which was likely designed to meet the needs of privileged folks) ever will.
Opinionated tools are not very useful - if you're privileged, you will be building tools that solve problems of privileged people. High-effort-to-use tools are not very useful here either - the point here is to actually make development *more* accessible.
Which means: unopinionated, accessible, easy to use *and maintain*, well-documented, and well-supported. Yes, those are the thankless parts of the work, and they don't get nearly as much hype as shiny features do.
hot take, FOSS development
@joepie91 is there an example of this type of tool you can point to? Your idea sounds great, but I am unsure of what one could build that would even meet these criteria.
hot take, FOSS development
@fancysandwiches Sort of but not quite. Godot, as mentioned, is working hard on the accessibility thing, as are Scratch and to some degree Excel. But none of those are really unopinionated.
There's a lot of work on good unopinionated tools in the JS ecosystem, like everything around the LevelDB ecosystem and other early-npm stuff; but most of it falls down on broader accessibility and documentation issues.
I have yet to really see anyone get both points right in a way that is consistent enough to use as an example. But then if there were such clear examples, this wouldn't need to be a hot take 😅
