Personally, I’d love this system (I immediately thought of some code snippets I’d bring!), but I’m curious how you’d handle candidates without any open source projects or contributions who still have a substantial employment history but are unable to show any code from that because it’s all proprietary.

My biggest (mostly) irrational internet pet peeve is the proliferation of people suggesting “:wq” when “:x” is strictly better.

This is exactly right. However, something that I’ve found frustrating is that in many projects (at least the ones that I’m interested in), it feels like there’s a secret roadmap that’s not documented anywhere outside of the maintainer’s head(s). You can scour the wiki, watch the IRC channel and mailing lists, and read through the issue discussions, and you still won’t have a good sense of what they want done next or if the change you want to make is incompatible with some big planned rewrite. I know the answer is to just ask—and I’ve done that more and more recently—but that can be a big hurdle if you’re just getting started.

I’m trying to build a community for a project right now, and this is something I’m very aware of. I’m trying to report on what I’m working on and planning in the project chat so that if someone else comes along, hopefully they’ll (a) understand the current status and (b) feel comfortable asking about the overall vision.

In case you haven’t figured it out already, there’s a bishop on a3 that attacks c1, so you’re not able to castle to that square.

I have a pretty unique perspective on this as someone who’s worked in churches my entire adult life. Probably the hardest interview question I’ve ever been asked–across both technical and non-technical interviews–was when I was interviewing to be the organist at a large UMC church in early 2019, right before the General Conference vote that set all of this off. They basically summarized the situation to me and then asked if I was comfortable coming into the position not knowing which way the vote would go. In many ways, this question felt like asking if I had principles and if I was willing to stick to them. As a progressive person, I had to really think about if I’d be ok being in a place where I wouldn’t be allowed to play for a same-sex wedding.

That church’s senior pastor was one of the leading figures in the movement to affirm LGBTQ members. We quietly performed at least one same-sex marriage while I was there, which was technically in defiance of the denomination’s restrictions. Since then, I’ve moved to one of the most prominent progressive mainline Protestant megachurches in the US. We’ve had long standing partnerships with many LGTBQ organizations, and we do lots of tangible things for all sorts of underrepresented communities. We had a visiting trans pastor speak about a month ago, and they received an instant ovation from the congregation.

My point in all of this is that it frustrates me to see comment sections like much of this one where people insist that every church is a highly regressive place. As someone who’s in the closed door meetings, I promise you that there are many that are not, and it’s not just all a ploy to try to stay relevant in today’s society. Some places really do support these causes because they believe in them.

(As a footnote, I’ll say that I don’t like to talk about my religious views online, as it might put me in a weird position with my current and potential future employers. An acquaintance of mine wrote a great blog post that sums up my feelings well.)