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Man, I learned so much about good architecture from just hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels. At some point, the business world called, and I
by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
Man, I learned so much about good architecture from just hanging out on Freenode in a few programming channels.
At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right?
Those were simpler times, I suppose. We were working with all the new frameworks of the day, and it was the grizzled old engineers alongside the young hotshots — and none of it mattered, because all anyone saw was your nick and your code. You'd put some interesting snippet up on one of those anonymous paste sites, and the critique would roll in.
I don't know how kids these days learn about dependency injection, the downsides of singleton architectures, the art of API design, or the nuanced tradeoffs of using an ORM to abstract over a relational model. But I rather enjoyed learning it all "on the streets" of IRC — frankly a far more welcoming and engineering-focused atmosphere than many tech companies.
- tetha 3y ago> At some point, the business world called, and I stopped spending time on IRC. And I haven't kept up, but I think something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? There was some .. lets just call it, rather encouraged rebranding to libra.chat. And there is something else namesquatting the freenode name.
- dizhn 3y agoI think you got autocorrected. The name is libera.chat .
- sshine 3y ago> something happened with Freenode, and the communities faded away, right? It was a netsplit. Freenode was sold to an heir of the former Korean monarchy. The idea that the network was even sellable did not resonate with several former staff calling it a hostile takeover, so Libera.Chat was formed as a moral successor. The split caused a drop in user count from ~80k to ~45k. Some channels migrated to OFTC instead. See a user count history graph: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera_Chat#History https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 Since the decline of freenode, their user count statistics have looked unapologetically synthetic.