Ada Lovelace Day

[black_samvara]

Celebrating the fabulous (almost entirely female) coders of the AO3 for Ada Lovelace Day - celebrating the achievements of women in technology and science.

Over the last 2 years, 30 people have contributed code to make the AO3 as shiny as possible. I admire this community of developers; what they achieve and amount of work they do is inspiring. There’s a deep love for the product they are working on, a willingness to work together, and the generosity to teach each other what they know.

The ‘Cantina’ (Coder chatroom) is a great place to hang out. It is full of good humour, easy conversation and fannish squee. I (who can only write baby HTML and ask some really nutty questions) really enjoy being part of the conversations about new things, bugs, solutions, pets, food, and everything under the sun and moon. Over the weekend I’ll meet representatives of different committees and subcommittees dropping by to ask questions, discuss issues or just hang out (we also do moral support in challenging times!).

I'd like to take a moment to shine the spotlight on the contributors to Release 0.7.3 (I will have missed stuff, so bear in mind this is a taste of how amazing these people are.)

1. Amc (first commit!) fixed bookmarks of restricted works being visible to logged-out users
2. Ambtus did some cool background stuff (scripts, tests, error checking, rake tasks) set up storage for icons, fixed bookmarks searching via tags (synonyms weren’t showing up) and stopped the AO3 from emailing poor webmasters every time an Admin sends out a Notification.
3. Betsy fixed the persistant ‘first login’ banner and built us the ‘edit username’ feature
4. Cesy fixed the login button, cleaned up admin invite requests XHTML, changed visited link colour from grey, moved the 'inspired by' links, improved bookmarks display in IE7, added alt text for user icons and added it's associated help
5. Dasbero gave us AO3 Admins the ability to tell how many invites you’ve already been issued when you request invitation codes *coughs* it’s not a complicated process. We tend to assume if you want them, you will put them to good purpose and say ‘yes’ to requests
6. Elz built metatags; something the Tag Wranglers have wanted desperately plus a huge amount of work redesigning and recoding the Tag Wrangling interface. She also added filters to collections, built the ‘user icon’ feature, gave us a ‘summary’ feature for Admin Posts, made the world safe for <3<3<3, did a bajillion fixes and is Mighty).
7. Enigel built the much requested ‘edit tags’ feature that allows you to edit them separate from the work, cleaned up background and navigation stuff relating to Collections, Bookmarks, Series, Works, Dashboard, Inbox and more J
8. Ira (first commit!) rebuilt the Post Work form which now has many subtle improvements such as tickyboxes for Warnings and Category (which is now multi-select) and grouping entry fields.
9. Lim spent the better part of 2 months doing a CSS review and rebuilding our front end. I don’t have words to fully express how amazing she is but you should know she is extremely so. She also added a sadface AO3 logo for the error pages, it makes getting ‘page not found’ a much cuter experience. I keep going ‘darn….Awww.’
10. Maryann Did some beautiful work getting the Terms of Service and Terms of Service FAQ updated and corrected
11. rklyne (first commit!) put in a new HTML formatter, fixed a date problem, fixed an importer problem, did a lot of profiler work, worked on error handling and wrote tests!
12. sarkymoocow fixed the anchor IDS in the FAQ, added work links to the ‘edit multiple works’ view and put a missing space back in the works blurb
13. Shalott built the Challenge Signup code, a complex process involving many late nights, shaking her tiny fists at the angry Coder Gods, and Adam Lambert’s sparkly codpiece. She also extended the ‘auto-purge half created accounts’ grace period for us, updated the auto-complete plugin, wrote help files, and spontaneously fixed things near her.
14. velocitygrass fixed redirects on the URL importer and made chapter-by-chapter the default view

What you see is a list of people with a variety of skills and experience, some of whom gained it working on this project. Together with a huge team of organisers, planners, communicators, designers, testers, wranglers and documenters we are working to build a resource for us all... and it's there, able to be used right now.

I call that an achievement :)
This entry was originally posted at http://samvara.dreamwidth.org/463785.html.