One Down…

[ursulav]

I spent today in the bowels of the beast, by which I mean Amazon and Smashwords. Most of the Amazon time was spent trying to figure out how I tell it that I don’t want to be exclusive to Kindle and just hitting “Save” until it told me it was in review and I couldn’t poke anything any more. I guess that’s how that works.

Theoretically the Goblin

Comments

[derakon]

Speaking as a technologist, it is amazing how much rage modern technology can bring out in even the most mild-mannered of people. I think it's something to do with there being Rules that you must Follow that are not spelled out anywhere, and when you break them things just sort of fail to work right with at best a cryptic error message telling you what went wrong.

[ursulav]

Exactly. It's like being the rat in the maze and nobody's telling you why you keep getting the electric shock.

[archie_c]

This is because programmers are not wired correctly (I was one once - I had the extra wiring removed but I still twitch and get the nightmares). What they think is useful and intuitive would have anyone who spends more time in the sun and doesn't live in SecondLife (I'm guessing) screaming and clawing at their own face.

[silly_swordsman]

I wouldn't say programmers aren't wired correctly; I'd say they live in a different world. What they see as useful and intuitive often is, to someone who, like them, have an intimate understanding of the underlying structure of the system. Decoupling the user's experience from the architecture underneath is a special skill that is both hard to acquire, and of little use to the majority of programmers, who develop things (applications, frameworks, APIs etc) that are aimed at other programmers.

Mind you, in my 20 years as a programmer, I've never been tempted to play SecondLife or HabboHotel or what have you, so what do I know?

[elialshadowpine]

Nah, I'd say more that it's that they are familiar with the Rules of whatever it is they're working on, and have a better basis to figure out the errors. Even then, my partner, who has been coding since they were a child, still gets rage fits when something does not work as intended. (I have learned to recognize the "Why the fuck isn't this piece of shit fucked crap working already?" expression and hightail it.)

[elsajeni]

Very true! My nomination for Most Rage-Inducing Manifestation Of That Problem: signup forms that have very specific requirements for the password, but will only tell you what they are after you enter a password that doesn't meet them, and then only one at a time.

[derakon]

And they only tell you after you've submitted the form, and then they send you back to the previous page with all the form information blank so you have to fill it in again. Yep.

[t_c_da]

As a programmer of some 40 years, I have reserved a special place in Hell for folk who do that sort of inconsiderate programming...

[elialshadowpine]

YES. OMG. THIS. I have literally given myself a rage migraine before with hand coding my website. (Shortly after this, I gave up and went with the partner-creature's suggestion of Wordpress. Fuck me and my stubborness, I should've done that ages before.)