Careercow Jeff Atwood / @codinghorror / @discourse - Cofounder of StackExchange and the failure Discourse

[Kazami Yuuka]

Attack of the Three Chin Man

Chronology
& Introduction
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Jeff Atwood is a former cofounder of Stack Exchange and the later sister project Stack Overflow. Jeff is also famous for his blog, Coding Horror, in which he posted various entertaining commentaries involving software coding and maintainability, but is now used for articles that either push products, shill for SocJus, or is otherwise dreadfully unentertaining. Additionally, Jeff maintains Discourse, a floundering forum software, which has been a sensitive spot for Jeff, especially after users of The Daily WTF (TDWTF) prompted a nuclear spergout from Jeff. Jeff attempted to also hijack Markdown (an easy to use replacement for BBCode) from it's creator by "standardizing" it and giving it a new name, as well, but was quickly nixed after the creator John Gruber discovered this attempt. All in all, Jeff is like many of the "techy" lolcows (e.g. John Flynt, Zoe Quinn, etc.) who hide behind rules and abuse administrative power to quash dissent and unfavorable opinions of him. Jeff is only capable of giving unabbreviated praise to himself (and forcing others to do so) while criticizing others as a primitive form of trollshielding. No, really, Jeff insists so himself:

It's ironic, then, that what I wrote ended up being a direct criticism... It's almost like I've fallen into the Spolsky rut; invite me to speak at your big important Java conference, and I'll create a session that tells you why you're all idiots for using Java.

You know what they say: If you run into assholes everywhere you go... ​

Popular Opinion

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Jeff "Stack Overflow" Atwood really gets on my tits with how clever he thinks he is.

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Jeff Atwood is that fat, loudmouthed guy you work with who insists on bloviating over his half-baked ideas because he's mistaken "confused" for "controversial"

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I didn't have much of anything against the guy until his botched rollouts of the piece of shit bloatware that is Discourse. The rollout on thedailywtf.com is especially indicative of his shitty attitude as of late.

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...Jeff Atwood is the worst programmer ever because his requirements elicitation consists of checking his own scrapbook of things he's seen that look good, cross referencing these with his personal agenda and then implementing these as a fuck you to all browsers, standards and users which get in his way. Seriously you cunting nob-shite you've ruined the site. I hope you're proud. Also, I'm not making an account. Stop being a part of the forced account culture. You dick.

(Source: http://www.codingconfessional.com/c...SkxGUT09LS14cEJhZlBMRmRmWnYwWHBTZkZw Wlp3PT0=)

He watched The Office, saw Todd Packer, and thought "Hey this is the cool guy, I should be more like him!"

Links​

• Coding Horror:
  • https://blog.codinghorror.com/about-me/
• Twitter:
  • https://twitter.com/codinghorror
  • https://twitter.com/discourse (Maintained by various parties)
• Discourse:
  • http://www.discourse.org/about/
  • http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/
  • https://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-construction-kit/
• Email:
  • mailto:jatwood@codinghorror.com
• Stack Exchange/Overflow:
  • http://stackoverflow.com/users/1/jeff-atwood
• Github:
  • https://github.com/coding-horror

Discourse Debacle

When we moved to [Discourse], it came with an external moderator who, unfamiliar with our ways and mores, went around threads with a nail festooned modbat and pissed off a large section of the community.

Discourse is Jeff's largest pet project at this current time. Absolutely riddled with bugs and usability problems at it's inception, this unholy trinity of forum software's problems continue today. Much to Jeff's chagrin, Discourse's attempt to combine social media, civilized discussion, and gamification has led to a completely bloated platform that is drowning under usability and maintainability issues. During the early days of Discourse, TDWTF administrators had been looking for a satisfactory forum software to replace the outdated platform that they currently were using. With Discourse being an open-source and hosted platform, TDWTF thought Discourse would be perfect to use. Unbeknownst to them, Discourse was riddled with user issues, and many vocally complained about blaring issues and inconsistencies. Jeff, acting like the pompous bastard he is, insisted that there was nothing wrong, and that it wasn't his problem.

I personally don't see the issue, other than a f**ked up desktop display on mobile, which is Not Our Problem.
Turns out, when you view desktop on mobile, it's gonna be bad.
NEWS FLASH
(I don't necessarily object to an "are you sure? YES/NO" on the dismiss buttons for the record, but that's 100% pure UX through and through, and I will fight to the death any man who disagrees. I'll also gouge out your damn eyeballs and cut out your tongue in the process.)

​

Jeff then proceeds to kick out every single user associated with TDWTF:

Professional.

Ultimately, I decided that Worse Than Failure makes me uncomfortable because it exposes the dirty little secret of our profession: we all write bad code.

This might have preceded the Discopocalypse, but what occurred only reinforces that he genuinely took this to heart. So much for the "my code" vs. "the code" distinction that he hollers to the high hills about.
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(Source: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/17231/wtf-how-can-this-be-so-wrong-aka-the-discopocalypse-thread/)

Markdown Hijacking
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Markdown is a simplified form text formatting created by John Gruber that allows for easy access to a variety of text formats. For example, italicizing can be done by enclosing a word in asterisks (e.g. *maybe*), and bolding can be done by enclosing a word in double asterisks (e.g. **no.**), and other formattings can be done using similar methods. Jeff, discovering this format of text formatting, intending to use it for Discourse, attempted to create a form of Markdown that was standardized, but violated the BSD licence in regards to naming (one of the very few things that can be violated under BSD).

Which leads me to the biggest problem with Markdown: John Gruber.

As Markdown's "parent", John has a few key responsibilities in shepherding his baby to maturity. Namely, to lead. To set direction. Beyond that initial 2004 push, he's done precious little of either. John is running this particular open source project the way Steve Jobs runs Apple – by sheer force of individual ego. And that sucks.

Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gruber are successful people. Maybe, just maybe, it might be worth imitating them instead. Minus the batshit insane fruitarian diet.​

Mr. Gruber, likely realizing Jeff wasn't the best person to be associated with, while also being irritated that "Standard Markdown" implied that Jeff's version was more correct, formally requested Jeff to take down all sites containing the name "Markdown" without redirecting to the new name, "Commonmark", and ceasing all references to Markdown. Referring to Mr. Gruber as the "biggest problem with Markdown" certainly didn't work well for Jeff's case. Neither did stating that project creators are obligated under any circumstance to continue working on their project. And while Mr. Gruber certainly had little intention on continuing his work on Markdown, it doesn't allow Jeff to ignore etiquette when picking up someone's project.

John then made three requests:
1. Rename the project.
2. Shut down the standardmarkdown.com domain, and don't redirect it.
3. Apologize.

Sorry Not sorry. Now that I satisfied these requirements, let me write a Coding Horror blog about how Mr. Gruber is a fucking schmuck.​

Sure, Mr. Gruber was more defensive about Markdown than what one would normally expect, the Markdown incident gives insight on how Jeff is largely unable to effectively address people in a respectful manner. Mr. Gruber's objections, perhaps, weren't necessarily the result of naming similarities, but rather, Jeff's sense of superiority and inability to address people in a respectful manner (as evidenced by the aforementioned Discourse incident) led to Mr. Gruber desiring to purge any association implied or otherwise between himself and Jeff.

(Source: https://blog.codinghorror.com/responsible-open-source-code-parenting/)

Epilogue​

Made with hatred, vitriol, and fury by yours truly and @S-chan.
Have a major tip? Message us or post it in the thread so we can update this post to include it.
Coming soon: "SJW Nonsense" section

 

[CatParty]

Made with hatred, vitriol, and fury

we aren't your personal army

 

[Kazami Yuuka]

we aren't your personal army

It's not a PA request. Just extra flavor.

 

[0xDEADBEEF]

Wow this is a little surreal. I'm actually installing Discourse right at this very moment on a server I use at work. One thing I've noticed so far is that the default minimum password length is 15 characters and forces you to use encryption when communicating with a mail server. I don't mind the security features, but when I'm forced to do all this security stuff just to get the damn thing running correctly, I feel like it's overkill.

Nice to know it's riddled with bugs before I even turn it on though.

 

[Roland Juno-G]

My favorite thing of the Daily WTF incident was when the Daily WTF forum regulars managed to exploit their own Discourse install and had fa-spin affect virtually every element, so a whole bunch of stuff was spinning. It was hilarious. I still have the 90+ MB GIF file of how the exploit looked like somewhere on my NAS. Main cause of that was attempting to blacklist bad HTML instead of whitelisting it. That was around September 2014, IIRC, since patched.

A few months later, they managed to do so again, but it required messing with JS and their quote system, lol. That was patched as well.

But yeah, Discourse had (and probably still has, who knows) security issues. One TDWTF user found an XSS within less than 24 hours of their install in April? 2014.

There were more exploits that I remember, but those were my favorite. I am just a Daily WTF lurker, so I saw most of that go down.