Developers: Stop Blaming Your Users
If you’re a developer and release code to the public: own your mistakes don’t blame your users for them.
— Dan Cameron (@dancameron) September 10, 2014
Someone on the Advanced WordPress Facebook group posted this about how he was frustrated how plugin updates were being handled by a certain developer.
That arena is definitely not the appropriate place for a post like this and the conversation started to turn into a bashing of the poster and blaming him for having display_errors on his live site; even though he explained that this wasn’t a live site at all, it was a development/staging site.
Since this was a recent issue I went through with SI I had to jump in.
I tried to have a healthy conversation but there were Joost defenders all over that thread slapping asses and clogging up the conversation…maybe I shouldn’t have told them to quite down…
Anyway, it quickly turned into Joost telling me that my opinion doesn’t count for shit and when I release code that breaks a larger number of sites I could understand.
Update: The thread was removed. Something that group has has problems with from the start. The problem here was that the thread was critical to an admin, nothing more. Dare I say that I miss the WP-Hackers group 🙂
Update 2: I have the full FB archived, if you want to see it let me know. I don’t think it matters much but it’s pretty silly.
Too much?
That was a very good discussion, it shouldn’t have been removed. Constructive criticism is good for the community and helps us developers develop more mature products.
For what it’s worth, I’m glad you took the time to participate in that discussion.
Thanks Jean!