this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
54 points (95.0% liked)
Programmer Humor
26152 readers
652 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Regardless of the (undoubtedly funny) nature of that very document, I wish that “codes of conduct” weren’t such a big thing. “Don’t be a dick” is the only rule one would ever need, and there is not much bureaucracy needed to enforce that.
Depending on the size of the repo and number of contributors.
Small ones, yeah probably a simple "don't be an asshole" is fine.
It gets harder when your contributors start scaling way up and go international. What might be customary in one culture may be considered rude by another. Allowing for people to be different while also maintaining decorum is important.
I worked on a FOSS project that was very small (~5 devs) and I really had to get used to how upfront the German devs were. We knew each other enough but still.
I’m all in favour of the OpenBSD mantra here: Shut up and code. People aren’t the same, and you can’t expect (e.g.) autists to share the same views about what’s nice and what’s rude as other persons.
The point I’m trying to make is that nice people won’t help the project by being nice people. IT projects are inherently technical, and that should be the only relevant unit of measurement here.
IT projects almost always have several different "correct" answers, which is why they generally lead to debate or discussion. That's where a code of conduct is needed.
Discussion between "shut up and code" people and everyone else doesn't tend to be a positive place to work without some boundaries. If you want people to volunteer for projects, you need to treat them with a baseline respect, and that baseline needs to be agreed on.
The baseline in technical projects is “make good products” though.
Sure. How?
Seems deceptively simple, but organizing people, especially people of incredibly divergent experiences and histories that may literally only share the traits of "is human" and "can code to varying degrees" is the complex part.
Saying "just do it right" is akin to saying "we dont need test or qa. Just code without bugs."
People are easily as messy as code itself, if not worse. We need some kind of organizing principles to work together, and thats what codes of conduct are.
That's great until someone says "I'm not being a dick, I'm just telling the truth" while being a dick. This is especially easy to pull off against minorities, because the aforementioned "truth" can be based on stereotypes or inaccurate media portrayals.
Not everyone has high emotional intelligence. There’s a fair bit of overlap between programmers/engineers and people on the spectrum. A good code of conduct effectively spells out how to avoid being a dick.
Being autistic, I am perfectly comfortable with “don’t be a dick”.
What you’re comfortable with as a contributor is irrelevant. What matters is whether you understand the maintainers’ intent and whether the people you’re interacting with think you’re acting like a dick. Someone who’s bad at understanding how other people feel will likely be bad at predicting what behavior will come across as being a dick.
Rather I think what we should wish for is that they be unnecessary, or at least it be unnecessary for them to be as fleshed out as they are. I've found a lot of FOSS communities to be quite casually misogynistic—you could just say to ignore it and focus on the code, but it most certainly makes it harder to focus on the code when the community is subtly hostile towards you. If you think CoCs are unnecessary even for large projects then it's probably because you're not one of the demographics affected by the problems that led to CoCs proliferating. Once a project has enough of a community around it I think a CoC is reasonable enough in the current culture.
In an ideal world they wouldn't be needed, but we're far from ideal and it definitely helps moderate a community by pointing to specific rules over "just be nice"
"1. Conduct Yourself"
Sounds like a threat though.
Good
Just like "reading the rules" for each community. Stop wasting everyone's time with boilerplate bullshit that shouldn't need to be said, like treat people with respect, no spamming, etc. If there are community specific rules to adhere to, put them front and center.
I would have thought describing images you post to spaces for blind people would be common sense, but do find my self enforcing rules on that all the time. Rules that are front and center. A real code of conduct formalizes rules, allows for consistent enforcement, and informs minority populations of the protections they may expect. If you don’t need that, I’m happy for you, but you may want to explore the nature of that privilege. Whether or not that’s necessary in the context of FOSS projects depends on multiple factors. It’s certainly not necessarily if you want to be a benevolent dictator for life.
I don't mind CoC's that much, but I do really dislike Discord server rules that all have the same 10 completely obvious points and then make you search for a password in the rules. I don't see how having to look for a password in 3 pages of rules that says doxing is bad and being nice is good is going to filter out anyone but the impatient.