Reflections on Building Forum Software

Summary

How has two Thursdays have passed already. Everything's a blur. Thanks, subscribers, for supporting this newsletter's ongoing shenanigans.This week, I went and threw bsBB into the world, which is the software powering our shiny new official forums. It's intended to be a free space, much like our very fun discord, to talk about things we find interesting in this community. It's official in that It's not going away any time soon so go and make use of it by sharing something you like, either about this newsletter, or just data stuff in general.Yes, we are a data community at heart because that's what I write about and what y'all signed up for, but as I've mentioned on multiple occasions, we're humans first, data practitioners second. That means that as humans we have tons of just stuff we find interesting and cool and want to share. So let me make this clear. Anyone who wants to talk about something they're excited about or just in general brings them joy or fascination, I'm more than happy to find and make a space for that kind of sharing on the forum.Otherwise, just have fun with it. I deliberately built it as a homage to the forums I used and managed in my younger days.Reflections on building the whole forum thingbsBB isn't the first time I've coded stuff with a lot of heavy lifting done by AI tools, but it's the first one where I was deliberately working on a pet project that I was going to put out as a public artifact for people to use. So, in some sense, it was "serious business". In another sense, it was still hairbrained weekend project spawned from pure nostalgia for the Web 1.0 days as the literal Web around us crumbles from the flood of AI slop.There's plenty of people out there extolling the benefits, and detriments on AI-coding out there. As far as I'm concerned, the people who write code for a living can hash those answers out far better than I can. The interesting part today is the fact that I don't code for a living. In fact, while I can write okay-ish ...