Theme for v2: Thoughtful

[nickcharlton]

I've long tried to think about "themes", either for a year or the goals around a project. It very likely comes from the CGP Grey video where he spoke about it and, as I've been thinking about where the project might go next, I figured it was probably helpful if I shared that!

As we got to the end of releasing v1, I considered the theme to be “stable”. When I took over maintaining the project in 2016, we were at v0.2.2 and there was a lot of features we needed to add in to cover the most common use cases. At thoughtbot, we'd used Administrate in a handful of projects and there was a decent amount of community interest but it'd stalled quite a bit. So the hope was to cover a lot of those common use cases and build confidence that the project was working well. But then, as we approached v1, I wanted to make sure we'd build a good stable foundation to build on (from the perspective of both the project and its users. I think both are equally important).

But we've done that now. So what comes next?

I've just built a whole application which is basically Administrate and model logic (plus a lot of webhooks for tying different things together, but that's not so relevant!). It's a proof of concept/MVP, but it does everything that's fundamentally needed and it was so easy to do. Even though @pablobm and I have worked on this project consistently for years, it's surprisingly uncommon for us to actually use it in anger!

As I was doing this though, I realised the documentation and example use cases are what really needs the most work, plus a few other things which are harder to pin down, but are the start of some thoughts at least.

The other day, Paul Cantrell posted:

Dang it, PostgreSQL is so good.

I did a data export thing. The options I needed were there. Then I needed more options, and then they were also there. They worked the way I guessed. It was fast. It was reliable. Then I thought “oh, what about sequences?!?”, but they already had that covered. My seemingly easy task turned out to be…easy.

And in a follow up:

It’s obvious that this tool was made by people who care about data and care about humans. It’s not even that it’s •perfect•; it’s just that it’s •thoughtful•.

That kind of human-to-human feeling of “we did our best because we care about the strangers who use this tool” just seems almost like an act of radical defiance in this Era of Enshittification. I appreciate it so much.

"thoughtful" stuck with me. I, too, think PostgreSQL is excellent. I said at thoughtbot Open Summit this year about how our release process, and wide dependency support was all deliberate — trying to not be one of those dependencies that creates more work than it has any right to do, and that's part of it.

I'm sure there's more concrete examples, and it won't take ten years for v2, but that's we'll focus on. I'm excited to hear about what you might consider fit in the theme, even from just vague ideas to concrete changes we should make!