The CEA has two full-time developers (Sam Deere and JP Addison). JP has been at CEA since at least June 2018, and Sam has been there for many years.
The EA forum appears to be a copy of the LessWrong forum, with some minor cosmetic modifications (like having a ‘community’ section).
The two web development achievements mentioned in this post (‘Built the timeframe feature into the All Posts page to enable easier post discovery’, ‘Ported and modified the Community Favorites section and added it to the homepage’) are features directly ported from LessWrong.
Please correct me if I’m wrong about any of these.
My interpretation of these facts is that the developer team at CEA isn’t very productive.
(There’s also EA funds and the EA donor lotteries, but what new features have been added there in the last 12 months?)
I’ll first clarify / correct some facts, then discuss my interpretation.
I’ve been at CEA since September 2017. I have been working full time on the Forum since May. Previously, I was only trying to keep it up to date with LessWrong. As mentioned in the previous post in this series, Sam does not work directly on the Forum.
Correct. The developer term of art is “fork”. In this case it’s a fork where we push our changes upstream to LessWrong, and keep up to date with their changes.
When I say ‘Built the timeframe feature’ I do in fact mean that I built it. It exists on LessWrong because I submitted a Pull Request. For Community Favorites section I refactored a small amount of code to make it fit back into our frontpage, (as LessWrong’s is used quite differently) and to have it include posts from the “Community” section at the user’s option. These two features were selected for relevance to the metric, but don’t represent the entirety of my work.
I’ll let Sam reply with the amount of behind-the-scenes work that he’s needed to do on the Funds & Giving What We Can (if he wants, also fair warning that he might want to wait till a workday).
—
As an open source project, we’re quite a bit more open than the average software project, but I realize it’s hard to assess the work that goes into a tech project from the outside.
Given the state it was in previously and the commercial alternatives, I’m pretty happy with the progress made on the Forum.
To my knowledge:
The CEA has two full-time developers (Sam Deere and JP Addison). JP has been at CEA since at least June 2018, and Sam has been there for many years.
The EA forum appears to be a copy of the LessWrong forum, with some minor cosmetic modifications (like having a ‘community’ section).
The two web development achievements mentioned in this post (‘Built the timeframe feature into the All Posts page to enable easier post discovery’, ‘Ported and modified the Community Favorites section and added it to the homepage’) are features directly ported from LessWrong.
Please correct me if I’m wrong about any of these.
My interpretation of these facts is that the developer team at CEA isn’t very productive.
(There’s also EA funds and the EA donor lotteries, but what new features have been added there in the last 12 months?)
Hi,
I’ll first clarify / correct some facts, then discuss my interpretation.
I’ve been at CEA since September 2017. I have been working full time on the Forum since May. Previously, I was only trying to keep it up to date with LessWrong. As mentioned in the previous post in this series, Sam does not work directly on the Forum.
Correct. The developer term of art is “fork”. In this case it’s a fork where we push our changes upstream to LessWrong, and keep up to date with their changes.
When I say ‘Built the timeframe feature’ I do in fact mean that I built it. It exists on LessWrong because I submitted a Pull Request. For Community Favorites section I refactored a small amount of code to make it fit back into our frontpage, (as LessWrong’s is used quite differently) and to have it include posts from the “Community” section at the user’s option. These two features were selected for relevance to the metric, but don’t represent the entirety of my work.
I’ll let Sam reply with the amount of behind-the-scenes work that he’s needed to do on the Funds & Giving What We Can (if he wants, also fair warning that he might want to wait till a workday).
—
As an open source project, we’re quite a bit more open than the average software project, but I realize it’s hard to assess the work that goes into a tech project from the outside.
Given the state it was in previously and the commercial alternatives, I’m pretty happy with the progress made on the Forum.