Why I Contributed to FujoGuide

[enigmalea]

If you follow me on tumblr or mastodon you may have noticed that I've been reblogging/boosting a lot of posts for something called The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development. There's a good chance you followed me or know me from the Dragon Age fandom where I run communities, events, and zines and write fanfic, and you might be wondering why the sudden and drastic departure from my normal content. Why would a writer contribute to something related to webdev? Why have you stopped seeing thirst for Dragon Age characters and started seeing… whatever a FujoGuide is?

My Coding Journey

I wrote my first lines of code in 1996 (yes, I'm old AF). It was the early days of the internet and tutorials for how to make your own websites were literally everywhere. You couldn't go more than two clicks without finding a how-to written in plain language. But it was painstaking and tedious. CSS didn't exist yet (literally, I started coding about six months before it was released) and even when it appeared it wasn't widely adopted or supported.

It was the "glory days" of Geocities, Myspace themes, Neopets, and Livejournal. If there was a cool site, you could use HTML and/or CSS to customize it. I honed my skills by coding so many tables character profiles for RPs, creating themes, painstakingly laying out user info pages, and building my own site.

Gradually, things changed. Web 2.0 showed up with locked down profiles and feeds you couldn't customize, free website hosts became more difficult to find, and point and click page builders became the way of the web. Shortly after, I took a long break from fandom; frustrated and disappointed with site closures, lost communities, and general fandom wank… it felt like it just wasn't worth it anymore.

I eventually came back, and when I did it meant customizing themes, figuring out how to create tools for my communities, coding tumblr pages (and learning they're not really supported on mobile), and looking at automations for my common tasks. One day, I woke up and thought, "I'm going to make a Discord bot… it can't be that hard."

So, I did it.

An Unexpected Friendship

About a month after I launched my bot to the public, I received a random Discord message from essential_randomness. A friend had told her about my bot, and she was working on BobaBoard which needed volunteers. I was shocked. First, people were talking about my bot. Second, I wasn't a real coder. I didn't know anything! I just googled a bunch of stuff and got something working. I had no idea what I was doing.

She assured me it was okay. She was willing to teach me what I didn't know - and most of all, that she wanted my help. I took a day or two to think it over, and fatefully filled out the volunteer form. I didn't know if I could be useful or how I could be useful, but I wanted to try.

Programming Is Awful

In the years months that followed, I spent a lot of time in essential_randomness' DMs complaining about programming… at least once I realized she wouldn't judge me. I was still very much doing things the hard way, taking hours to update a site to add a single link on all the pages. I knew there were easier methods, but I either couldn't find them or once I found them, they were filled with dense jargon which was terrifying.

"An all-in-one zero-javascript frontend architecture framework!" Is that even English? "A headless open-source CMS." Cool. Sounds good. "A full-stack SSG based on Jamstack extending React and integrating Rust-based JS." Those sure are words. With meanings. That someone knows. Not me, though.

I spent so much time looking at what sites claimed was documentation and losing my mind because I had no idea where to even start most of the time. With essential_randomness' encouragement, I kept at it, experimenting with new things, and jumping in headfirst even when I had no idea what I was doing. And I was so glad. Where I used to struggle keeping one website updated, last year I managed to deploy and update 7 websites. Yeah, you read that right. It was amazing.

The new stuff made it all much, much easier.

An Idea Is Born

Meanwhile, we spent hours discussing why it was difficult to get fandom to try coding. Part of the barrier was the belief you must be some sort of genius or know math or that creative/humanities people can't do it. It is also partially coding communities being unfriendly to newbies and hobbyists; a culture which often thrives on debasing people's choices, deriding them for not understanding, and shouting rtfm (read the fucking manual) and lmgtfy (let me google that for you)- all of which are unhelpful at best and humiliating and abusive at worst. The tech dudebro culture can be unforgiving and mean.

The number of coding-based Discords I've left far outnumbers the ones I've stayed in.

We determined what fandom needed was a place for coders of all skill levels to come together to help and support one another; where they could learn to code and how to join open-source projects they love, and where they could make friends and connections and show off their projects whether they were new or experienced programmers.

And thus… Fandom Coders was born.

What About FujoGuide?

Of course, running a coding group and working on BobaBoard together means we spent a lot of time talking about the state of the web. We both lamented over poor documentation, jargon-rich tutorials, and guides which assume a baseline of knowledge most people don't have. What we needed to do was provide tutorials which start at the beginning… from the ground up (what is a terminal and how do I open it?) without skipping steps. What we needed to do was make those tutorials fun and appealing.

I don't remember exactly the journey it took to get us here if I'm honest. I have no clue who said it first. But I do remember I first started thinking about anthropomorphizing programming languages when we attempted to cast the languages as the Ouran High School boys… and again when I suggested we do a [TOP SECRET IN CASE WE DO IT] group project in Fandom Coders to help people learn about programming.

What I do know is that as last year ended, essential_randomness became laser-focused on creating our gijinka and moving forward with FujoGuide… and I couldn't say no.

Okay, But… Why Contribute?

To be honest, it's not just that I was around for the birth of the idea. It's ALL of the things in this post - the culmination of three years of frustration trying to figure out what I'm doing with coding, of wading through dense documentation, of wanting to give up before I even start. It's three years of dipping my toes into toxic techbro culture before running away. All added to decades of watching the web become corporate-sanitized, frustratingly difficult to customize, increasingly less fun, and overtly hostile to fans who dare enjoy sexual content.

To sum all of this up, it's the firm belief that we desperately need a resource like this. Something that's for us, by us. Something that builds fans up, instead of tears them down; that empowers them to create for themselves and their communities what no one is creating for them. It is a project I'm deeply passionate about.

And I can't wait until we can bring it to life for you all.

Comments

[vriddy]

That is such a cool story!! I love the whole experiencing a problem -> talking about the problem -> attempting to fix the problem pipeline :D :D I hope the project is wildly successful, and manages to make a dent into this huge problem!!

[bluedreaming]

I really enjoyed reading the Tumblr post linked from Mastodon, but I’m overjoyed to find it here in a place I can comment! I really enjoyed this post, and I’m so much looking forward to the guide.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I finally got around to backing this today. I can't code. I just want to support the idea in hopes other people will code things that don't suck. Well, and because the boys are hawt and I like art.

Thanks again for trying to make cyberspace a better place.

[enchantedsleeper]

As someone who has been online since 2002-ish and has always wanted to code/program but never comprehensively learned how, I feel this really hard. I was on Gaia Online during the mid to late 00s and to me, people who knew CSS to customise their profiles were wizards who could practice an arcane magic art that was closed to me. (I was extremely salty about it). I don't know why I didn't just look for a how-to guide, but I think we were a few years out from that "you can just Google it" mindset of looking for resources for anything you needed, or maybe I believed it would be too hard to pick up? Forum BBcode was my introduction to code, and that being very similar to HTML made learning HTML markup easier, but I still remember that when I posted to the NaNoWriMo forums (which used HTML instead of BBcode), I constantly had to look up the HTML for a link and an image. I also remember making a friend at camp who put me onto w3schools and it was like a whole new world had opened up to me. I was so enamoured with it. But not long after that I started seeing messages about how the HTML I knew and was comfortable with was "deprecated" in HTML5 and now I had to use CSS for everything... and I was like "what? why??? This still works, doesn't it?" Having a separate "style thingy" stored for your entire website made much less sense to me than just using the formatting that you wanted inline whenever you wanted it. I know now that you CAN do that with CSS, but it does require extra steps and that frustrates me.

I did learn some CSS during a coding class during my MA, but I didn't feel like it really "stuck" until I went to a women and tech event in... 2017? And finally relearned the basics of HTML and CSS. So it took me like 10 years to finally grok CSS. Somewhere in the middle, 2012ish, I started this fannish website with the help of a coder friend and learned some more advanced stuff on the fly (like PHP), and I felt really accomplished but I also used templates to build most of the website. I think there's a lot to be said for looking things up as you need them, but it does make me feel like I don't really have a grounded understanding I can draw on, just bits and pieces of knowledge.

To add further to an already VERY long comment... I feel quite frustrated when I look back over my own history of coding/programming, because the will was always there. My brother had a book on how to learn JavaScript (or just Java?) in 24 hours that I was DESPERATELY jealous of, but by the time I decided to pick it up a few years later, all of the software/information was outdated and I struggled a lot. I tried to use the customisation options in Civilization II to build my own game from scratch and I was super into it, but I lacked most of the knowledge to make it work. At school I was put off taking an IT GCSE because I already knew my way around a computer and my family persuaded me it wouldn't be worth my time (my husband is baffled by this, since he did the GCSE and learned a lot of valuable stuff from it), and from pursuing anything else related to coding/IT further because I wasn't strong at Maths. But I also have multiple aunts who have been in computer science all their lives and I wish I'd realised that sooner and talked to them about it!

Anyway, all of this is why your post really resonated with me, and I'm super excited for this project and the movement to help open up coding to more would-be coders. I really want to finally be one of them.