fannish 50 #3: coding for fandom

[karanguni]

snowflake_challenge seems delayed for day 3, so I shall ad lib for Fannish 50 and talk about coding for fandom.

I tried and failed to engage with fandom coding early on, when AO3 was getting spun up (got recruited at my university to join AO3 coders! Then gave up very rapidly as I was both very busy and not yet very hip with coding) and when the LJ-DW shift was occurring (will I ever understand S2 themes? No, because it takes too much CPU!). But 2017 (!!) rolled around and I coded the first-ever Yuletide tagset app because I could not stand for the life of me looking at a large AO3 tagset in the UI. The rest is history!

I don't terribly enjoy coding for fun; I don't do it because it takes up too much brainspace. But coding up the apps filled a niche in my life of engaging in fandom and helping people that made it the perfect fannish exercise for me. I wish I were the sort of person who could make friends easily with others over shared fandoms, but I honestly don't consume enough fannish material nor have enough baseline energy anymore to engage that way: the last time I was successful at it was way, way back in FF7 fandom, when I RP'd with people and had a close DW/Tumblr writing circle. Even then, I mostly bonded with individual people, and our interactions lived or faded based on how busy we were/what fannish commitments we could have to one another. Not very reliable at the end: most of the people I can think of that I was close to or admired or liked to chill with in shared spaces have moved on from fandom in a permanent way.

But coding apps! I can do that! And it's been an amazing gateway into meeting people and getting to hang in fandom spaces in a non-awkward way. I have a purpose in fandom that doesn't involve needing to be enthusiastic about a canon! Since coding the first tagset app, I:

• Joined the Yuletide tagmod team, a dream I didn't even realise I had
• Got to meet a bunch of other mods who needed apps for their exchanges, like Chocolate Box and Trick or Treat
• Eventually realised that the utility of a less-eyeburn-y proxy for looking at AO3 was useful for almost every exchange and rolled out what is now https://autoao3app.fandom.tools, the automagic app
• Continue to hang out in fandom as a semi-lurker year round, absorbing good vibes even if my contributions are mostly technical

Other fun projects have included learning how Discord bots work, digging into AO3's open-source internals to learn to reverse engineer things, and thrusting scraped data into various automations so everyone can have Google sheets and CSVs when AO3 refuses to cough 'em up itself. I've experimented with Elasticsearch (even if I refused to pay for it and therefore the Great and Good of prompt searching will not happen any time soon), learned some fun SQL, and tried to wrangle high-text density design. The autoapp project is technically simple but is still a fun stretch: it's got to be generically flexible, updates can't break what's already out there. Once enough data was gathered it's been great fun to open up what it can do to help exchange writers find what they love to write more easily.

Along the way, I've tried out new exchanges and managed to learn to write again. I now even manage some fannish joy every now and then! I have so much love for the people who reached out and helped me back into fandom via this stuff: Morbane and Fence and Firebird and everyone else. Then there are the crazily generous donors who show up every year to toss a coin to their Witcher coder to keep the app (and my spirits) up. Then on top of that are the amazing writers and recipients I've met in the course of trying exchanges other than Yuletide. It's been an super fun ride, and one I hope I get to keep riding for the foreseeable future. ♥