Fiddleware and QA
Last week a very familiar experience made it to the HN frontpage: The Matrix Trashfire. When I was looking into alternatives for Slack for the Arbor community, I ran basically into the same things. At the time, I just wanted to derive the quickest path to success so I could share it with my team mates. I wanted it to work after all, because, on paper, Matrix just seems like such a good idea. Somewhere in the comments a person describes Matrix as fiddleware, which I really like. We all ran into missing keys and non-working backups on Matrix I think!
The post puts the experience in a different perspective though, and indeed, it’s great that the Matrix people are in contact with the author to smooth out some of the experience. I guess I do QA a lot without calling it that: trialling some new tool comes down to the same, and I even frequently make notes about the most important gotchas. So, I’ll use this term now to describe some of my qualities and requests. We all know and use systems that could do with a similar write-up.