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Isarra interview
(Your article's descriptive subtitle here)
This week we sat down with Isarra, a MediaWiki developer, designer and sysadmin. She's a past OPW intern and serial patch contributor.
Can you talk about some of the projects you are currently working on?
Projects:
- Being perpetually distracted
- Yelling at random people
- Trying to play nice and be polite and generally not yell at people, before devolving into yelling at people
- Being distracted, but taking short breaks to yell at people
- Generally yelling at people
- Sometimes actually working on real stuff, before yelling at people
A follow up question about a project
- Response
For those of us who don't know anything about fonts, could you explain what serifs and san-serifs are? What is a "font stack"?
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Serif font |
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Sans-serif font |
- Serifs have little fiddly bits on the ends of the letters, which can look cool when printed and generally diminish the effective resolution of the font so letters need to be bigger to actually read them. Sans-serifs just have very basic letter shapes, so they're easier to read, especially at smaller sizes, but they tend to look pretty stupid especially if you blow them up real big.
- Font stacks are something bad web designers like to use to make their websites look more pretentious. It basically involves coming up with a favourite font they think looks good that probably severely reduces the legibility of the content, realising nobody actually has that installed on their systems, coming up with some fallbacks that may or may not be remotely similar that people may actually have installed, and then putting some generic things after that. And thus the resulting pile of usually mismatched fonts is the 'font stack'.
What's your favorite font?
- I hate most fonts, but some are worse than others. And then there's things like ecofont, if you want to make fonts that are already bad enough even worse by adding holes to them.
What has your experience been as a volunteer developer? How could the Wikimedia Foundation improve the experience for volunteer contributors?
- Angry.
- As for what the WMF could do, maybe actually paying development staff to do code review outside their teams would help? Poor sods spend so much time at the office and/or working already that trying to get them to do it on their volunteer time just seems cruel. Also I'm bloody lazy and/or have absolutely no bloody time as is and can't be arsed spending a week tracking the right folks down and crap.
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