Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
A Node.js Project, And Deciding to Shelve It
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2014 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
In my second week of my 2014 Hacker School batch, I asked:
What are red flags in scifi/fantasy magazines' calls for submissions? What words/phrases make you think "ew, avoid"? -- @brainwane, 3:48 PM - 13 Oct 2014
As Moss guessed, I was thinking of making an SF&F version of joblint.org, to automatically check for suspect wording in "please submit" pages and posts by speculative fiction publishers.
I take off my hat to Rowan Manning for creating the tool and the site, which I found easy to adapt (my fork of the tool, my fork of the site). The code's in Node.js, and despite an npm problem on Ubuntu, I found it fairly easy to figure out how to change the tests, regular expressions, and error messages, modify the package dependencies and update appropriately (especially thanks to Hacker School colleagues). Check it out: package.json lets you point specifically to a git repo as a dependency, and specify a branch. Even though my JavaScript is terrible, I even figured out how to check for the absence of a thing we want in calls for submissions (specifically, wordcount expectations). Overall, the tech side of this project was easier than I expected. (I also did a few of the Matasano crypto challenges that week, which was a very different approach to looking for signals in text!)
But conversation with some SF&F community members led me to believe that the joblint approach wouldn't help here. In tech industry job descriptions, you can rely on certain buzzwords and key off them; joblint should be only part of a suite that catches problems, the way a code linter should be in a software engineering process, but it prookes thought and is useful on its own. But problems with SF&F calls for submissions are often in subtler approaches rather than easy-to-match strings. So it didn't feel worthwhile for me to try for a regexes-alone approach, and I didn't want to spend my Hacker School time thinking though the automated literature analysis part of this problem; that's not what I wanted to do in this batch.
So I shelved the project and I have not gotten it even close to launch. But the code's up with a TODO list, and y'all should feel free to grab it and run with it if it strikes your fancy!
And I got some hands-on time getting comfortable with Node and I reassured myself that I can cargo-cult JavaScript modifications when necessary, so that was cool. And I got and merged a pull request from an old Wikimedia acquaintance, which made me feel warm and fuzzy. I've left the Foundation, but relationships remain.
