gadhra

Maybe this is more rant than anything, I don't know; but I'm at my wit's end and I really want help.

I belong to some specific subreddits around Old School Roleplaying games (if you're not familiar, think like ... Basic Dungeons and Dragons, Traveller, etc.) At the start of the reddit fiasco, I posted that I was curious where everyone would go if we weren't on reddit. The death of Google+ was kind of a body blow to the hobby, and Twitter became ... something else, so we had come to reddit and now that community felt like it was in jeopardy. So I posted the question and folks weighed in, and something that kept popping up was among grognards who missed the "web rings" of yore.

So I started thinking about that a bit and decided - what the hell, I'll make a web ring for OSR content. The code is here: https://github.com/totalityofygg/osr-webring-firefox It's really nothing fancy, a side menu opens up where you can page through a list of OSR sites. I'm not a professional javascript developer. I'm literally just posting links, no images, no revenue grab, nothing. I'm just trying to surface something for the hobby.

I submitted to Mozilla, waited a day, got approved. Yay! I put that up on reddit and was really proud of myself.

That lasted 12 hours, give or take. The Add-On got pulled back by Mozilla for "objectionable content." I felt humiliated as I had to tell people who were excited by it to forget what I said, but I also felt that I must have fucked up, and there must be some site in that json feed that they didn't like. Bummer but whatever, I can clean that up. So I asked what the objectionable content was. Waited a few days, no answer. I incremented the version and resubmitted. This time I got rejected, but the reason changed to the fact that my website didn't provide any support for my Add-On. OK ... So I cleared up anywhere that my website was mentioned, just deleted it because it didn't ultimately matter. I resubmitted and got denied again for the same issue. Each time I write to say "... hey, can you tell me what I'm doing wrong so I can fix it?", I get no response.

I'm not trying to make a cent. I'm not trying to market content. I'm not trying to fucking do anything but contribute in the way I thought we were supposed to? For the first time in my career working on the web - a career which began in late 80s / early 90s - I feel completely out of place and unable to understand what's happening.

I'm hoping someone will just tell me what I'm doing wrong. I want to improve. I want to contribute. But if no one can tell me what I'm doing wrong, I'm finding this impossible.

Growing up, my parents (both teachers) had to put in 100 hours of professional development every 5 years; I've tried to do the same as a developer, and I feel the time to put in my 100 hours is nigh.

I just turned 40, been in the industry for more than 20 years. Management experience, lots of PHP, Python, bash shell. MySQL, CouchDB, and Redis. Plenty of network administration, web server, and infrastructure design / setup, including AWS for the past 5 years or so. I've got no formal CS training, just what I've picked up on the job. My tech portfolio has afforded me a good living working for startups as anything from systems administrator to front-end developer to back-end work to managing developers.

I hate to say it, but I don't feel like I've got a great handle on the Next Important Thing. Is it Go? Haskell? Ruby? Docker? Will learning any of those leverage my brain into important programming concepts, like the way C++ and PHP taught me the importance of OOP so many years ago? Are any of those programmatic approaches going to be cornerstones for the future?