New Ones Come in Pairs: NPM Articles, Patreon Tiers (& Catboys)

Greetings, fu(jo|dan|jin) and friends,
It’s been a busy busy time in the Fujoverse: plenty of lessons learned, cool stuff sent out (and preparing to be sent), plus new learn@ articles—and how could we forget…the catboys?

Let’s dive right in!

FujoCoded General Company News

• Buy Our Love: We have not one, but TWO new Patreon tiers: “Supporter Georg”, because someone asked to give us $100, and “You Fund Me(ette)?”, because we had to make a $50 one too, just for good measure! We’re running out of names though so don’t ask us for $200… unless? 👀 (if you can’t find them on Patreon, just keep clicking to the right 😜)

• Lemon-stealing Applause: Ms Boba’s CitrusCon talk “Working Together in a Dying World”debuted to raving reviews. If you want to hear read about toxic collaboration triangles, and toxic triangular villains, you can find the slides here (turn on speaker notes) and various thematically-related works on AO3, we’re sure.

  

• That’s How the Cookie Crumbles: Our Fandom Cookies are all mailed out and no longer threaten to crush Ms Boba in a devastating, if hilarious, avalanche—which means people have already been stuffing their mouths with delicious treats! And also the cookies. Thanks to Linky and an Anonymous Supporter for the promo pics!

  

  

• Here’s Some We Made Earlier: If that’s not enough, the Digital Cookie Pack is also nearly ready and we’ve hired Hyena, also featured in our promotional art, to make some delicious cookie-themed wallpapers using both their immensurate visual skills and our CSS wallpaper maker.

• Getting Our Teaching Degree: Speaking of the Digital Cookie Pack, we’re also working on the promised JS/HTML/CSS learn-along. It is going steady, but ut taught us that even our multitasking has limits… at least when it comes to deadlines. Next time, only a “basic” or “fancy” code version in our learn-alongs, not both!

• Planning for Success: Q3 planning for Fujoverse is done, in the nick of time! We’re going to continue hiring more people, and laying the foundations to make our work sustainable, so that Ms Boba no longer wakes up in a cold (or hot?) sweat thinking about (teaching) TypeScript. You can read about our NPM articles outsourcing below or simply gaze at one of Ms Boba’s humungous project management charts in equal awe and fear!

  

  If you’d like to be confronted by one of those monstrosities (and paid for your service), drop your card in the hiring section below!

FujoCoded Backerkit Update

FujoCoded Backerkit Fulfillment Progress: Recent

• NPMployees: We landed our first articles—that you paid for!—written by someone other than Ms Boba, and learned a lot from the process! Such as “Wow, this stuff costs money” and “Huh, other people write differently to me”. Even with these obstacles our hired writers knocked it out of the park. You can find the fruits of their labour in the new “JavaScript beyond the Browser” section of learn@fujoweb.dev!

  

• Feeding Frenzy: We’ve also learned that holy hell, fans tasked with “just uploading” new article drafts on our learning site will instead rip them apart like piranhas on a cow, and rebuild them better like… piranha scientists on a cyborg cow. Unlike this simile, the final articles came out great! Next time, we’ll save time and effort by intentionally channeling this energy, perhaps into some kind of prose-editing FujoBeam.

• Barely Beginners: We also got some great feedback about our terminology: turns out a lotta people read “beginners” to mean “Starting from scratch” rather than our “Ankle-deep and wanting more”. With this in mind, we’re gonna work on improving our messaging for learn@ and beyond, so we can fujo-snipe our main targets into coding forces of nature yaoi!

• A Need for NPM: Finally, our new content had a bit of a mid-creation crisis—the NPM articles are useful, but it’s not always clear where they fit, especially to beginners hobbyists. Next up, we’re taking them out to buy a motorbike and hooking them up with Astro, so that together you all can shoot for the stars. More below!

FujoCoded Backerkit Fulfillment Progress: Future

• Dressing to Impress: One of our writers, Rie, gave us some excellent post-article-delivery advice, like how to do “better storytelling” and “clearer content guidelines”, which they claim are “important”. Under their guidance, we’ll be evolving the style guide in preparation for our next learn@ releases!

• Shooting for the Stars: As mentioned, we plan to showcase NPM’s learning value by tying it closer to Astro like it’s a 3-legged race! We’re still working on the details, but we’ll keep you all updated—nay, involved: next week, we’ll be gathering feedback live from you on stream*! Join our “Learning Path Plan-Along (Astro edition)” Twitch stream on Monday, September 1st, 2PM Pacific!

  

The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development

Recent Progress on the FujoGuide

• Git Ready for Badges: We’ve had one, yes, but what about a second badge? Coming in hot with a cute new badge for our lovely backers, courtesy of touchofstatic. Just like the old badge backers will find it in their rewards folder; but unlike the old one, this will remain a Kickstarter Exclusive! (Lost your rewards folder? Check out the email to follow!)

  

• Catboy Convergence: The new catboys are here! Having gone through the final adoption process for ‘em, Gitea and Forgejo’s pedigree certificates—their behind-the-scenes files, that is—will soon be in our Kickstarter backers and Patreon $upporters’s inboxes, right after you read this! Hopefully fully vaccinated and neutered, though they’re not happy about that last one. Huge thanks to brokemycrown for another two hot catboys hot off the art presses, they look great!

  

• Teasing Tails: No money for the behind the scenes? Have a tease: twins Gitea and Forgejo used to be so close you could hardly tell them apart. Unfortunately, since Gitea (left) created his own company—whether to chase sustainability (he says), or to seek big daddy Microsoft’s approval (Forgejo says)—he’s now become insufferable. He even started wearing a beret! Yet, in their own way, they both still strive to bring independent Version Control to the masses, even if they squabble like…well, two cat(boy)s.

• Pre-sale and Pre-view: This month, we updated our store to support selling unlisted, direct-link-only items (👀), which means FujoGuide Issue 1 Preview (the one folks got in their Kickstarter rewards) is now on sale… if you know where to get it. We already had our first chances to give it out, so we can confirm the sales are sailing, with a few bugs still to squash!

  

What’s Next for FujoGuide

• Ye Olde Badge: And speaking of FujoGuide sales. Remember the old Git badge (👇👀) we sent our backers? With the new Kickstarter exclusive one finally ready,it’s time to share that one more broadly with everyone who buys (and bought) our Git zine! If you’re among the current acquirers, you’ll soon get an email with your updated zine, badge included. And if you’re among our backers… go check back in your rewards folder, it’s already there!
  

• The Beta-verse: While we’ve had to channel all our teaching energy into the Fandom Cookies Learn-along, we pinky-promise to have an update on the GitHub Zine beta by the next newsletter. Thank you everyone for your patience—in the meantime, look forward to getting the new badges and character sheets into your hands!

Around the Fujoverse

In the Press

• Seeing Talking Double: Hot off the tails of this year’s Citrus Con talk, Ms Boba jumped straight into the DashCon 2 ball pit to give last year’s again. Check out the “Rebuilding Community on the FujoWeb” re-recording to hear how shit’s, well, still pretty fucked in the “running social media platforms” world—or, if you prefer, just her passionate rambling in the final Q&A.

• Writing Triple: If watching is not your cup of (git)tea, the third and last part of “Rebuilding Community on the FujoWeb” is also all yours for reading! Continue from where you left off to learn more about the journey ahead, or start back from the beginning to understand how we got here and how we (might) get out.

• Boards-Love Cameo: Our FujoBoards got even more web-famous this month after they were featured on esteemed-BL-manga-publisher Seven Seas Entertainment’s own Twitter account. As they say, “Senpai noticed us~” (and stole our hearts bought our boards).

  

In the (Git)hub

• Plugged In: A new Astro plugin Integration has landed! @fujocoded/astro-dev-only lets you hide any page of your Astro website from the prying eyes of visitors, making them only available during development! Big power, big JavaScript crimes.
• Wall Pa(m)pered: Our “HTML&CSS Wallpaper Maker” got an upgrade! The Fortune Cookies wallpapers (soon in our digital pack!) dusted off our memory of its inner workings, which means we’ve released our “internal upgrades” for everyone to enjoy. You too can now create HTML snippets to reuse multiple wallpapers. What better way to practice your HTML & CSS? Make some wallpapers, and share them with us on socials!
• Long Staffed: @bobaboard/ao3.js got a tiny bit more powerful thanks to a short-but-mighty external contribution: our friend Gingerchew—thank you!—added built-in support for short “ao3.org” links! If you wish to follow in their footsteps, we’d love to help you open or grab an issue, or be a “pinch-hitter” for an open Pull Request. All skill levels are welcome!

Ms Boba Streaming Schedule

To knock our ATproto guestbook up out in record time, we’re back (with a vengeance) to our double-feature Monday+Thursdays schedule. As always, join our coding adventures on Twitch at 3PM Pacific…ish. We may be on air more often, but not always more on time 🙇‍♀️!

More importantly: the increased schedule once again leaves us space for some special edition streams. This time, we’re inviting everyone to come brainstorm the future Astro section of our learn@ website with us!

What should our new articles cover? How will they intersect with our NPM ones? Let’s ALL find out during our “Learning Path Plan-Along (Astro edition)” Twitch stream on Monday, September 1st, 2PM Pacific!

We Are Hiring!

It remains true, month after month: writers, coders, and artists are always welcome to submit their business cards via our Business Cards Drop-off Forms. When hiring opportunities arise, we always pull these contacts up as we search for the right candidates!

Speaking of which, welcome to the special contracting opportunities we’re hiring for at this time 👇

• 💰Digital Relea$e: Are you a hype-generating machine? Do you know how to make online dwellers’ hearts go doki doki? Help us create a release plan for our upcoming Digital Pack! While you won’t have to do everything yourself, we need your help thinking through this launch, and planning (maybe even writing) content that gets all our supporters to share our joy…and, hopefully, their money.
• 💰WRITEME.md: Do you like writing? Do you like (even just some) coding? Do you love the idea of empowering others to, as they say, “supercharge” their coding powers with pre-made libraries or integrations? Come write the README.md files for our repositories, and tell others how to put our code to their own use! First step: our WIP @fujocoded/authproto integration, which adds ATproto authentication to any Astro site and lets visitors log in.

To express interest for these short-term opportunities, use our expedited “Hiring Right Now” form to let us know you’re currently available, and a good match for the position. If you don’t quite fit (and have filled out our usual forms), we’ll still look over those records to find additional candidates.

That’s All, Folks!

And with that, our August [update] is finished! See you next edition for more adventures together, and don’t forget to check out our Patreon to help us continue building all of the above!

Love,
The FujoCoded Team (A Confluence of Calamities)