Everything, Everywhere, All at Once...just fashionably late

Greetings, fu(jo|dan|jin) and friends,
It’s almost that time of the year again, when BobaBoard retrospectives get written and April 1st jokes are planned and (one way or the other) delivered. Before we go heads down again on our Recurring Spring Obligations™ and FujoGuide Issue 2, our current priority, here’s the roundup of what we’ve been up to since you last saw read us.

🌸✨ A FRIENDLY NOTE ✨🌸

This edition was written by Ms Boba herself, without much chance for others to stop her help review and revise. Please enjoy her typos, writing quirks, excessive parentheticals (and occasional digressions (and nested asides)).

FujoCoded General News

• Juicy Con-centrate: On March 1st, we (once again) haunted the virtual halls of CitrusCon—not with a talk, but with a “Q&Ad-lib”, an innovative panel format where Ms Boba attempts to prepare in advance, fails, and is then forced to improvise live. Luckily, she’s good at that…or was she? Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait for the recording to find out. In the meantime, you can catch up by rewatching her 2024 talk “Rebuilding Community on the FujoWeb” and her 2025 talk “Working Together in a Dying World”.

• It Takes an Orchard: And as it is also (an admittedly-less-known) tradition, we haunted hosted a WebDev help CitrusCon booth/workshop space—a.k.a. a Discord thread. In there, some of our volunteers, contractors, and general friends provided help with websites, JavaScript woes, and general tech inquiries. Legend says, we may even have helped some folks get their hands on the Issue 1 Preview of FujoGuide 👀 Thank you to all who showed up to meet and chat with us!

• Pairin’ Up: Couldn’t make it to CitrusCon? Live your BL-fest dreams vicariously by shipwatching—that is, by gazing into the endless stream of RobinBoob purchases flowing into almost all our @fujostore socials (Tumblr/Mastodon/Bluesky). Add your ship to the extended parade using code LOVE_IS_TIMELESS for 15% off, then channel the spirit of a tried-and-true BL umarell and judge celebrate everyone’s taste. But hurry: only one single certified (owner)shipper can get their hands on each OTP. Who will claim yours?

• Get-ProjectManager’d: Thanks to last newsletter’s plea, we have an official Project Manager! While not exactly a fujin (yet?), James is a wise, older, non-binary eldritch horror of knowledge who has been helping fan communities since 1995…and now helps us. Other than guiding the transition from Ms Boba’s planet-sized charts to actual GitHub issues, and wrangling our raccoons collaborators in her stead, James has introduced us to Posh-chan, Microsoft’s official PowerShell gijinka and absolute BombShell of a… shell. Now that is culture fit!

• $upporters in the Loop: Our $upporters Area continues to hit milestones…and now hits our Discord server with a daily reminder of exactly how generous our $upporters are. Aside from lending us strength when code (or prose) just won’t behave, it lets us know our database is synced, and our not-finished-but-ravingly-(pre)reviewed $upporters lounge can now welcome our latest patrons. Unfortunately, it’s hard to test this code without new $upporters…so if you wish to help us “test in production”—no other reason, really—pledge to our Patreon and become our angel investor tester.

FujoCoded Backerkit Update

FujoCoded Backerkit Fulfillment Progress: Recent

• Coding in Space(s): There’s a new article at the event horizon! Sel and Grubdog joined forces to (space)ship learn@ readers straight into a full development environment by teaching them about GitHub Codespaces. Want to Halo jump into coding your site or contributing to one of our projects without first installing a bunch of stuff? Steal compute from Leverage Microsoft’s generous (free) offerings and get a full computer in your browser—Catboys, alas, not included.

• One (S)hell of a Breakup: Last you heard from us, we were splitting up NPM articles to (allegedly) improve their readability. Having acquired a taste for dramatic breakups—in, you know, true fujo spirit—we’ve proceeded to tear more articles apart: “What is a Terminal?” and “Choosing your Terminal” have, alas(?), separated, and we’ve also thrown the absolutely-not-quick Terminal series out of “quickstarts”. “HTML & CSS: Editing Basics”, now alone, claims it’s nice to have the section all for themselves, but we know denial and mutual pining when we see it.

• Spec-tacularly Written: Speaking of moving out on your own, our community is stepping up to help us create the learn@ we all wish to see on the web. But this very appreciated collaboration, while “just as planned hoped”, adds the extra challenge of *deep breath* creating a cohesive creative vision across a variety of creatives. To (style) guide us, Rie has updated—and even PR’d!—our community@’s learn@ writing specs. Incidentally, we’ve also discovered the Diataxis framework, which has helped us all get on the same (web)page not just about the how but the what we’re writing. Wish us luck sweat, but eventual success!

• License to Learn: Nothing like having to make legal decisions reminds you the ol’ 9 to 5 still has its perks. Thankfully, rather than giving into despair and dusting off our resumes, we put on our bravest attitude, faced our fears, and worked out a dual-licensing model for learn@ articles. In a few words: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial for the public (so everyone can copy and remix our articles—but not sell them), and a more permissive license for FujoCoded (so we can write our paid Zines and coding offerings without legal anxieties). You’ll hear more about this in future newsletters: the legal ducks are, after all, ever waddling 🦆🦆🦆

FujoCoded Backerkit Fulfillment Progress: Future

• Nearly Viable Manuscript: Now that we’re in the future (section), you may wonder where our article on installing NVM is at. TL;DR(eview): Submerged in an avalanche of "//TODO"s, we left the most complete article for last…then found it needed just a bit more style-guide polish to fit with its peers. While we didn’t have time to give it, there’s no need to despair: we’re currently pushing and pulling pronouns, tenses, bulletpoints, and assorted Starlight components, and will publish this excellent article as soon as we’ve bestowed it the appropriate ~learn@ vibe~.

• Taken for (April) Fools: We have so many great things cooking, and they all deserve their time and space to simmer! Between polishing articles, our ongoing FujoGuide rewrite, and FujoCoded’s LLC #1 Company Holiday slash Prime Immovable Deadline™—that is, our April 1st fun(d)raiser—we’ll keep Learn@ work going in the background so it can properly absorb all those creative juices.

The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development

Last newsletter, we talked about focusing on FujoGuide Issue 2 with the new year—and we did! But the more we wrote, the more something felt off. Not everyone agreed: our beta readers loved the issue, the feedback said in unison, and their points of confusion were just “GitHub being GitHub”. Could we have left it at that? Sure! But have we ever took “it’s supposed to be confusing” as an answer?”

Read on for our diagnosis (and solution) ✨

Recent Progress on FujoGuide

• The Issue with Our Issue: A key part of making what’s technical approachable is finding the right balance between over- and under-explaining, and our chapters had tipped hard into “everything, everywhere, all at once”. The “Cloning & Remotes” chapter alone, for example, juggled a) SSH setup, b) HTTP vs SSH addresses, c) creating remote repositories, and d) an overview of distributed repositories connecting to the same remote. Crammed into “asides” boxes without room to breathe, everything felt both rushed and slow—too much content before you got to “Git your hands dirty”, but no space for any idea to land. The diagnosis? Right content, wrong structure.

  

• Issue’ing Our Extra Chapters: Armed with this new understanding, we’ve been reorganizing chapters, reshuffling sections, and generally performing the technical writing equivalent of gutting canon down to its studs to rebuild it around your OTP’s perfect ending. And when you start splitting overstuffed chapters apart, some of that content finds a better home on its own…in this case, this issues’ newly unveiled extra chapters:

  1. “Keeping Your Branch Up to Date” — a.k.a. the bane of everyone’s git-xistence, a.k.a. what to do when you have a feature in progress but your main won’t stop (updating) for no one…not even yourself
  2. “Uploading Local Code to GitHub” — We made the bold choice to start our guides from Git, and our GitHub guide from “code already on GitHub”. We stand by both: git cloneing an existing repo is straightfoward, but uploading local code to a new repo goes so much smoother on the other side of a few git pushes.
  3. “Multiple Remotes” — Did you know you can push and pull code between different repositories without going through GitHub? This (optional) chapter shows people why GitHub is structured like “a hub”—an invaluable mental model to help move from your own repository to collaborating with others!

• Poasting through (G)it: …and we’re doing all this in public (as time permits)! For those yearning for a front-row seat, Ms Boba’s been liveblogging the writing process: chapter restructuring, table-of-contents poking and prodding, head-banging walls while thinking about section ordering…the works. Follow along on her socials (or FujoGuide’s) for a look at how the sausage is made is taken apart and reassembled. Next one due soon!

• Git Intro’d: We’ve also taken another next step into expanding the Git chapters on our site. In our new intro chapter, written by our friend Hyena and appropriately named “Say Hi to Git (and GitHub)”, we give a real quick overview of Version Control to help teach it (and sell it) to all visitors to our site—not just our zine buyers!

What’s Next for FujoGuide

• Staying A-live(blogging): This newsletter, a CitrusCon talk, and a certain Valentine’s Day launch may have slightly delayed our next liveblog, but social followers will get another zine progress update on either side of the end of the week. We contain multitudes (in both talents and deadlines), and [✨new & overdue achievement✨] we’ve learned better than to promise specific progress…but we’re past “the really messy part”, heading into a tiny, half-way through flow-switcharoo.

• Dawn of the Extra Chapters: Once the main ones are locked in, it’s new chapters time! The foundation (cut from the old chapters) is already there, so this will be less “writing new content from scratch” and more “expanding each extra to cover all that matters”. If you wish to keep up with progress…you know where to go!

• One Peer to Herd Them All : And then…Beta 2! Once we’re sure on a timeframe for wrapping up this rewrite, we’ll be looking for a coordinator to wrangle our chosen betas through one (final 🤞) round. Willing to sit in a Discord group DM with 7-8 fannish GitHub beginners (sometime in the next 2 months) and make sure they don’t get too stuck? Write us at contacts@fujocoded.com. We’ll be in touch!

Intermission — a Word To Our $ponsors

This update (and ongoing work) is brought to you by our lovely Patrons: our raccoon-employees demand the fanciest of trash, and those legal ducks will only waddle on premium grain—we couldn’t feed them without you all!

If you’ve not boarded our ship yet, jump on our Patreon now! Tiers start at $3/month, and give you access to coupons and discounted or limited-edition merchandise. We’re working on a $upporters area so you can (among others) showcase your blorbo on a big wall!

Did you know? Studies show our Patrons are 47% more likely to have their OTP become canon…or have them explode in a juicy cloud of drama—whatever their preference.

Around the Fujoverse

In the Git(hub)

• Welcome to the GitHub: A warm shoutout to the newest first-time contributors to our GitHub—and for some GitHub itself: Ev, Hyena (✨first ever!✨), deepspaceaxolotl (✨first ever!✨), and Rie (✨first ever!✨)! Whether with a PR, a review, or a README, their generous contribution keeps us going and (not going to lie) makes us shed little tears of gratitude. Thank you for making the FujoVerse a little bit shinier ✨

• Astro-nomical Fanfic Data: Scraping AO3 data is fun, but you know what’s even more fun (and simple)? Using AO3 data in your Astro webiste with our Astro AO3 loader plugin! This plugin’s first official release now works with Astro 5, and supports series in addition to works. Plus, Ev (our valiant hero) gave it a proper README! So go forth now, load fics on your Astro site, and call it “learning webdev”…cause it totally is!

• AO3.js goes Adult: Our AO3 scraping library/Official “Fan Bait” Project™ got a bunch of upgrades: we’ve added support for adult works (we see you 😎) and listing tag synonyms (for internal purposes Certified Shady® 🥷), exported Zod schemas for ease of integration (e.g. our Astro loader plugin 👀👆), and overhauled error handling. Check out the release notes for the full changelog.

• Official Rec-list: Last but not least: @fujocoded/authproto, our ATProto authentication library for Astro sites, is now recommended in the official ATProto documentation. Look, fandom! Senpai noticed us. No pressure.

Fujostore Highlights: Restocks, Sales, and Limited-Time Offers

You’ve (hopefully) already seen our RobinBoob relaunch and associated “limited-time offer”, which officially expired…almost a week ago.

That said, and stop me if you’ve heard this…what is time, to real love?

To celebrate finally making it past the writing a lot of copy (an avoid setting up another promo) we’re extending RobinBoob’s Valentine’s Day 15% off (with code LOVE_IS_TIMELESS) until March 14th! Come forth! Come all! Buy on RobinBoob.com!

Collaborate with Us!

Want to help us help the fandom web? Are you a social campaign expert wishing for some monetary return (💰), or a GitHub connoisseur willing to donate your time to The Cause™? Read on!

• [🙏]One Peer to Herd Them All: We’re not quite ready yet (the draft needs a few more weeks), but we’ll soon be looking for a volunteer beta readers coordinator to help wrangle FujoGuide Issue 2 Beta 2. The gig: sit in a Discord group DM with 6-7 fannish beginners as they brave our GitHub zine, and help them surface unscathed. You don’t need deep GitHub expertise —just enough familiarity to get beginners unstuck. If this sounds like your thing, reach out NOW so we can hit the ground running when it’s time. DM us or write us at contacts@fujocoded.com!

• [💰]Social Media Campaign Lead & Copywriter: Are you a fandom person (or adjacent) with a penchant for capturing the hearts (and eyes) of your fellow netizens? We’re looking for a paid contractor to plan/write social media launch campaigns for our projects and products—think Bluesky threads, cross-platform posts, and short newsletter blurbs. You’ll own the campaign timelines, wrangle the content delivery, and work directly with our founder to help us sound like ourselves…just uncharacteristically on schedule. This is a per-campaign role ($150–250/campaign), and we welcome experience from non-traditional avenues: fandom, zine promo, indie launches, crowdfunding, or anywhere you’ve had to get people excited and rallying. Apply here!

That’s All, Folks!

And with this, it’s all for these months! It took us a long while, but we’ve made it on the other side…somehow.

FujoGuide updates aside (follow them on our socials), we’ll see you on the other side of March 31st 👀 until then, “good night, ship tight, don’t let the discourse bite!”

Yours,
The FujoCoded LLC Team