Sunday, September 10, 2023

Trying to smooth out BAM-related communications

Communicating anything and processing (of the cognitive kind) anything, these things do not come by easily for me.  I find these things exhausting.

Using the right tool for the job helps me immensely.  However, the right tool for me is often times only the right tool for a subset of tasks.

Since I started the BASIC Anywhere Machine project in December 2020, I have found myself in a continuous struggle of refactoring workflow and choice of "tools" to try and reduce cognitive and sensory overload.

Over the course of that time, I've taken a lot of flack over communications when, really, I have no idea how to communicate anything.

So here's the plan:

  • I'll be using this blog for all writing/sharing.
  • I'll be using forums to
    • Share links to blog items for much-better-suited discussions in those forums
    • Share any link to a blog item with only the forum(s) that have a scope matching the blog item

Blogger will be central

Blogger (i.e. this blog) will be my go to communication platform for writing and sharing.  It is for me the best tool for the job of writing.  I rely heavily on formatting features to help organize my thoughts.  I cannot stand markup as it is too distracting.

I had thought that Reddit would be good as a primary communication platform, but it seems to require an app on mobile devices, and requires an account for Windows XP (as reported by one individual.)

The forums


I generally really like it, for many reasons I haven't quite yet figured out.  However, I have figured out that I really appreciate how a post in Reddit can easily be shared via "cross-posts" to other communities on Reddit.  I like this idea: "cross-pollination" of communities.

For every blog item, there will be a matching post in this Reddit.


I find discord a bit overwhelming (everything is a shiny object), but the GotBASIC channel has got my attention something silly.  I know of nothing else that does the job of "celebrating BASIC" as well.  So whatever challenges I have with Discord, that is totally worth it.

I'm pretty sure every blog item will have a matching post in the "bam" sub-channel in GotBASIC.


Although this also screams "celebrating BASIC", and I find it much less overwhelming than discord, it is a really big bucket that makes it challenging to focus on a particular context.  I do love to reminisce on all things BASIC, and this group is stellar for being quite active: it is a very large community, so there is always very good stuff to find every day.

Here, I'll only post links to BAM programs for running and for viewing source code.

If somebody shares a program in this group and I port that program to BAM, I'll share that program as a comment to the OP in the Facebook Group.


Ditto (BASIC Programming Language Facebook Group)


Although a small and not very active community it is a nice focus on "Retro Programming".  I do find it a little bit challenging to communicate there because formatting is done with markdown, which I cannot stand because I rely heavily on WYSIWYG formatting to organize my writing/thoughts and markup really painfully distracts me.

There, I'll only post about programs or BAM enhancements that support the scope of "retro programming".


That is pretty much a dormant forum except for occasional posts be two or three of us.  Although the WYSIWYG editor is nice, the advertisements are a little bit annoying.

I post there as I post to RetroCoders because it is worth trying to give anything good for BASIC some kind of pulse.


This is a great community.  When created BAM, the original intent was to create a sidekick for QB64 for porting QB64 programs to the web.  Despite lack of interest in BAM in huge interest in QBJS (for porting QB64 programs to the web), the community is very helpful in explaining to me how the QB64 BASIC works for when I'm attempting to create compatible statements/functions, and/or provide workaround code.

Although the community is generally very welcoming of BAM-related posts, there isn't much point in my sharing anything BAM-related in the forum unless it is to provide context when I'm trying to understand how QB64 works.










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