Everyone loves a story about some genius swooping in and changing the world overnight. It’s neat. It’s inspiring. And it’s utter nonsense. Real progress is messy, boring at times, and absolutely depends on ordinary people actually doing the work and dealing with each other without throwing a tantrum.
There are many irritating phrases in the English language, but one sits firmly at the top of my list: "no offence but". It is the most dishonest phrase in everyday conversation.
You know the one. It arrives politely at the start of a sentence, pretending to be considerate. It tries to disguise itself as empathy. In reality it means exactly the opposite.
The web was supposed to be the most open publishing platform ever created, a system where anyone with a server and a connection could publish ideas, build services, and participate in a global conversation without needing permission from anyone.
Twenty-six years ago, in the desert town of Swakopmund in Namibia, I jumped out of a plane without a parachute.
This is not a metaphor. It was a tandem skydive.
There is a persistent myth in open source that the biggest challenges are technical. People assume the problems lie in the code, the architecture, the governance model, or the roadmap. They’re wrong. One of the biggest problems facing open source software is the users.
You found a bug. Good. Now the real work starts.
Many developers think fixing a bug means making the error message disappear or getting the expected output to appear again. That is not fixing a bug. That is silencing a symptom. Real bug fixing requires understanding what changed, why it changed, and what that change affected.
Just because someone, or something, speaks with certainty does not make it true. Confidence can trick you. It can feel convincing. It can make you trust words that are completely wrong. Confidence is persuasive. But it is not proof.
Every software team faces the temptation to build from scratch, but sometimes that instinct can do more harm than good. In software development, NIH syndrome stands for “Not Invented Here” syndrome.
If you are using Firefox and experiencing problems when editing content in Joomla — specifically where the TinyMCE editor keeps reloading, flashing, or constantly refreshing while typing — this article explains the solution.
