I'm a designer and developer with 15+ years of professional experience and I would absolutely agree culture is more important than code.

I won't go as far to say as coding is easy, because it isn't. The effort it takes to create a platform is considerable. It's why we don't have that many options when it comes to social media.

But culture? That's HARD. Fostering an environment that's open and inclusive and limits abuse? That's so much more difficult.

I'm a context guy, so in attempting to explain why it is so difficult, you have to look at the social context of tech, which isn't the most inviting place to begin with if you're not white, straight and a dude.

Combine this with economic inequality factors and it makes that much more difficult for non white people and women to even start building anything.

So you generally get white guys building platforms for ALL of us.

A culture that favors their perspectives.

I would say the conversation is opening up, albeit slowly. I think we all realize how important the coding aspect is, but we are steady coming to the realization that we need to put more emphasis on culture.

It doesn't matter how fantastic a codebase is if the culture around it stays stagnant and intolerant to anyone that doesn't have the same philosophical posture of the person who created it.

It doesn't matter if we're going to keep repeating the same stupid mistakes.

Honestly, I would say coders should not lead the effort for building community. Having a slick set of features and tools should not define the efficacy of a community that is dependent on a people who don't give a shit about these things.

Do they matter? Of course, but most people don't care about how cool a feature or tool is.

They just want it to work. They want to be safe. They don't want to be harassed.

I have yet to see any coder lead initiative takes this seriously.

@Are0h In Scrum you're supposed to have a product owner, who doesn't have to be (probably shouldn't be) a programmer. It seems like this structure lends itself well to not being coder-led, though it doesn't seem to work out that way much of the time because I don't think coders take that role sufficiently seriously.

@freakazoid This is a good point. A lot of code head have a hard time understanding their role as part of team.

Good projects aren't built in vacuum. This is a hard transition for a lot of programmers that are used to being isolated because no one understands what they are doing.

This is a hard bridge to gap b/c most people aren't going to understand programming, which leads to an under appreciation of that as well.

It's a hard balance to find.

@Are0h And even when the feedback is there it seems like it's likely to be ignored. Things like theming always come later if at all, and they're limited in what they can change.

I think this is a place where a different kind of application distribution could potentially help. The Smalltalk model in particular, or something like it since I don't really understand it that well: focus on APIs and give people a lot of control over the frontend.