Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

  • On Behavior and Respect

    On Behavior and Respect

    I’ve had an interesting week with WordPress. It’s been bad enough that I have to preface this post with a note.

    I have no plans to quit WordPress at this time.

    Good Faith and History

    This morning, I woke up thinking about a statement I picked up from Wikipedia. Assume good faith. I like that. I try to do it. The concept is simple and direct. Don’t assume everyone’s evil, instead assume they do mean well, but sometimes they may have trouble expressing it properly.

    And while I do believe that most people don’t mean to be evil (there are exceptions…), I think that more people remain concerned about themselves over anything else. And this self-involved nature causes problems like happened recently, with choices certain companies made to self-promote in ways that other people found offensive and harmful.

    So when I think about ‘good faith’ I do it with a look back to the previous actions someone (an individual or a company) has taken. How have they behaved before? Have they constantly shown poor choices? Is this a first? What happened the last time I tried to talk to them about it? Did we have a discussion? Did I get 15 emails in a row, alternately being called names or being begged to give them another chance?

    That means I find it strange to watch people use the concept of ‘Good Faith’ to argue that they don’t look at people’s past actions to judge their current ones.

    I’d like to think that my consistency would be something people would use to judge my actions, but I’ve learned people whom I’d trusted don’t. And yes, that’s sad. It’s depressing to find out people would rather jump to outrage and pointing fingers and blaming me than taking into consideration 10 years of work.

    Respect and Doubt

    Respect is both given and earned. You give people respect for a position, under the assumption they deserve it, and people either live up to that respect and thus earn more, or they don’t. But when you have an unknown person, you start from assuming good faith based on the hope that they have legitimately earned the position.

    Obviously when you know someone, hung out and had dinner, your assumptions are based on more than that. And if someone has a public history you can turn to, you can use that to base your assumptions.

    That’s not what happened to me this week. Instead, I found out people actually assume bad faith, because perhaps my opinions are different than theirs, or because I saw something in a different way. It felt like “Assume good faith, but only if you’re on my side.” And that? That is sad.

    I imagine how different things would have been to say “Hey, y’all. Mika’s been really careful about using her power here for five years. Give her the benefit of the doubt.”

    Instead, people said I was seeing things that weren’t there. I was playing a victim. It was all in my head. There’s a word for that: gaslighting. God help you if you call them out on it.

    Damage and Care

    It’s in a week like this where I totally understand why so many people have been quitting WordPress. People have worked hard to do good for a community, without any expectations of compensation, but they find out their opinions are dismissed and their word discarded or minimized. They feel disrespected, and it’s worse when they feel made fun of by the community they’re trying to help.

    Some of them have chosen to walk away from WordPress, and I fully support that choice. To do anything less would be like telling someone that the beatings will stop once morale improves. It would be cruel and unkind to dismiss their feelings, and it would mean I’m not listening to them and have no empathy for them.

    Also I’d have to be blind not to see it, because it happens to me all the time. This week? People I thought I knew assumed the worst in me. They didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt and, when I asked what I’d done to deserve that, they said I’d done nothing. They said they were just being fair and hearing all sides.

    In other words all the work I’d done, being consistent and fair, acting carefully and listening to everyone was pointless. In the end, they were just going to dismiss all of that and jump on the bandwagon with everyone else.

    And it was more than one person I’ve know for about a decade who did it.

    For a while I wondered “Did I really mess up here?” And then I asked myself if I’m told I did nothing to be not-trusted, but I was going to be anyway, was there a possible positive outcome here?

    Empathy and Power

    It really boils down to empathy. If someone says “Hey, this hurt me.” and your reply is “Yeah, I don’t see that” then you’re dismissing what they said. And it’s not just because I get treated badly that I have empathy, it’s because my parents, my family taught me to have empathy and care about the strangers as much as I cared about myself. We don’t live in isolation, we live in a community.

    You can see why I call myself a Socialist, right? I care not just about the people I know, but the people I don’t know. I think about the impact my choices have beyond me, and given the amount of power I wield, that has a lot more weight than you might think.

    Oh yes, I have an insane amount of power, and it scares the hell out of me. I could destroy a company with a click. I could insta-ban people for wrongs. I could close plugins for every single security and guideline mistake. I could publicize exactly what specific people did to get permanently banned. Worse, I could spread fear and doubt in the entirety of WordPress, just by closing a plugin.

    I don’t. I handle the majority of that quietly, on the books but privately, because I assume good faith in everyone, even people who make massive mistakes. And because I consider the negative impact to the community in general before I take an action.

    How much trust do I erode in WordPress as a whole with what I do or say? How much damage do I cause? How many people do I hurt? How many people will this person hurt if I permit them to carry on as they have been? Will their uncensured actions damage the reputation of WordPress? Will the community forgive a mistake?

    That’s what I think about, every single day, before I approve, reject, close, or open any plugin.

    Alone and Together

    If you look at some of the people who’ve left the WordPress Community recently, you’ll see a trend. They feel alone. They feel like they’ve been tasked with ever increasing, insurmountable, chores, and they have no support or backup.

    I feel that way too. It took months to be taken seriously about a problem, to the point that serious action was taken. Months, in which I questioned myself. Was I seeing something that wasn’t there? Was my value so little that I’m not worth taking the time to address this problem?

    To put it in perspective for you, someone told me that my father’s death was my fault for banning them for abusive behavior.

    When you look at it, you’d wonder how I could ever doubt myself. Well, that’s what happens when people don’t step up and ask how they can help. And certainly I could have been more vocal about it, but at the same time, it illustrates the invisibility problem in our community. People are hurt all the time, and no one is looking out for them.

    Should I have to scream that someone is hurting me for it to be seen? There’s no oversight in all things, but there’s also no clear way to ask for help. How much worse would this have been if I didn’t have support from people in the community, people in places who could (and did) help me?

    What about everyone else?

    Unending and Critical

    Now look back at Slacks and Blogs and Twitter. You know which ones I mean. Read what people are saying and assuming, and ask yourself “Is this making a welcoming environment?”

    Far too many of us have used our critiques as excuses, without caring for the damage they cause. Dismissing people’s pain. Not offering honest and sincere apologies. We hide behind the veneer of “I’m just passionate” or “I’m being critical.” And instead of discussing the idea, we sling ‘understandings’ like accusations, and we cut at people for disagreeing. We assume the worst and treat people shamefully.

    And worst of all? Our comrades allow this to happen in their backyards. They won’t remove a homophobic ‘joke’ comment because clearly it’s not meant sincerely. They will allow someone to be called a powerless puppet. They give space for hateful comments that barely even have a veneer of merit.

    We’ve stopped encouraging meaningful discourse and regressed into screaming across the aisle that the other person is wrong. We believe our way is the only valid way, and we will tear people down, all the while claiming we’re doing it for the greater good.

    And yet people can look at all that and not see the pitchforks and tiki torches.

    Comments are Disabled

    There’s a reason I disabled comments and mute and block people on twitter with ruthless abandon. It’s not that I don’t want to hear different voices, it’s that it’s stressful to be attacked all the time. It makes a person physically ill. Certainly it’s made me that on more than one occasion.

    I don’t leave comments open, I don’t engage with certain community news sources, I left many Slack groups and I don’t offer comments when asked very often. You see, I can either do good work for the community, do my best and keep things safe, secure, and as fair as a human can, or I can wade through toxicity.

    I decided to do good work.

    I would like to think that a decade of it would allow any perceived missteps of mine to be taken with a grain of salt and a sip of trust. I will still believe in the inherent goodness of people, and their ability to make colossal mistakes. I will still accept an appology when sincerely given.

    But I will not forget and I may not forgive.

    Then again, forgiveness should never be the point of your apology.

  • Spam Your Blacklist

    Spam Your Blacklist

    As mentioned when I began my hiatus, there would be the occasional code post. Here’s one that is born from how annoying someone is.

    The Situation

    I have a serial harasser. He’s a troll and a semi-stalker who doesn’t understand the meaning of “No.” I’ve blocked him on social media, his emails are blackholes, and as I don’t have contact forms on my sites, nor do I have open comment forms at the moment, it’s a non-issue here.

    However, I do have another site which he found and decided to use my contact form to spam me and my co-admin with 10+ emails. When I found out, I blocked his IP address. He was on mobile, though, so I knew this would only last as long as he was on his phone. I needed a better solution.

    This is not a rare problem. Especially not for women online. One of the many ways in which men drive women offline is by upping the emotional labor needed to be online. That is, they attack us with message after message, generally in the guise of being ‘a nice guy,’ or ‘just trying to have an open conversation.’ But the reality is that they want to wear you down and get you to do what they want.

    It’s exhausting. If you’ve ever gone car shopping and had the dealer call you over and over with the hard sell, it’s like that.

    The Paradox

    Contact Forms are meant to be a way for people to contact you, outside of the comments on your site. That being so, they really do need to exist outside the confines of the comments, which means your comment moderation list is a bit inappropriate. You want people who are having comment problems to get a hold of you.

    At the same time, if you’ve blackholed someone, you don’t. You don’t want them to bother you at all, as reading their messages, even though you’re deleting them, is draining. So you want to be able to block them.

    Here’s the problem: most contact forms don’t let you do this out of the box.

    Yeah, think on that for a moment.

    Here are the top four contact form plugins:

    I use Jetpack, and while I may be annoyed I’m also a developer. So I did made an answer.

    The Caution

    This will not block everyone. If your harasser changes emails a lot, you’re out of luck. And this is the ‘excuse’ I see a lot of the time. Why bother if they’re going to change emails? The answer is obvious. If I can inconvenience them enough, and make it clear I don’t care, they’ll go away.

    Also if you do this right, they never know they’ve been blacklisted, so they think they’re getting to you and you’re sipping a damn mai tai.

    The Solution

    In March 2014, I opened a ticket asking for a way to blacklist people. They have made zero forward momentum on this in the 4.5 years since. So this little red hen is doing it herself.

    By using the built in filter for spam (which Akismet uses), this code checks if someone’s on the comment blacklist by IP or email, and if so, flags the message as spam. You don’t get an email. You do still get the message in your spam, which is not a great fix. I’d rather it just get dumped into trash, but there’s no filter I can find for that.

    Still. This works, and it shut the guy up.

    add_filter( 'jetpack_contact_form_is_spam', 'jetpack_spammers', 11, 2 );

function jetpack_spammers( $is_spam, $form ) {
	if ( $is_spam ) {
		return $is_spam;
	}

	if ( wp_blacklist_check( $form['comment_author'], $form['comment_author_email'], $form['comment_author_url'], $form['comment_content'], $form['user_ip'], $form['user_agent'] ) ) {
		return true;
	}

	return false;
}

    But. That only helps what’s on the blacklist. And the blacklist has a couple drawbacks. First of all, while it absolutely does handle multiple words (so I can block ‘milady mika’ if I want), it’s a little more complex if you wanted to block someone using gmail and a plus sign in the email address. So if you want to block example+spammer@gmail.comthen you either have to add that in literally or you get creative. I went creative.

    add_filter( 'jetpack_contact_form_is_spam', 'jetpack_harassment', 11, 2 );

function jetpack_harassment( $is_spam, $form ) {
	// Bail early if already spam
	if ( $is_spam ) {
		return $is_spam;
	}
	$badlist   = array();
	$blacklist = explode( "\n", get_option( 'blacklist_keys' ) );

	// Check the list for valid emails. Add the email _USERNAME_ to the list
	foreach ( $blacklist as $spammer ) {
		if ( is_email( $spammer ) ) {
			$emailparts = explode( '@', $spammer );
			$username   = $emailparts[0];
			$badlist[]  = $username;
		}
	}

	// Check if the comment author name matches an email we've banned
	// You'd think we didn't have to do this but ...
	if ( in_array( $form['comment_author'], $badlist ) ) {
		return true;
	}

	// Check if the email username is one of the bad ones
	// This will allow spammer@example.com AND spammer+foobar@example.com to get caught
	foreach ( $badlist as $bad_person ) {
		if ( preg_match( '/' . $bad_person . '/', $form['comment_author_email'] ) ) {
			return true;
		}
	}

	return false;
}

    My original take was hardcoded in, but this way is more elegant and covers the majority of the ways ‘nice’ people try to get around blocks. Now, if you’ve blocked spammer@example.com and someone submits a form with spammer+avoid@example.com this will catch them. It has a higher chance of catching ‘innocents’ (like innocent@spammer.com) however considering I’m looking for something like rosbeitam@example.com I’m reasonably confident in this for my personal application.

    The Take Away

    If you make a contact form, you damn well better make a way for users to block people from the back end, without having to code it.

    Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.

  • Hiatus: Irregular Updates

    Hiatus: Irregular Updates

    This will not be the final post on this site, however after six years of regular, two to three times a week posting, I am putting a pin in the promise of two posts (minimum) a week.

    The reality is that I’m just too busy now with writing to write.

    You can pause for laughter there.

    I’m busy with another site, and writing and the various work that it entails. Shockingly to me, I’ve found I’d rather work on it than this. For a long time, I was super happy to do both, but the reality now is that I’m not.

    Of course if something comes up in my regular work that I can share, I will, or if I find a wild bug or a cool workaround. But I don’t actually have the time to dedicate to that amount of blogging here.

    And so, at 1035 posts, I thank you all for reading. This blog absolutely changed my life.

  • Monitored Automation

    Monitored Automation

    One of the things I touched on in my talk at WordCamp NYC in September was the fact that automation has it’s flaws. The problems we face with automated systems flagging LGBTQ videos as ‘restricted’ or trending horrific topics or promulgating fake news is all because of automation. We did this to ourselves.

    Computers Share Our Biases

    Humans have biases, which color the ways in which we develop code. If we feel no one should be able to use a lower case P in WordPress (because that’s it’s name) then we can use our biases to programatically force that. Right or wrong, we are biased in many other ways.

    The bias of robots is limited to what we’ve taught the robot. There’s no such thing as a true AI yet. Yes, I know European Parliament has declared robots to be ‘electronic persons’ and therefore responsible for their actions. In the case of automated reviews, the robot lacks the ability to detect nuance. It lacks ethics and morals. It cannot make a judgment of what is worth more than something else.

    The flip side to this is that humans do what we’re told to do too. Sort of. If I tell you to download a file, review the code for security and sanity, but not make a moral judgement on it’s use, you will and you won’t. Oh sure, you understand it’s not your job, or responsibility, so you’ll try not to. We don’t ask the TSA to make a value judgement on what’s in our luggage, we ask them to determine if it’s allowed or not.

    Biases Drive Design

    Computers, even the most advanced, make decisions based on how we program them. If we tell them “The word Nazi is bad” then anything with that term that is submitted will be rejected. Even a tool by, say, the Holocaust Museum, talking about how their skill provides trivia about the Nazis’ rise to power.

    The reason a computer has bias is because we, the people who program the computers, have bias. We are capable of discussing the paradox of tolerance and, in many cases, of coming to an agreement as to what should and should not be permitted. It’s easy to say that guns are illegal on airplanes. It’s not easy to say that being mean will get you kicked off a plane, because that’s subjective.

    Back to the TSA. If you brought a pair of fuzzy handcuffs in your carry on, which is legal as of the time I wrote this, you would be permitted to do so, but someone would comment. You may even end up having a very public conversation about your private life. And yes, that TSA agent is totally making a value judgement about you.

    Who Watches the WatchMon?

    The answer, the solution to these problems, is difficult. On the one hand, a computer won’t judge you for the fuzzy handcuffs. On the other, it may also decide you’re a criminal for having them in your luggage. A human would understand the purpose of a skill that talks about Nazis not being hate speech, but they also may judge you for having some Nazi swag in your bag for your demonstration class.

    Curiously the solution comes with a blend of automation and humanity. There are some things that should be auto-rejected. If you have a rule based on a clear technical limitation, then a computer should be relied on to process those. Except in practice, this is not the case. Instead, we need a human to check, approve or not, and move on to the next possibility. That’s right, the solution to the automation problem is human monitoring.

    Human Bias Isn’t Solveable

    We can’t stop people from being biased.

    We can meet regularly to discuss the situation, but something needs to go over all the approvals and rejections to see what people are actually doing. So then we have automation monitor the human in reverse. A computer monitors and makes its calls “It looks like X is trending.” A human checks the trends and, if they notice something abnormal (like Betty White trending on a Tuesday afternoon), then can check if she’s done something.

    If a human manually removes Betty White from trending every time is shows up, a computer can flag that for their supervisor to ask why the hate for The Golden Girls. But this means someone has to sit down and talk about removing one’s personal biases from work, and I promise you, it’s harder than it looks.

    Automate But Verify

    The ultimate answer? If you’re not monitoring and verifying your automation, you’re doing it wrong. Much like we say ‘test your backups,’ you have to test everything you task a computer to automagically do.

  • Being Aware about Safe Spaces and Self Care

    Being Aware about Safe Spaces and Self Care

    One of the things people complain about is that I will walk away from a conversation that’s going nowhere. This extends to my worklife, and of course my WordPress work. Related to this, I will also choose to not engage with argumentative demands like “Why did you do X?” on places like Twitter and Facebook.

    This is often considered to be cowardly, an admission of wrongdoing, avoidance, or proof I’m not “up” for the job. Sometimes people jump into the special snowflake argument (that is: I am one) or that I’m too sensitive and need a safe space.

    Okay, let me explain why I don’t defend myself, or even generally reply to people who demand explanations.

    Social Media is Unsafe

    I like social media. I like reading thoughts and replying, expressing my own short form feelings, and so on.

    But by its open nature, social media is incredibly dangerous. Anyone can talk to anyone, and if we’ve learned anything from recent days, there are a lot of naive people out there who fall prey to any con man who walks up and tells them it’s not their fault their life sucks.

    It also lends itself to a mob. And mobs are the most dangerous sorts of people. They’ve fallen in truck with a group and they believe everything they’re told. Worse. They are regularly aggressive when they face adversity, and they take justice upon themselves. This means, should you ever happen to upset one of them, you will end up with a mob on your doorstep. Or your DMs.

    A Place For Everything

    Recently, a plugin developer made what should have been an innocuous question. Why was a post moderated. This is the sort of question I get a lot, and in general I press mute and ignore it, because if you want to ask me a question about plugins, there’s an email address you already have. Press reply. And if you want to ask about forums stuff, there’s a channel on Slack.

    The problem here was in the hours leading up to this, he’d also spoken with people about another plugin. This plugin happens to be contentious for many reasons, including overmoderation of bad reviews. Someone decided that one and one meant four, and I was the fault of the reviews being removed.

    I think that if you have questions about a team, you logically ask the team. Or the team management. When you ask someone whom you presume to be the point person on Twitter, you run a risk of a public misfire. You also run a risk of signaling to the mob who their new target is. Which is what accidentally happened that day.

    Angry People are Stressful

    If you’ve ever tried to reason with someone who’s angry, you’ve probably reached a point where you thought it was better to bash your head in than try to explain facts. When you get a mob, it’s even worse. The people start out super angry, they refuse to accept any viewpoint but their own, and they make you angry too. This begins a vicious cycle where you overreact, they get angrier, you get angrier, and bad decisions are made.

    It goes without saying, I’m not exempt from this. I make bad decisions when under anger and stress, same as pretty much everyone. While I strive not to, this is nearly impossible, and that is when I will disengage. Because I can tell I’m not going to be reasonable, and that would be harmful.

    But what changes when you’re the end stop of a team? When you’re the rep and you have no choice but to make the decisions and the hard calls and continue to try? Well, you draw a line about where you will have those conversations. And you draw a line about with whom. Like saying “I won’t do this over Twitter.”

    Say No, Even When You Feel Bad

    The main reason I won’t have a conversation about why decisions are made on Twitter is that there is no accountability for actions.

    Anyone can make an anonymous account and troll people, telling them off for perceived slights. But to take your regular, daily use account and step up to ask a question, in the official location for those discussions, takes courage. More important, it takes a quality of human that will accept responsibility for their actions.

    Most of the time. The odds are at least higher that people will be willing to discuss when they come into a discussion room. Obviously not always, and unlike Twitter I can’t mute or block people who are incapable of accepting ‘no’ as a valid answer.

    Because you see, the main reason I don’t want to have the conversation on Twitter is that I worry you’re going to out yourself. That you will embarrass yourself when I say that leaving a review on the moderators in a plugin review is not appropriate. Or if I explain “You made multiple accounts to leave 5 star reviews on your own plugins.” Or worse, when I have to point out that “You called the moderators Nazi c***s.”

    None of those are made up.

    Emotional Labour

    There’s one more thing.

    When someone walks up to me and demands I explain myself to them, they place a burden on me. Literally they ask me to defend my actions. While the word “explain” is in there, it’s not what they mean. What they mean is for me to justify my actions and choices.

    Usually when I attempt to explain the situation, or if I suggest the one they’re comparing to isn’t the same at all, I get called defensive. Or I’m trying to hide the point.  And I’m expected to do it with a smile. If I call someone out on their inability to reason, I’m a bitch and making excuses. If I’m polite and respectful, I’m hiding something.

    Simply put, if I can’t have a civil, reasonable, conversation with them about it, I’m not going to waste my time. No matter what, they’ve made up their minds going in.

    Now, I will note that after some time doing this, you can tell who is going to be a stubborn jackass and who is not after about two passes. I can tell, on Twitter, from their previous tweets. That’s why I’m quick to mute and block. It’s not to silence them, it’s to sufficiently ignore them and not spend energy on someone who begins a conversation from a place of disrespect.

    None Of This Changed Your Opinions of Me

    If you’re reading this, you’re probably a regular who knows you’re getting an opinionated, open minded, person who looks as intently at herself as she does everything else. In order to be truly honest, I have to be honest about myself, who and what I am, and what I say. 

    The other person who’s reading this probably came from a link someone gave you, following a discussion about my flaws. Let’s be honest, I’m a big fat target for those posts on Twitter, Facebook, and other various blog sites around the planet.

    You both probably got here and thought “Yep, she’s exactly what I thought.”

    Funny how that works.

    I’ll leave you with this relevant article about why YouTube stars are heading for burnout:

    Lees began to feel a knock-on effect on his health. “Human brains really aren’t designed to be interacting with hundreds of people every day,” he says. “When you’ve got thousands of people giving you direct feedback on your work, you really get the sense that something in your mind just snaps. We just aren’t built to handle empathy and sympathy on that scale.” Lees developed a thyroid problem, and began to experience more frequent and persistent stretches of depression. “What started out as being the most fun job imaginable quickly slid into something that felt deeply bleak and lonely,” he says.

    The Guardian 


  • ES5, ESNext, and a Headache

    ES5, ESNext, and a Headache

    You may have noticed, reading the Gutenberg documentation, that there are two ways to add new blocks. There’s ES5 and ESNext. The two code bases are similar, but they certainly can confuse new developers. And while it’s possible to migrate from one to the other, that too can be a bit of a headache.

    Consistently naming versions? HAH!

    Providing a consistent naming pattern is important for people to be able to understand what version of a software they’re using, and what’s next. Whatever you pick, when you decide how to go. you’re pretty much stuck with it forever. There are exceptions, but even Apple and Microsoft had semi-logical explanations for their names. I can’t really justify Windows ME to anyone, though.

    In Open Source land, people love to complain that WordPress itself doesn’t use semantic versioning (aka SemVer). That is, a jump from 4.2 to 4.3 is a major release, where as if it were SemVer, that would be a minor change.

    SemVer uses the concept of MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH with regards to numbers, which means you increment:

    1. MAJOR – when you make incompatible API changes,
    2. MINOR – when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner
    3. PATCH – when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes

    WordPress does MAJOR.MAJOR.MINOR-OR-PATCH which really confuses a lot of people, and I understand that.

    Of course, then you look at the history of JavaScript and you cry a little.

    JavaScript isn’t Java, and neither are coffee.

    We have to go back a while here. In 1995, Netscape Navigator was releasing a new coding language called LiveScript. In 1996 they renamed it to JavaScript, presumably to capitalize on the whole ‘Java’ craze. I actually took some Java classes back in those days. Anyway, Netscape tossed the deal over to ECMA International for some standardization, and got us ECMAScript.

    ECMAScript is the language, Javascript is the most popular implementation of the language. Its like HTML and XHTML, and when you get down to brass tacks, most people don’t care. They use the terms interchangeably. And that’s okay.

    From 1996 to around 2010, nothing changed. Javascript trucked along doing what it did, and ECMAScript didn’t change much at all. There was ECMAScript2 and ECMAScript3, but after that, we had a decade of nothing. The astute reader now has gone “ECMAScript… ECMA Script. ES?” And they would be correct.

    What is ESNext?

    ECMAScript 5 (aka ES5) came out in 2009, but really it didn’t get picked up until 2012. This is because of our old nemesis, Internet Explorer. In the last 6 years, developers have pretty much stuck to ES5, since it works in all modern browsers. We have ES6, also known as ES2015, but not every browser supports it yet. Which is why we have ESNext.

    To put it simply, ESNext (or ES.Next) is the future version of ECMAScript which is yet to be released. If you hear ES7 or ES2016, that’s actually the same thing. The naming system is a little janky and confusing, if you hadn’t already noticed.

    And this is why you’ll hear it called ESNext in WordPress. It encompasses ES6/ES2015, ES7/ES2016, and whatever comes next. Aaaaaah you see? 

    ES4 was abandoned by the way.

    It’s Not Dangerous.

    While not all browsers support ESNext, there’s good news for WordPress. It doesn’t matter because we transpile (I’ll get there in a second). For WordPress and Gutenberg, the primary difference is going to be in the ‘style’ of code and the build process. The break down is as follows:

    • ES5 is more obscure to write, but runs immediately
    • ESNext is more clean to write, but requires post compilation (transpilation) to run Gutenberg

    That probably didn’t help. Okay, how about this. There a way to write CSS (called SASS) which lets you add programatic features to your CSS. ES5 and ESNext are the same way. You totally can write ESNext without compiling, but not yet for Gutenberg. This is kind of the same thing, except when we transpile ESNext, we’re converting it to ES5.

    Now, we use ES5 in the end for a couple reasons, but primarily it’s because Gutenberg uses React, and React JSX (which translates Javascript to XHTML). That requires us to transpile back to ES5 in order to be used by all browsers. For now.

    Browsers update a lot faster than they did when we were trying to get rid of IE5. Still, Internet Explorer is around and will be for a while at financial institutions, so don’t get super excited yet.

    Where does this leave us?

    When you go to write your first Gutenblocks, I recommend ES5 for the simple ones and ESNext for the complex ones. ESNext is more semantic, in that it’s laid out in a more human readable way. ES5 is faster to edit and test.