Roomy & Designing for Communities

With Roomy now in what I would call the "very early beta" stage, I'd like to reflect on the last few months regarding my experience working with the three core folks that develop Roomy: @meri.garden, @zicklag.dev, @erlend.sh.

Even with all of the tough problems that we encountered that occurred during my time as a contributor, it was still an absolute pleasure to be a part of something as incredible as this project; the team took time out of their days to read my responses, and answered any questions I had. I'm also incredibly thankful for their patience with me throughout all of this and helping me to acknowledge my wrongdoings throughout. In the end, I became a better person through it.

So how did it go contributing to an open source project on the AT Protocol? Delightfully wonderful, all things considered. Time for some insight!

Joining Roomy

My initial introduction to Roomy started in early February. Though I can't remember what in particular led to me finding out about the existence of it, my curiosity was peaked immediately and I jumped onto the Discord server to ask a lot of questions. @zicklag.dev was kind enough to entertain any responses. I've attached a snapshot of these initial discussions as an image below.

With all of the questions out of the way, my interest rose pretty significantly and my initial thoughts starting to sway towards "How can I contribute to such a cool project like this?" after learning everything. The following message is a little ironic, considering how I've gotten used to the name.

But uh.. if there's ever still room for a new name, I do still own the domain ramble.im, and I'm still a strong believer that it'd be an amazing name for a platform, especially alongside a "blue ram" mascot. 👀

The first course of action that I took in helping with the design was to improve the sign-in experience, by doing two things: making the input box clearer, and adding more information below the "handle" label to explain what it is. This was an important step in building a better user experience, as now we have a small subtitle to explain to new users how they could log into Roomy without an account (but already having one on another platform).

There are a lot of challenges in building good user experience in an open source project, especially one where it's hard to get a sense of direction sometimes because there are only a few running the show and have to juggle multiple hats at once in order to get their work through the door.

Roomy, even with all of its flaws, is almost certainly in a state of great potential. Since I started contributing to the project, I've made additional contributions to the codebase personally because of the team's kindness and spirit in helping me accomplish pull requests to the project. Here's a few of the merged PRs I managed to get in a few days ago.

The last one, updating the room edit form modal, is that one I'm most proud of; I managed to add a new modal to Roomy's channel edit flow in order to prevent archiving channels from becoming annoying and frustrating (especially for accidental clicks!) which are almost certainly not uncommon.

All of this to say ... I am incredibly excited about the future of community messaging on the AT Protocol—not just for Roomy—as a whole. Colibri.social is incredibly promising, and the integrations & tooling planned for the ecosystem are super interesting!

That's all for now, regarding my thoughts on it all. I certainly can't wait to see what's next. Don't forget to check out the Roomy blog post below sharing details about their "general availability" launch of the new lite app! And below that, I'll even share other blogs you can read surrounding Roomy.