[CONTENT REQUEST] How hard should newbies have to look to unlock what words constitute the IPFS acronym? #2015
Description
After a lifetime working with emerging tech, I've understood that a project says almost as much about its quality and integrity in what is missing from its documentation as does what is included. For instance, in the 80's and 90's, you would never find in Microsoft DOS update documents the explicit statement "DOS ain't done 'till Lotus won't run". But we all knew that an essential feature of that upgrade roll-out would be many hours on the phone with Lotus engineering to work around the deliberate anti-competitive bugs Microsoft implanted in each release in an effort to extinguish that competitor. Each delay in getting those 1-2-3 spreadsheet patches out cost another big chunk from Lotus' user base. (Lotus' ability to survive until IBM bought them out is a testament to the skill and quality of their management and employees, if not so much their legal department's grasp of civil court, and their seeming inability to make anything of the mountains of evidence their engineers dug out of Microsoft code. You'd think that with IBM's profound familiarity with anti-trust law and consent decrees, they could have put together a devastating suit against that Richmond, Wa. company).
Of course, Microsoft always took great pains to gently coax its users through the learning curve. They never ever failed to mention, like a skipping record, that DOS was short hand for "Disk Operating System". I mean, really? You have an introductory document, the first one showing under the Docs' "Basic" heading, called "What is IPFS", and you don't say what its full name is. You don't say what ipfs is. Is this an ongoing insider joke? Subconsciously a bit elitist, perhaps? Sure, we all LOVE acronyms, but their utility is diminished if a shared understanding of what the acronyms are short for is missing. Do you have pride in your project, or what? If you had a marketing department, they'd be beating you over the head and shoulders (figuratively, of course. HR was just one cubicle over) with revisions to the documents, and everyone knew there was a serious demerit badge handed out when a business school grad corrected a technical screw up in engineering.
Consider this content request to be your marketing demerit badge. Wear it proudly.
I remember reading in various places about something called the "Interplanetary File System". Is this that? It might be. Or it might be the "Insiders Preferred File System". Or maybe it is the "Intelligent Professionals Falsification Substrate".
It might all be painstakingly laid out right under my nose, but this is the second time in three years, that I've played newbie to see if I could find it spelled out. Yet, I've put my time in. I'd rather go grab a second coffee and tell the bosses that the project documentation is deficient, than continue to check beyond the obvious places for something that should be first to be spelled out. Literally. "