Blog

End-of-year retrospectives are good for our soul. And so is communication. Our New Year’s resolution is to share more with you, and to create more ways for you to share back.

Code for Recovery is made up of people like you who are in recovery and performing service work in support of our broader fellowships. While coding might seem like magic, it is really the hard and selfless work of volunteer developers who regularly meet, chat and code. This collaborative process results in the products districts, service offices and areas around the world use daily to provide meeting information to the still sick and suffering. None of this would be possible without the spirit of service.

Twelve Step Meeting List (TSML) has supported any 12-step-based recovery program holding regular fellowship meetings from the beginning. Today Code for Recovery reflects this diversity with active community participation from AA, Al-Anon, CA, and NA (and probably others; they’re anonymous after all). We’re also international! We are grateful for the different perspectives that come from the various groups and countries. If you are a developer interested in being a part of our community, please reach out to us.

The past twelve months have been productive for Code for Recovery, albeit perhaps not as much so as they could have been. Honesty is one of our watch words. Rigorous honesty, right? So here we go:

Our number of members in Code for Recovery grew, but the active regular participants remained flat, or perhaps even declined.  

To remain healthy, Code for Recovery needs rotations to share in the maintenance of existing applications, adoption of new technologies, and support of users. People get burned out or bored with the same routine, and we believe in the shared responsibility that comes from more people actively participating. Our goal is more of this and less of this. 

At the 2021 National AA Technology Workshop (NAATW) we announced that we would set up a website, achieve 501c3 status for Code for Recovery, accept contributions, …

We accomplished these three goals. Yay! There are improvements to be made for the website, for sure. We’ll continue to strive to make it the entry point for our organization and products.

… implement a new geocoding gateway…

This goal was not met. We have a beta service but more work is needed before it is ready to roll out for use by TSML or other products. Progress, not perfection, and we’ll continue to work on this. This is an area where volunteers who are more into devops could be of important service.

… and adopt a more service-based architecture.

We’ll give ourselves a partial here. We replaced the internal TSML PDF generator with a service, and development of the Google Sheets service for managing meeting information has matured. TSML UI (our ReactJS-based meeting finder) has been adopted on roughly 50 websites and has been translated into Spanish, French and Japanese.You can use it too! It is a selectable option for TSML (navigate to the Settings tab, and select TSML UI under the User Interface Display dropdown). We recommend turning it on.

Feedback is critical to keeping meeting data accurate. Our Enhanced Feedback Plugin, provided as an add-on service to TSML, makes it easy for end users to request or update meeting changes. Access it thought the WordPress plugin page on your site.

TSML Discussions for user Q&A, Ideas and general discussions.

We adopted the GitHub Discussion feature for TSML about 18 months ago for questions, suspected bugs/issues and new feature requests. If you’re looking for help, search first using some keywords as the most common issues have often been addressed. If you have indeed discovered a new bug, one of the developers will turn it into an Issue for our internal tracking. Ditto for new features agreed upon by the team.

Let’s highlight some of the TSML-specific features over the past year or so. 

• Added change detection with meeting feeds. As a workaround to trying to automate a kludgy process for sharing meeting data between two sites (i.e, district data feeding into an area site), one of our members wrote a feature that notifies the web admin when meeting data changes. This prompts them to refresh the meeting feed from the source. Please see our demos for more details.
• Revamped Import & Settings Page. Let’s face it, it had got a bit busy as we tried to add important administrator options. So, we broke it up and made it neater. More changes may come soon.
• Improved TSML UI integration. We expect the aforementioned TSML UI front end to eventually replace the current meeting finder in TSML, and the drop down option makes it easier for admins to test it on their site. As this feature matured and we got your feedback, multiple behind-the-scenes adjustments were made.
• Added requested online conference provider options. 
• Fixed numerous moderate and minor bugs.

Whew! This seems like quite a bit bigger update than we first thought. In looking at our plugin page on WordPress.org, we surpassed 800 active installations with over 91% of those using the most recent 3.14 series.

Two things will help keep Code for Recovery healthy and capable of providing software so helpful for newcomers. As discussed above: volunteer active coders to maintain and improve our services. We have several ideas in search of talented and motivated people to refine, develop and implement. ‘Nuff said.

Second, our services today exist because the developers have covered the financial costs. This is not good. First, we should hold resources under the non-profit umbrella so that if something happens to one of us, the community continues to have control. Second, it flies in the face of the 7th Tradition. So, if you’re willing and able, please consider making a contribution to help cover expenses. 

We’re tremendously grateful for our recovery programs, and the opportunity to be of service to you.

In fellowship and service,

The Code for Recovery Team