I suppose it was ever thus – yes.
The big difference seems to me the ethos – i.e., “This site is all about getting answers . It’s not a discussion forum. There’s no chit-chat.” – and the moderation (whether and how posts are moderated), and the community (what the questions and answers are).
Well done then, I guess.
I think a “system” is specified by its I/O – what input it accepts and what output it produces – and in the case of a web app that specification is more-or-less defined by its UI (plus some “non-functional specifications”).
As a coder I’d hope to work off one or more UI design specifications – those would be my input, those would be my marching orders (plus whatever internal or external APIs or other developers I must interface with).
And as a sole developer, or a project manager for a non-technical boss, I’d either agree on a simple UI – like a wireframe or sketch plus some vanilla styling like Bootstrap – and/or have a UI designer to customize the pixels.
That’s the “UI design”. From that a developer can infer what all the data are.
Something like this, even, is a spec of a sort that a developer could run with (i.e. implement) – I don’t know whether that spec is “accepted”, though – the only answers there are people complaining about the choice of font and colour (which are trivial to change since they’re controlled by CSS).
And I guess someone might want to specify several designs and say the software must support any-and-all of them – to whatever extent the software is designed to support being “customised”.
The “technical” aspect of design – the implementation architecture – is all just about invisible to end-users, therefore nothing that a non-technical boss might have an opinion about or know. Developers might often select a technology stack based on whatever they know already, or based on whatever new shiny they want a chance to experiment with – and people might get into religious issues – like, “Which is important: ‘ACID’ or ‘web-scale’?” – which might be tedious to resolve, or resolved wrongly, unless you can Lock 'em Up Together. Apparently there is an architecture selected now – ASP.NET Core – I don’t know why though, I haven’t seen the definition or discussion and don’t know where to look for that.
Ha.
My instinct is principally to “finish” (define, implement, and deliver) a coding project – something of a killer instinct – I’m not so sure about “participate”.
How should one get in touch with either of those teams, or a project manager?
Are there (or will there be eventually) any “blessed” specifications somewhere for a coder like me to read and from which to dequeue some task to be completed?
Is it a matter of posting “Hi can I help with something?” on ‘Discord’ – then waiting, for somebody who’s willing to chat?
And hopefully your chef or chefs have it all in hand already, yes?