I did open source community management for MediaWiki for about three years. At first, in 2011, I was an individual contributor (see my February 2012 post "What Does A Volunteer Development Coordinator Do?"). After several …
My household has donated a few books to the Hacker School library. RESTful Web APIs - easy. I also donated four interrelated books: Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing Women Don't Ask: The High Cost …
The other day, our friendly performance engineer Ori, who loves to teach, whiteboarded Wikimedia's caching layers for me. Varnish, memcached, MariaDB's query cache, the browser's native cache, LocalStorage, and so on. I took notes and …
Four sets of four: Leah Steinberg's Hacker School diary, in illustrated form: 1, 2, 3, 4. "Four Search Requests, Presented In Descending Order Of Politeness." Surprises, failures, jokes, and disorientations. New York, Montreal, San Francisco, …
American Scientist is the good stuff. Accessible prose but not condescending, and covering a variety of biological, mathematical, physical, and social sciences. "Programming Your Quantum Computer", "The Toxicity of Recreational Drugs", and "Empirical Software Engineering" …
I'm noodling around, thinking about vision, perspectives, and leadership. In a 2012 interview with MIT Technology Review (in their compilation Twelve Tomorrows), Neal Stephenson spoke about science fiction's role in innovation (pp. 5-6): ... a …
Last night I was talking with some folks at Subcontinental Drift (open mic for South Asian-ish folks) who are paratechnical but find learning to program frightening or intimidating. It's not their fault; we (technologists and …
It turns out you can go into your init.cfg file and change the usability flag from 0 to 1, and that improves user experience tremendously. I wonder why distributions ship it turned off by default?
On March 25th, I had the honour of addressing the Code4Lib conference as their opening keynote speaker. My topic: "User Experience Is A Social Justice Issue". ....Maybe another way of thinking about it is, …
I stepped off the train at Penn Station last night and emerged into Manhattan again new and gently buoyant and muted. I'd spent the last week at the code4lib conference, helping out with and soaking …
