Some get-togethers turn into dominance displays -- participants see each other as someone to defeat. We often see this pattern in technical spaces, such as conferences, mailing lists, programming classes, and code review. Skud's 2009 …
I just reread Lee Iacocca's autobiography, in which he mentioned the loop apprenticeship he did when he first got to Ford. Fog Creek's SMTP and the vaunted Procter & Gamble apprenticeships are a bit like …
I've been thinking recently about the line "A week in the lab will save you an hour in the library," in the context of how programmers keep reinventing the wheel over and over instead of …
I've been posting to "Cogito, Ergo Sumana" since late 2000. Sometimes I think about the really old, embarrassing entries from college, and I wince. Today I happened across a post celebrating a blogger's ten-year anniversary …
The Wikimedia Foundation, which employs me, is hiring, a lot. We need your help to: write code to try new ways to encourage people to edit Wikipedia (Growth engineer) keep our users' data safe (operations …
I love my spouse. I love the joyous, wondrous expression on programmers' faces when I tell them he wrote Beautiful Soup. I love his published scifi, and his seven-word pulp scifi story ("a scrap of …
Sometimes I forget that I am a person of color and that the United States has Issues with that. Then I remember, say, the Sacramento Bee saying, "The decision of the United States Supreme Court, …
In San Francisco last month, I found out about the bookstore trio of Dog Eared Books, Alley Cat Books, and Badger Books. Immediately I wished for a children's book about the weekly chats of a …
My ha-ha-only-kidding joke: Everyone thinks they're chaotic good when they're actually lawful neutral. What rules do I unthinkingly follow? I don't want to reassess my rules every single time I use them; that's paralyzing. And …
Wikimedia is participating in this year's Google Summer of Code internships and Outreach Program for Women. This week we are seeing a bunch of new folks try to learn how to navigate the world of …
