Danny O'Brien mentioned this concept and tried it out at a conference several months ago. So Leonard and I playtested it at Backup Thanksgiving (photos) at our apartment, with several of our friends. One of …
At least one friend of mine was generally unsure how one finds and works with a lawyer to get help with, say, government paperwork, or employment contract review. The "How to get a lawyer" entry …
Left-justify your name and web address and email address -- no title necessary -- in a legible font. Get the perforated cardstock and do it on a home printer, or get a local copy shop …
On Sunday I wrote my first Twitter bot, with a bit of help from Leonard. (A Hacker School colleague inferred, understandably, that Leonard and I just write Twitter bots on the weekend, to relax.) Then …
If you were designing an interactive experience where people got to ask an expert questions about what she'd just taught them, what would you aim to achieve? How would you structure it? I imagine you …
By now dozens of women have stepped into open source via Outreach Program for Women, a paid internship program administered by the GNOME Foundation. I recently asked several of them whether they had been able …
Back when I worked at the Wikimedia Foundation, I used the Ada Initiative's anti-harassment policy as a template and turned it into the Friendly Space Policy covering tech events run by WMF. I offer you …
My third week of my 2014 Hacker School batch, I decided to take on a project that I'd originally thought about doing a year before, during my first go at HS. Between April 2005 and …
I'm interested in piloting a peer code review group, structured like a writer's group. So next month I'm starting one out in New York City, starting with Hacker School alumni and participants, and I figured …
I am starting to hack on Mailman, per my plan for early 2015 -- and along the way, I'm also learning how to use Launchpad and Bazaar. Mailman To quote maintainer Barry Warsaw's architectural overview, …
I have been to WisCon three times (2009, 2010, 2011) and I am going again this year, yay! If you enjoy my writing, you might like WisCon, and -- especially if you've never tried it …
Yesterday I spent an hour teaching a woman whose nonprofit wants improvements to their current Drupal setup, especially around content approval workflow and localization. She wanted to understand more about how Drupal works so that …
I am glad I read Hackster: The Revolution Begins..., a technothriller by Sankalp Kohli and Paritosh Yadav taking place in modern-day India. It's plotty and passionate and tense, and it's about Indians to whom India …
Someone in one of my communities was wondering whether we ought to build a new automated tool to give little tasks to newcomers and thus help them turn into future maintainers. I have edited my …
In February, while coworking at the Open Internet Tools Project, I got to talking with Gus Andrews about face-to-face tech events. Specifically, when distributed people who make software together have a chance to get together …
This year I submitted talks to several tech conferences and got a higher acceptance rate than I had been used to. For instance, this year I will speak for the first time at OSCON and …
Recently, a couple of programmers asked me for advice on starting and running a new open source project. So, here are some thoughts, assuming you're already a programmer, you haven't led a team before, and …
Leonard and I love seeing movies at the Museum of the Moving Image. Every few months we look at the calendar of upcoming films and decide what we'd possibly like to see together, and put …
You help run an open source software community, and you've successfully signalled that you're open to new contributors, including people who aren't professional software engineers. And you've already got an easy developer setup process and …
Have you ever wanted to reply to a mailing list post that wasn't in your inbox? I had that problem yesterday; here's how I fixed it. Context: I'm the project manager for Warehouse, the software …
Someone in my network wanted guidance in building a professional (often software-related) writing portfolio for the first time -- they want to give other people a portfolio of work they've already done, so that those …
Google Summer of Code just announced the 207 mentoring organizations (open source projects seeking participants) for this year's round, and Outreachy's 9 mentoring orgs also announced open internship projects. This blog post is directed at …
In May, I chaired "The Art of Python", a festival of arts about programming that took place at PyCon North America. People presented short plays, monologues, songs, and a video remix that explored how it …
Every year, many developers of Python (the language itself, not just stuff written in Python) get together for a sprint. This year it will probably be virtual. How should that work? I offered to share …
"Imaginary Book Club" is an improv-type session that's fun to run at a scifi/fantasy convention. It's a panel where each participant "reviews" a book that does not exist, and the other people riff on that. …
I'm talking in this post about wikis, political clubs, open source projects, fanvidding exchanges -- any groups where people try to work together and are open to the public. "No, what's that?" Some people joining …
I did some volunteer work earlier this year, helping rejuvenate pipenv (a command-line tool that some people use to help handle Python packages they make and use). Here's what I did, how long it took, …
My mental and physical health are much better if I can exercise, to the point of getting sweaty, for at least 20 minutes every day. The forms of exercise I most enjoy (hiking, biking for …
On Saturday night I received my first vaccination dose against COVID-19. I've had minimal side effects and the appointment went very smoothly. Here's a longish post about eligibility in New York, booking the appointment, and …
I came up with this game and Leonard and I have been enjoying it the last few days, so here it is for you. I just came up with the name "podguess" which does not …
This is the textual version of my June 7 2021 online talk at Upstream Live: "Sidestepping the PR Bottleneck: Four Non-Dev Ways To Support Your Upstreams", 23 minutes. Video is now up. Intro Hi, I’m …
The global supply chain is dealing with a lot of shortages and delays, and there's no sign it's going to get better anytime soon. (Some explanations: thread, thread, NYT piece.) People are figuring out how …
Want to become a better programmer? Join the Recurse Center! In the virtual PyCon hallway track, a newcomer to the industry said he'd like to get into contributing to open source, and asked for my …
I slice, dice, and transform documents often enough that I rely frequently on pandoc and pdftk. I often use pandoc to turn Markdown, HTML, wiki syntax, reStructuredText, etc. into each other or into LibreOffice, MS …
Whisper, from OpenAI, is a new open source tool that "approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition"; "Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into …
I follow a few main principles to reduce my risk of catching COVID-19:
In this post, I detail those principles as well as my specific protocols (masking, ventilation, self-testing, and so on), including links to examples and product vendors.
I recently bleached and dyed my hair at home, and I really enjoyed the end result. A few people expressed curiosity, and I will probably want to refer to the process later, so here's a …
Someone I know just decided to come to this year's PyCon US in person and asked me:It's my first PyCon. Are there any tricks or landmines I should know about? I assume that the standard …