02 May 2014, 10:41 a.m.

What Will Success Feel Like To You?

Disequilibrium -- surprises, failures, jokes, and disorientations -- will always happen, and we learn from it. We learn about the world, and we learn about ourselves. I first felt like a New Yorker when I …

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01 May 2014, 10:11 a.m.

Better Q&A Sessions

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 …

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27 Apr 2014, 9:07 a.m.

Cool Open Source Bridge Proposals

I have submitted a couple of talks to Open Source Bridge 2014: "The Outreach Program for Women: what works & what's next", with Liz Henry, and "A Few Python Tips", a solo effort and the …

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23 Apr 2014, 16:54 p.m.

A Change Of Roles

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 …

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22 Apr 2014, 22:12 p.m.

Necessary Dreams - Content and Cover

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 …

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21 Apr 2014, 22:20 p.m.

It's Nice To Have Some Things Cached

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 …

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18 Apr 2014, 7:30 a.m.

Four Quartets

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, …

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09 Apr 2014, 0:29 a.m.

Some Short Reading

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" …

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06 Apr 2014, 15:18 p.m.

Points of View

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 …

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06 Apr 2014, 14:51 p.m.

Yes, It Sucks And Is Not Your Fault

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 …

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