This week, alumni like me get to spend time at Hacker School. Since I work on MediaWiki-related documentation and I've never programmed in PHP before, I decided to start understanding just enough PHP to be …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
