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 …
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 …
