06 Jun 2022, 14:30 p.m.

My Upstream Talk Tomorrow: Cadence Shear

My 25-minute talk "Cadence shear: Managing rhythm and tempo mismatches in participation" is in 1 day: 2:30-3pm EDT on Tuesday, June 7th, as part of Upstream 2022. Registration is free and the conference is online. …

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25 May 2022, 14:00 p.m.

The Rituals

The Onion posts their "'No Way To Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" piece.Someone links to Jo Walton's poem "Moloch," and someone else to Cheryl Wheeler's song "If It Were Up To …

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24 May 2022, 12:00 p.m.

My Plans for WisCon 2022

I've recently changed my plans and will only attend WisCon virtually this year.Today is the day I finalized my decision of whether to go; I had booked travel and a hotel room, and was running …

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13 May 2022, 16:00 p.m.

Contribution Metrics Are Messy: An Example

I frequently notice folks asking or answering questions like "how many contributors does this open source project have?" or "how much contribution is this project getting?" Here's an example of why those aren't simple questions.ffmpeg …

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10 May 2022, 15:00 p.m.

HTTP Can Do That?!

I realized recently I've never blogged about the best tech talk I've ever given and one of my favorite performances: "HTTP Can Do That?!: A collection of bad ideas" from PyCon US 2016 in Portland, …

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10 May 2022, 6:00 a.m.

Amusing Things

A few things that have made me laugh recently:The bit in an episode of I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats (S2E9) where John Darnielle says "People always ask me to play 'No Children' at …

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06 May 2022, 23:11 p.m.

"How Do I Accommodate This Person?" Ask JAN

A couple years ago, through Ask a Manager comment threads (some links), I learned about the Job Accommodation Network which has a giant organized list of accommodations an employer could make, sorted "by disability, by …

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05 May 2022, 13:00 p.m.

PDFtk, qpdf, And Dealing With Password-Protected PDFs

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 …

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02 May 2022, 16:00 p.m.

"I want to start contributing to open source": My (Current) Advice

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 …

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26 Apr 2022, 20:30 p.m.

Longish Things To Listen To

Sometimes I exercise with friends via videocall, but when I want to exercise by myself, I often listen to stuff. I like having a mix of things to concentrate on and things I can half-listen …

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