Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Posts for 2021

07 Apr 2021, 13:07 p.m.

Painstakingly Reminding Myself How To Play

  This is a little bit about how free-range learners in programming assess our own skill levels and choose what to learn next. But it's also a response to my own insecurity, and to the …

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05 Apr 2021, 12:41 p.m.

Paralipsis

I'm in the process of working with a contractor to overhaul my personal and professional websites. Thus, I have been thinking about my brand (oh how I want to put distancing quotation marks around that …

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29 Mar 2021, 10:46 a.m.

Autocorrect Hilarity

A friend found out recently that his spellchecker did not know the word "disempowering" and instead suggested "disemboweling". Spellchecker, I beseech you, in the bowels of Merriam-Webster, think it possible you may be mistaken.

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26 Mar 2021, 16:44 p.m.

Not The First Time We Tried (FSF, GNU, RMS, etc.)

Here's the open letter in which thousands of people and several organizations ask for major changes at the Free Software Foundation and GNU in light of the FSF's recent and extremely frustrating choices. I haven't …

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24 Mar 2021, 16:57 p.m.

A Miscellaneous Reading List

A few days ago I submitted my nomination ballot for the Hugo Awards. In many years it's a bit hard for me to think of five excellent things to nominate in each work category. But …

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22 Mar 2021, 21:09 p.m.

A Spec For A Sandboxed Open Source Project Environment

I'm writing a book on maintaining legacy open source projects to help teach people vital skills. Right now, as far as I know, there's no textbook or course you can work through to learn skills …

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22 Mar 2021, 19:56 p.m.

Bad Startup Idea

You provide a set of songs that people want to sing together but don't have the skill and range to sing. We use machine learning to rearrange them into more singable versions. Pricing: this is …

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22 Mar 2021, 12:09 p.m.

Missing DIY-ish-ness

Alexandra Rowland wrote that "The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on." (further thoughts). And when I think about punk, I think about DIY and imagining and making the structures that need to exist …

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18 Mar 2021, 9:49 a.m.

Podguess -- A Little Guessing Game

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 …

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16 Mar 2021, 20:18 p.m.

MozFest 2021 Followup: Apply for Grants To Fund Open Source Work

This session was in two parts: a fifteen-minute video (a remix of the session I delivered at PyOhio, with five additional minutes of material) a one-hour discussion The additional material in the MozFest video (slides, …

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