Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Advice

07 Nov 2023, 23:45 p.m.

Set Contributor Expectations To Reduce Ghosting

Let's say you're a maintainer who's just received a new contribution. A new contributor has submitted a patch/pull request. And the fundamental idea of it is one you like, but the diff itself will require …

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03 Oct 2023, 12:25 p.m.

A Few Tips on Seeking a Lawyer, Psychiatrist or Therapist

Recently I've helped a few folks as they sought professional help from lawyers, or mental health professionals such as psychiatrists or therapists. Here are a few tips; they're more relevant in the United States but …

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21 Aug 2023, 11:35 a.m.

User Support, Equanimity, And Potential Cross-Project Tools and Practices in Open Source

I met David Lord at this year's PyCon, talking about maintainer burnout and how to make projects more resilient. Since then, we've been chatting regularly to help us develop material for our respective writing projects. …

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29 Jun 2023, 12:15 p.m.

On Choosing Work Environments

Someone in a group I'm in just asked others' opinions on working in higher education. I said:In big institutions -- such as higher education and government and companies that have over, say, 300 employees -- …

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16 Jun 2023, 1:10 a.m.

My Current Approach To Reducing My COVID Risk

I follow a few main principles to reduce my risk of catching COVID-19:

  1. Avoiding sharing unfiltered air with people outside my household
  2. Noticing how safe I am and raising precautions accordingly
  3. Focusing on protecting myself over protecting unmasked people (in general)
  4. Spending money

In this post, I detail those principles as well as my specific protocols (masking, ventilation, self-testing, and so on), including links to examples and product vendors.

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09 May 2023, 13:00 p.m.

Maintainer Burnout: PyCon US 2023 Followup

At PyCon US 2023, David Lord facilitated an open space discussion of "maintainer burnout, how to survive it, and maybe how to prevent it." Here are some notes (incorporating his; thanks, David!), my analysis, and …

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13 Apr 2023, 9:30 a.m.

Your First PyCon, But Not Your First Convention

Someone I know just decided to come to this year's PyCon US in person and asked me:It's my first PyCon. Are there any tricks or landmines I should know about? I assume that the standard …

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29 Mar 2023, 11:30 a.m.

Dyeing My Hair

I recently bleached and dyed my hair at home, and I really enjoyed the end result. A few people expressed curiosity, and I will probably want to refer to the process later, so here's a …

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07 Mar 2023, 13:10 p.m.

The Memex Mirage

In case you use Pinboard, heads-up that you might want to hedge your bets. An Ask MetaFilter conversation from the last few months: "Is Pinboard.in (bookmarking site) still supported software?"Also:In December, Lilly Ryan wrote a …

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22 Dec 2022, 15:10 p.m.

Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why

Whisper, from OpenAI, is a new open source tool that "approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition"; "Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into …

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