Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Open Source and Free Culture

22 Apr 2019, 16:41 p.m.

Rabbit Hole Interview(s)

Recently, the Rabbit Hole developers' podcast interviewed me; we discussed open source sustainability, maintainership, sensationalism among bards who sang the Odyssey, how PyPI is like Wikipedia, and what we think is paranoid. The interview continued …

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19 Apr 2019, 11:00 a.m.

Design, and Friction Preventing Design Improvement, in Open Tech

This month a Recurser I know, Pepijn de Vos, observed a concentration of high-quality open source software in the developer tools category, to the exclusion of other categories. With a few exceptions. I understood where …

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17 Apr 2019, 9:13 a.m.

Recurse Center, What Really Works And How We Know

I participated in Recurse Center (formerly Hacker School) in 2013 and in 2014, and emerged a better programmer, a calmer and kinder person, and a more confident learner. Gender diversity was part of the quality …

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27 Feb 2019, 8:01 a.m.

GSoC/Outreachy Mentoring Orgs: Consider Giving Applicants English Tutoring

Google Summer of Code just announced the 207 mentoring organizations (open source projects seeking participants) for this year's round, and Outreachy's 9 mentoring orgs also announced open internship projects. This blog post is directed at …

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25 Feb 2019, 16:52 p.m.

API Copyrightability Law Brings (Many of) Us Together

So you know that moment partway through a movie where heroes team up and stride toward the camera in slow motion while epic music plays? The Python Software Foundation's counsel, Van Lindberg, writes: @ThePSF and …

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17 Feb 2019, 10:53 a.m.

My Open Data Quest, Part ... 11?

On Tuesday night, I attended a committee meeting of the NYC council's Committee on Technology at City Hall (another view) and gave a bit of public comment (video -- my testimony is 02:05:03 till 2:09:11, …

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07 Feb 2019, 8:17 a.m.

Socratic Questioning, Devil's Advocacy, and Conversational Power Tools

"Devil's advocate" was a job. In order for someone to perform the role of Devil's advocate, someone else had to appoint them to that position. And the Devil's advocate performed a bounded task within an …

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07 Feb 2019, 4:49 a.m.

My Recent-ish Government Transparency Efforts

I've put together a page of my past few years of Freedom of Information Law requests and the responses they've garnered. In particular, folks might be interested in the NYC Department of Health and Mental …

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19 Nov 2018, 19:23 p.m.

The Fascination Of Municipal Taxation Software

On January 30, 2018, I attended my local city councilmember's "State of the District" speech. If one of your local officials offers such a speech, I recommend going; it's a structured way to find out …

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16 Oct 2018, 11:22 a.m.

NYC Comptroller Town Hall, And Reflections on Constraint

Last night I suited up and went to a local town hall held by the office of New York City's Comptroller, Scott Stringer. (I am in the fuzzy foreground of the second photo.) After very …

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