Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Recurse Center

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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16 Jul 2020, 10:41 a.m.

Misunderstanding What It Takes To Make Recurse Center's Social Rules Work

In a contentious thread on MetaFilter about race and racism on the site, one user lauds the bit of Recurse Center's manual about how if you are corrected for breaking one of the four Social …

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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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22 Sep 2016, 15:09 p.m.

New Essay: "Toward a !!Con Aesthetic"

Over at The Recompiler, I have a new essay out: "Toward A !!Con Aesthetic". I talk about (what I consider to be) the countercultural tech conference !!Con, which focuses on "the joy, excitement, and surprise …

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14 Jul 2016, 13:08 p.m.

A Great Explanation of WebDriver and Browser Automation

Maja Frydrychowicz's "Untangling WebDriver and the Browser Automation Landscape I Live In" is a delightful, very satisfying read. It covers the difference between the W3C WebDriver specification and Selenium WebDriver, explains their history and future, …

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30 Jun 2016, 11:19 a.m.

Ambition And Failure

People who are trying to make stuff often feel like we're failing. Ira Glass's articulation of the gap between taste and skill gets at this. He suggests making more stuff, for deadlines, for others, as …

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21 Dec 2014, 22:10 p.m.

Why You Have To Fix Governance To Improve Hospitality

Fundamentally, if you want to make a community hospitable,* you need to work not just on individual rules of conduct, but on governance. This is because the particular people implementing rules of conduct will use …

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15 Dec 2014, 11:06 a.m.

A Code Review Group

I'm interested in piloting a peer code review group, structured like a writer's group. So next month I'm starting one out in New York City, starting with Hacker School alumni and participants, and I figured …

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18 Nov 2014, 15:21 p.m.

Using Beautiful Soup, Pystache, and Lunr.js for an Archival Site

My third week of my 2014 Hacker School batch, I decided to take on a project that I'd originally thought about doing a year before, during my first go at HS. Between April 2005 and …

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18 Nov 2014, 12:01 p.m.

A Node.js Project, And Deciding to Shelve It

In my second week of my 2014 Hacker School batch, I asked: What are red flags in scifi/fantasy magazines' calls for submissions? What words/phrases make you think "ew, avoid"? -- @brainwane, 3:48 PM - 13 …

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