The Devil Comes Courting by Courtney Milan -- about people in 1870 falling in love while figuring out how to encode Chinese characters for transmission on the first worldwide telegraphic network. It's like a "Landsailor" …
I don't have much to say about this but this piece ("safe spaces and competing access needs") and this discussion ("Safe" isn't a monolith.) have been rolling around in my head a lot, and I …
Today is my fifteenth wedding anniversary! Leonard and I got engaged on 18 April 2006 and then married on 21 April 2006. For our tenth wedding anniversary we visited Paris. While there we visited the …
Two exciting bits of news regarding massively improving how we package, distribute, and install Python software! First: a new grant. New York University (specifically Professor Justin Cappos) and I have successfully asked the US National …
I'm ploughing through some open source project email threads and thinking: In 2010, people got together in Berlin for a Wikimedia developers' meeting .... and then a bunch of them hung around a lot longer …
This insightful, funny, downbeat Brandy Zadrozny interview obliquely reminds me of something I realized the other day: the modern Web is, relatively, amazing at offering discovery but awful at offering context. It's easier than it's …
In scifi/fantasy fandom there's this phrase, "Big Name Fan". This is someone who is well-known, influential, for the fannish things they say and do and make. The idea is that a BNF is a minor …
I'm working on a forthcoming book on rejuvenating legacy open source systems. In addition to my bibliography of open source management books/courses, I'm grateful to a few management, teaching, and writing books that have influenced …
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 …
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 …
