Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Advice

05 May 2022, 13:00 p.m.

PDFtk, qpdf, And Dealing With Password-Protected PDFs

I slice, dice, and transform documents often enough that I rely frequently on pandoc and pdftk. I often use pandoc to turn Markdown, HTML, wiki syntax, reStructuredText, etc. into each other or into LibreOffice, MS …

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02 May 2022, 16:00 p.m.

"I want to start contributing to open source": My (Current) Advice

Want to become a better programmer? Join the Recurse Center! In the virtual PyCon hallway track, a newcomer to the industry said he'd like to get into contributing to open source, and asked for my …

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21 Apr 2022, 12:15 p.m.

Nurturing Volunteers: A Shortcut And An Event Template

A few suggestions to help you nurture volunteers in your projects. (Expanded from some advice I recently gave Ms. Boba, founder of BobaBoard -- she's a coaching client of mine.)Live Tour As First Draft: Extract …

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24 Mar 2022, 8:00 a.m.

A Pragmatic Truth About Self-Promotion

Some advice, deceptively, sounds great at first but then reveals itself to be maladaptive as one slides into different contexts.When I was young, I got the idea into my head that I should not brag …

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30 Nov 2021, 10:14 a.m.

Sign Up Now For Free Maintainer Skills Workshops

Maintainers of open source projects often need help learning how to address issues such as "how do we recruit and promote project members?", "what do we spend our money on?", and "how do I finally …

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03 Jul 2021, 16:45 p.m.

Researching The Leadership Gap for Legacy Projects

I've given a lot of conference talks recently. As part of the PyCon US Maintainers' Summit in May, I delivered an eight-minute talk, "Researching the leadership gap for legacy projects". The video is now available, …

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07 Jun 2021, 17:28 p.m.

Sidestepping the PR Bottleneck: Four Non-Dev Ways To Support Your Upstreams

This is the textual version of my June 7 2021 online talk at Upstream Live: "Sidestepping the PR Bottleneck: Four Non-Dev Ways To Support Your Upstreams", 23 minutes. Video is now up. Intro Hi, I’m …

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22 May 2021, 19:25 p.m.

If You Give A Speech You Care About, Post A Transcript

When I give a keynote address at a conference, I sometimes commission* and post a transcript or a near-transcript afterwards (example). And sometimes I do this for non-keynote speeches (example); this year I decided to …

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06 May 2021, 15:12 p.m.

What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy? Video & Transcript

In late March I spoke in the GitHub Office of the CTO Speaker Series (online): "What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy?" When I think about open source sustainability, I think about …

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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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