Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Advice

15 Sep 2022, 10:20 a.m.

Six Key Maintainer Skill Guides

Earlier this year I ran several maintainer skills workshops sponsored by Open Source Collective. I’ve developed six resource documents based on those sessions, which are all now live:Recruiting Financial Sponsors: Inventory your potential donors and …

Read More
09 Sep 2022, 11:00 a.m.

"The Pathway To Inclusion" - Insight From Alex Bayley

My friend Alex Bayley is one of my inspirations in working in and on open source and open culture. Alex founded or cofounded the Geek Feminism blog and wiki, for instance. They were ahead of …

Read More
08 Sep 2022, 12:01 p.m.

Reluctance To Process Contributions, and Tips from InnerSource

So there's a software development approach, borrowing techniques from open source for use within an enterprise, called InnerSource. It's "the use of open source best practices for software development within the confines of an organization." …

Read More
02 Sep 2022, 15:10 p.m.

A Few Thoughts From Elsewhere

I thought y'all might enjoy a few things I said recently on MetaFilter.About daily web puzzles:I realized the other day that -- as the chronological history game Wikitrivia does -- a lot of puzzle/trivia games …

Read More
07 Jun 2022, 11:40 a.m.

Managing Cadence Shear: My Upstream 2022 Talk

This post has the script and video for “Cadence shear: Managing rhythm and tempo mismatches in participation”, a 25-minute talk I delivered/will deliver at 2:30pm EDT on June 7th, 2022 as part of Upstream. It …

Read More
06 May 2022, 23:11 p.m.

"How Do I Accommodate This Person?" Ask JAN

A couple years ago, through Ask a Manager comment threads (some links), I learned about the Job Accommodation Network which has a giant organized list of accommodations an employer could make, sorted "by disability, by …

Read More
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 …

Read More
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 …

Read More
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 …

Read More
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 …

Read More