Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Open Source and Free Culture

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
14 Jun 2022, 20:30 p.m.

Mourning Marina Zhurakhinskaya

I’m very sad to learn and share the news that Marina Zhurakhinskaya has died of breast cancer. It looks like there will be a livestreamed memorial service tomorrow (Wednesday) which I hope to watch. These …

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

Some Upcoming Availability: Talks And Coaching

For once, I have no upcoming public talks scheduled. Now's a good time to invite me to present or do stand-up comedy at your event or organization, or guest on your podcast, or to give …

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 Jun 2022, 14:30 p.m.

My Upstream Talk Tomorrow: Cadence Shear

My 25-minute talk "Cadence shear: Managing rhythm and tempo mismatches in participation" is in 1 day: 2:30-3pm EDT on Tuesday, June 7th, as part of Upstream 2022. Registration is free and the conference is online. …

Read More
13 May 2022, 16:00 p.m.

Contribution Metrics Are Messy: An Example

I frequently notice folks asking or answering questions like "how many contributors does this open source project have?" or "how much contribution is this project getting?" Here's an example of why those aren't simple questions.ffmpeg …

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