Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Work

30 Jul 2019, 13:18 p.m.

Comparing Y2K and Climate Change

When you know there's a big upcoming threat, how do you get big institutions to commit and follow through? And in particular, how useful is it to frighten whole populaces? I looked into a specific …

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19 Apr 2019, 11:00 a.m.

Design, and Friction Preventing Design Improvement, in Open Tech

This month a Recurser I know, Pepijn de Vos, observed a concentration of high-quality open source software in the developer tools category, to the exclusion of other categories. With a few exceptions. I understood where …

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27 Mar 2019, 19:40 p.m.

Expectations, Toil and Sludge, Discovery, And A Lot of Handwaving

I have an inchoate tangle of thoughts I'll spill out into this sandbox for thinking -- sometimes on this blog you get well-organized how-to guides and analyses, and sometimes you get "what constellation do these …

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27 Feb 2019, 8:01 a.m.

GSoC/Outreachy Mentoring Orgs: Consider Giving Applicants English Tutoring

Google Summer of Code just announced the 207 mentoring organizations (open source projects seeking participants) for this year's round, and Outreachy's 9 mentoring orgs also announced open internship projects. This blog post is directed at …

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03 Oct 2018, 17:16 p.m.

Tidelift Is Paying Maintainers And, Potentially, Fixing the Economics of an Industry

As the founder of Changeset Consulting, I keep my eye on consultancies and services in and near my niche, open source leadership, maintainership, and sustainability.* And I've known Luis Villa for years and got to …

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11 Sep 2018, 8:55 a.m.

Now Imagine Switching The Lead Actors For Those Two Shows

I was in the midst of talking with my pal Jed about Star Trek: The Next Generation. He'd kindly checked whether I was ok hearing criticisms of this show-of-my-heart and I said dismissiveness no, criticism …

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11 Apr 2018, 22:17 p.m.

My LWN Story Summarizing PyPI's Overhaul

This coming Monday, April 16th, we plan to flip the switch on the new PyPI and redirect https://pypi.python.org web browser requests and pip install requests so the codebase serving them is Warehouse (which is in …

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02 Jan 2018, 9:46 a.m.

2017 Sumana In Review

Four years ago, during my first batch at the Recurse Center, every day I'd write in a little notebook on the subway on my way home, jotting down a few bullet points about what I …

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18 Sep 2017, 11:01 a.m.

On Noticing That Your Project Is Draining Your Soul

I was talking with a fellow consultant about what to do if you have a gig getting you down. Especially when you realize that the client isn't being helpful, and there's a bunch of learning …

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17 Apr 2017, 9:15 a.m.

Alternate Questions

Is it still in vogue for US tech companies to ask quantitative estimation/implausible-problem questions like "how many phone booths/piano tuners are there in Manhattan?" in hiring interviews, particularly for programming-related jobs? Fog Creek asked me …

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