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06 Oct 2013, 10:41AM: Net Work: I saw Apollo 13 when it came out in theaters in 1995, and I don't think I'd seen it again until the other night, when Leonard and I rewatched it.

Apollo 13 Mailbox at Mission Control Leonard and I both thought it was pretty inspiring -- see his review -- and of course we both absolutely loved the Iron Chef moment where engineers on the ground gather copies of all the equipment the astronauts have, dump the mess on a table, and get to work kludging together a CO2-scrubbing solution.

What is a hero? Is it a person who makes a big positive delta between the world as it might have been and the world as it is with the hero in it? (I'm remembering when Aaron Swartz talked that way, when I asked him what he wanted.) Part of the magic of that scene in Apollo 13 is that it demonstrates that you can be a hero in a life-or-death situation even if you are not the one at risk. John Rogers's recollection from filming a Global Frequency pilot touches on some of the same chords, about mutualism and solidarity and sharing our brilliance with each other towards an urgent goal.

My tastes in stories grow clearer over time. I like wit, compassionate clear-eyed observation about how intelligent people act, and celebrations of labor. Via deepad: "Yeh Zindagi Bhi" from Luck By Chance.



Part of the joy of open source is that I can work with and share my work with more people than I could otherwise. I can help people I've never met. And I get help from people I've never met. Some days you're Mission Control, and some days you're the astronaut.

06 Oct 2013, 12:00PM: What They Don't Know: Or: you are an expert if you can save people time.

Late in 2011, I found out that one of my colleagues, a whip-smart and infinitely organized administrator, wanted to know more about how the engineering side of Wikimedia works. So I started teaching her. Every month, we talked for about an hour. She asked me about some activity from the monthly report and I explained what we're doing and why, often using analogies. She loved it and felt far more connected to what her other colleagues were doing.

She's not at Wikimedia anymore, so I have tried doing it as a Wikimania presentation and continuing the tradition with other WMFers who were interested. So far I've done a lot of one-off "What the fudge does Wikimedia engineering do" sessions for incoming folks, mostly non-engineers coming into the Foundation's other departments.

Two lessons from that experience:

  1. Sure, continuing mentorship relationships are awesome. But don't discount the value of a few limited teaching sessions.
  2. I have about three approaches to teaching this stuff: Historical (What has happened since we started in 2001?), Experiential (What happens under the hood when you go to en.wikipedia.org in your browser, and who's in charge of what parts?), and Organizational (Who are the eight directorates in WMF engineering, and who are other important Wikimedia tech institutions, and who does what?). I want to get better at the historical mode, which means learning what happened in what order between 2001 and 2011; right now I do the org-chart mode quite well, and the experiential mode well except for talking about load-balancing and caching.

I wish I'd kept good notes of all the questions people have asked during these sessions. Some of them:

I have just started at Hacker School, a place designed to help everyone learn. That means making people feel comfortable with saying "I don't know". I've benefited countless times from this, because if no one's going to belittle me for not knowing something, I feel safer asking and learning. I didn't realize how much I would also get to teach! When everyone feels safe saying "What does that mean?" then I get to help more people learn more things. I've explained, among other things:

It's super amazing when you teach someone a skill or a perspective that changes them. I feel so lucky that I am an expert, i.e., someone who can save other people time. It is a form of hospitality.
Filed under: Hacker School Work:Wikimedia Recurse Center Open Source and Free Culture

09 Oct 2013, 10:43PM: Programming Jokes: The Hacker School application form asks you to provide some code you've written so the faculty can look at it. I wrote a game: "Where on the Oregon Trail is Carmen Sandiego?" It is a joke of a game and a platform for further jokes. During my first week at Hacker School, I improved my programming skills by improving it. For instance, now multiple villains might have stolen that wagon tongue, including Waldo.

Kat Walsh encouraged me to actually implement the joke I made in August. So I am now working on a toy web app (using Flask) to grab physics article titles from English Wikipedia (via the MediaWiki API, via Pywikibot) and perform Queneau assembly on them to make plausible scifi novel titles, and then display those strings on a web page. So far, fun titles have included:

They make people laugh. With software, I can scale my comedy! I can make more people laugh at more things. I think we could get more people programming if we showed comedians that you can pull better pranks if you can code.
Filed under: Hacker School Comedy Recurse Center

16 Oct 2013, 11:19PM: Idiosyncratic Troubleshooting Tips: Yesterday I tried to diagnose and fix a bug in an open source project. I got discouraged because of a few factors, so I'm noting down a few things I ran into, for future Sumana and other similar folks.

  1. Are you editing the right file? If you're in a virtual environment, make extra special sure that the file you're trying to tweak is the same one listed in the traceback.
  2. Special characters? For instance, bash might get all weird on you if there's an ampersand (&) in an argument you're passing via the command line.
  3. pdb, assertions, and IPython. I'm working in Python, and I've started to learn to use "python -i", the Python debugger, "assert" tests, and the IPython toolkit. IPython especially is cool because the visual presentation of the stack trace is easier to follow.
  4. The database setup toolchain is blergh but worth it. If a project needs a MySQL database set up, then fine. There's a little bit of dependency hell but it's not intractable, especially if you have someone nearby who's done it before. What all did I have to do? I can't retrace the order, but from looking at my .bash_history, Synaptic history, and dpkg.log:
    • apt-get install python-dev
    • apt-get install python-mysqldb
    • apt-get install mysql-server
    • apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev
    • apt-get install mysql-common
    • pip install MySQL-python
    • pip install python-MySQLdb (I think?)
    And then, you know, you have to do the initial privilege-setting and connection-making, and probably create a database, blah blah blah. But! Eventually it works and you can alter and create and drop things like it's going out of style. (Which it probably is, memory bank fashion going the way it is.) And it does eventually work, and the stack of dependencies doesn't REALLY take up loads of disk space the way it feels like it will.
  5. Branch! Not quite as relevant, but: just get into the habit of proper git hygiene when working on improving a shared codebase, e.g., switch to a new branch for a new logical set of changes. It makes merge requests/pull requests so much more frictionless. And then "git checkout -" makes it super easy to switch between the branch you're on and the last branch you were working on.
Thanks to Joe, Fei, Rupa, Allison, Travis, Moshe, Kat, Julia, and the Bicho developers for their help the past few days!
Filed under: Hacker School Recurse Center

18 Oct 2013, 11:17PM: A Mediocre Day But A Good Week: Mel Chua visited Hacker School last week and especially entreatied us to blog about bad days, days we felt demoralized or unproductive. It helps her with her research. Well, Mel, here you go.

It's a Friday, and we get Fridays "off", that is, we don't have daily checkins and the facilitators don't have bookable office hours and some of my colleagues are gone and it feels muted and off-kilter. On September 27th I'd thought that I'd be working four days a week, but I look at colleagues who come in every single day, including weekends, and feel FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out. So I've started coming in for half a day on Fridays, but it rarely feels as good and productive. I think by the end of Thursday I could really use a break to recharge. So that's one thing. I think from now on, if I come in on Fridays, it should be to accomplish a very specific task, and I should leave when that task is done or when it becomes clear that my energy or cognition is flagging.

Last week some of us joked around that we should do the opposite of Casual Friday: Fancy Friday we dubbed it. So today I came in wearing a dress, a bit low-cut at that. But I didn't see anyone else in suits or gowns or similar, so I didn't feel as comfortable in what I was wearing. For next week, if I come in on Friday, I may try a pantsuit.

I arrived around lunch time I and brought my lunch, which is good because it makes me feel good to be frugal. But I read a depressing and not particularly edifying message board as I ate, and I should probably save that kind of thing for the weekends or my couch at home.

I started off my work with the vague goal of "learn about unit testing" and it took me a lot more reading, sighing, and moping time than it should have for me to ask for help (thank you, Ryan, for our impromptu chat in the kitchen that led me to understand when to use assertions and when to go for mocks, and thank you to HSers who chatted with me about Mock) and to reduce my aims to something more manageable. Next time: follow my own advice, and ask for help after fifteen minutes of feeling stuck. Also, "learn about x" is an okay way to start surveying the problem space and the solution space, but "try a single implementation/example of x in a toy app" is a much better goal for an afternoon.

I drank coffee when I should have had water. I ate licorice when I should have snacked on edamame. So I got jittery and sugar-crashy instead of focused.

I chatted with someone, and I was judgy or negative when I could have been more thoughtful and constructive.

I helped people with git problems and questions, which I'm glad about, but I missed the opportunity to ask them about their learning styles first and organize my thoughts a little accordingly. It felt haphazard.

It took me way too long to start listening to energetic productivity-provoking music on my music player; maybe I'll just set a reminder to make that happen around 11am every weekday.

And there's random other stuff on my mind, e.g., having to grab my old mail off the OCF's servers by Sunday.

So, Mel, overall, today I started off in a low-energy, non-driven mood, and I didn't take the kinds of steps I know I oughta take in order to fix it. But nearly every time I spoke with someone, it shook me out of my rut, and helped me gather the activation energy to do The Right Next Thing. So it could be that Fridays I should just try to arrive in the morning and set up a pact with a few colleagues to do a check-in conversation every 30 minutes. (It's easier to set up that sort of thing upon shared arrival in the morning.)

Hope that helps you. It helped me.

What did I accomplish today? I implemented a few docstrings and started learning how to use __repr__. I showed some people how to work with branches and multiple remotes in git, and how to fork and make pull requests on GitHub. I reported a few bugs in one product and made a pull request for another. I used "git cherry-pick" for the first time, with Alan's guidance. I wrote most of a test that uses "assert" to check that there's a path from Independence to Portland given the links between cities in my game. I got emacs to give me two side-by-side buffers. 3.7 hours tracked in Project Hamster, 2.9 of learning and .8 of teaching, plus a few more of faffing about on the net or in conversation. But I surpassed my 20-hour learning goal for the week -- I'm around 25 -- so this week overall I've done well.

In retrospect, today felt suboptimal in contrast to a usual Hacker School day. Today I plateaued. I think after some rest this weekend I'll plunge in fresh on Monday with clear goals and better discipline.

Filed under: Hacker School Recurse Center

22 Oct 2013, 08:25AM: OMG, or, Biting Off More Than I Can Chew: So, there are random non-programming reasons why I didn't feel like I made much progress yesterday -- I tried working in a beanbag chair (no good for Sumana), I drank coffee too early in the day (caffeine crash in the afternoon) and I listened to the wrong music (Guster and Neutral Milk Hotel? might as well be The Mountain Goats for all the good that does me) -- but here are the big ones.

Today is a new day! As soon as I hit Publish I will pair with Leonard a little. Yay morning freshness.
Filed under: Hacker School Recurse Center

(1) 26 Oct 2013, 12:42PM: Hacking Music: I spent a day at Hacker School without a working pair of headphones recently. So I spent about three hours pairing, which I loved and which I'm going to repeat every day that I can. But I also booked a room to play music in and invited fellow participants to come in and code while listening to music together for an hour. I was just going to play some video game soundtracks off my Nokia N9, but Andrew showed up with his massively multiplayer music player and the speakers we use for parties. I know when I'm outclassed.

When I ask my colleagues what they like to hear while coding, we mostly agree: "nothing with words I can understand." So, here, monolingual English speakers have a big advantage! Some albums I like:

And then there are the songs I listen to on the subway when I am discouraged from bughunting and troubleshooting. These are my "Perseverance!" songs.
Filed under: Hacker School Recurse Center

(2) 26 Oct 2013, 05:07PM: Some Artifacts: At Hacker School, I'm working on little projects to teach myself various things. I am following my own advice by embracing silliness. A few things I have made, all of which now have code up on GitHub:

An Obama speech generator. I wrote this command-line speech generator just after Barack Obama gave a televised speech partially about trouble with HealthCare.gov. I thought, "what if Barack Obama gave LOTS of speeches about tech?"

Also, I wanted to try out test-driven development, so speech-tests.py has the tests I wrote (using Python's unittest module) before or as I wrote functionality.

So, here you go. Run speech.py at a command line and type in three tech buzzwords when asked. (Alphabetical characters and spaces work, but no other punctuation -- "the cloud" and "NoSQL" are fine, but "object-oriented" won't work.) You'll then get a short speech incorporating at least one of the buzzwords you've provided. This gets Leonard to laugh a lot at lines like "Thank you, and may God bless Agile."

Green Sea Turtle grazing seagrass "Personality Rights", a super-short and moody game. I made it in Ren'Py, a platform for making "visual novel"-type games, which meant I fiddled with a sort of domain-specific subset of Python to specify plot, characters, styling, music, and graphics. (Graphics include the turtle image at right.) I wrote it in three hours because that's the time limit for the Ectocomp game competition.

A scifi novel title generator (previously).

Improvements to Bicho, although I backed off my giant "refactor and add tests to everything" plan in favor of learning to write tests first.

(I wish I were using Gitorious instead of the closed-source GitHub, but Gitorious wouldn't let me log in, even after password reset. Bleah!)

What have I learned? I only have eight weeks left. I'm better than I was at Python, emacs, git, and bash. I have gotten to question ten on Python Challenge, and finished all of CodingBat Python.

Sometimes I have a reaction I don't like. When I learn some new amazing thing you can do with Python, I get angry that I didn't know it already. It's a very fixed-model way to react, not a growth-model way, and I think I have to fix more things in me before that stops happening.

Filed under: Hacker School Recurse Center

(1) 28 Oct 2013, 02:20PM: Prank And/Or Business Idea: Problem 1: Food at tech meetups usually fails to satisfy foodies. Make-your-own-tacos if you're lucky, "the Statue of Liberty is crying" bad pizza if you're not.

Problem 2: Most places we hold evening tech talks just aren't very good for actually hearing and enjoying those talks. Either the sightlines and sound suck, or you're in some weird institution like a college or Google that comes with a bunch of other emotional freight.

Problem 3: People want entertainment with their dinner, gimmicky outings for their friend or professional groups, and opportunities for limited socializing with strangers.

Proposed Solution: a proper restaurant like those old 1940s halls, the ones that used to show up in set pieces in Astaire movies. The terraces of round tables, where you might be seated with a few folks you don't know yet, remain the same. But the floor show is a few short tech talks, nightly.

Filed under: Comedy

(1) 28 Oct 2013, 11:59PM: On Ability: Someone discovered "that the addition of 'Harry' to almost any Plato quote makes it seem legitimately like a nugget of wisdom out of the mouth of Albus Dumbledore." This reminded me to look up my favorite Dumbledore quote:

It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

I am trying to remember that, because every day I go to Hacker School and sit next to people with lots more programming skill than me, and sometimes I find that discouraging. Or I realize how badly I want to impress people, to feel admired and respected, and how that sometimes gets in the way of growing and achieving actually admirable, respect-worthy things. I need to remember to disregard that kind of anxiety fungus emotion. Thomas Beagle said in some related comments:

to be a good geek you [have] to have both humility and arrogance in equal measures. The humility was so you'd admit you didn't know something and get help/read the docs/etc., the arrogance was the bit that said "I don't know that now... but I can and I will soon."

I think that, like a lot of people, I conflate skill and confidence, and I need to disassemble a construct I didn't even realize I had in my mental infrastructure. How slippery, that the confidence I need to develop is the confidence to express uncertainty, to say "I don't understand" as many times as it takes. Our Hacker School facilitators guide us to try projects that intimidate and scare us. Truly being vulnerable to my own ignorance is on that list. I wish I knew how to credibly and persistently promise myself that the rewards from being open to change are greater than the return on inertia.

Filed under: Hacker School Recurse Center Introspection

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