Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2014 March

# 01 Mar 2014, 10:19AM: My Parents, My Cousins: Sometimes I forget that I am a person of color and that the United States has Issues with that. Then I remember, say, the Sacramento Bee saying, "The decision of the United States Supreme Court, that Hindus are not eligible to American citizenship, is most welcome to California." (1923, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind.) Or I remember September 11, 2001, when my mom and dad frantically searched all of Stockton for a US flag to hang outside our house as protection; since all the stores were sold out, Dad printed something out on our printer and taped it to our doorway.

And I live here.

"Now I prefer cloudy days when the drones don't fly. When the sky brightens and becomes blue, the drones return and so does the fear. Children don't play so often now, and have stopped going to school. Education isn't possible as long as the drones circle overhead."

"[P]retend that you don't see the aircraft".

But I can't.

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# (5) 05 Mar 2014, 10:28AM: Tender: I love my spouse. I love the joyous, wondrous expression on programmers' faces when I tell them he wrote Beautiful Soup. I love his published scifi, and his seven-word pulp scifi story ("a scrap of paper on which you'd written in pencil 'MAN HAVE SPACEGUN. explode!! NOW IS SAVE'"). I love the silly dances he does, the astounding puns he makes, and all the rest of his playfulness. I love how supportive he's been of my career -- moving to New York on a month's notice for my job change in 2006 being just one example. And more, of course.

The stats on my blog say I've mentioned Leonard's name 870 times -- 871, once I hit Publish -- and more frequently than "because" or "going" or "every", which feels right. But no number could be sufficient.

It's not our anniversary or his birthday or anything like that. I just wanted to make explicit note that my closeness with my spouse is one of the great facts of my life, a rhythm and melody underlying everything else.

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# 06 Mar 2014, 12:25AM: Open Source Jobs (We're Hiring): The Wikimedia Foundation, which employs me, is hiring, a lot. We need your help to:

1. write code to try new ways to encourage people to edit Wikipedia (Growth engineer)
2. keep our users' data safe (operations security engineer)
3. make sure our designers and multimedia engineers build the right things (multimedia product manager)
4. help other Wikimedians figure out how to design their outreach and mentoring initiatives better and evaluate them for effectiveness, so we learn what works (program evaluation community coordinator)
5. automate more of the systems that help developers test new code to find bugs early (Test Infrastructure Engineer)
6. like 14 other jobs, seriously, we're hiring a lot

And of course everything you make at the Wikimedia Foundation is freely licensed, so you can suggest your buddies use it to solve their problems, write public blog posts about it, talk about it at parties and conferences, and link to it on your résumé. Isn't open source rockin'?

(Many WMF workers, including me, telecommute. You might also like our Pluralism, internationalism, and diversity policy.)

Some other places that make open source software or free culture and are hiring: Linaro, MongoDB, Participatory Culture Foundation, CollectionSpace, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, Mozilla, Kaltura, Boundless, Acquia, OpenStack-using companies, Varnish Software, Red Hat, InkTank, wikiHow, the libraries and similar institutions seeking Wikimedians/Wikipedians in Residence, Canonical, Collabora, the Linux Foundation, Eucalyptus, New York Public Library Labs, Pro Publica, Nebula, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation.

That's just a fraction of who's hiring. You can check the FSF jobs board, OPW's list and the liberationtech-jobs mailing list for more.

If you're looking specifically for internships, the OpenHatch list, Google Summer of Code, and Outreach Program for Women should help you.

This is a followup to a similar post I made in late 2012.

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# (1) 10 Mar 2014, 09:32AM: On Having a Decade-Old Blog: I've been posting to "Cogito, Ergo Sumana" since late 2000. Sometimes I think about the really old, embarrassing entries from college, and I wince. Today I happened across a post celebrating a blogger's ten-year anniversary that provided a welcome perspective:

I'm not the same person I was. In many, many ways I am ashamed of that person, and I wish I could just go back and erase many of those early entries, because I was terrible and wrong, and I no longer believe those things. But I let them stand, because I don't think we should edit our histories to include only the parts where we spoke and behaved well. I am a little proud of that person, because she did survive, and became me, and so she couldn't have been all bad. I am kinder than I was, although I am harder, too, and often so tired.

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# (1) 16 Mar 2014, 11:44PM: Skillshare: I've been thinking recently about the line "A week in the lab will save you an hour in the library," in the context of how programmers keep reinventing the wheel over and over instead of reviewing each others' code or learning from CS or software engineering research. Part of why lots of programmers don't reflexively ask themselves, who's already solved this problem? is a lack of discoverability. StackOverflow is much better at sharing useful code snippets than it is at shifting searchers' paradigms. So much relevant research is locked up behind paywalls, and even when it's publicly available, naive web searches for my problem won't necessarily match the jargon academics use. And another reason is that programmers need a certain amount of initial cognitive and behavioral training even to recognize what classes of problems we have and notice when we could use help. We don't teach these thought processes in most accredited programming education.

Greg Wilson says that, on average, a Software Carpentry bootcamp saves a participant one day per week for the rest of their working life. That's how valuable those skills are, and how under-taught they are in the general curriculum.

I want practitioners, in general, to effectively learn from each other. As Leonard wrote:

When you design the fifty-eighth microblogging API you're limiting your audience and wasting your users' time.

This is a really huge problem and we won't solve it with a book. But we can point out that it's a problem and take the first step towards mitigation.

We can't afford to waste time; there are real unsolved problems that need our efforts. Reinventing the wheel is spinning our wheels.

Which means, among other things, that we need to be able to teach developers to review code effectively. It's been done before and I'd love for someone to say they've replicated that process, or a similar one, in an open source community.

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# 20 Mar 2014, 12:10AM: Loop: I just reread Lee Iacocca's autobiography, in which he mentioned the loop apprenticeship he did when he first got to Ford. Fog Creek's SMTP and the vaunted Procter & Gamble apprenticeships are a bit like this.

Mel wrote:

Reading about cognitive apprenticeships brings up all sorts of fun moments. For instance, the ideal way to design an apprenticeship experience is to have students do global tasks early on, then local tasks later. Do something that lets them see the big picture (assemble a whole dress) first before focusing on detailed parts (cut out a piece for a dress)....

* teach release engineering first, instead of programming

What would a real open source software apprenticeship flow look like? May First/People Link has an idea, around systems administration. Anyway, I know Mel probably has a zillion thoughts on this and I look forward to reading her thesis, but it's just on my mind and I thought I'd note it down so I can get to sleep.

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# (1) 20 Mar 2014, 11:41PM: Why I'm Excited About !!Con: Some get-togethers turn into dominance displays -- participants see each other as someone to defeat. We often see this pattern in technical spaces, such as conferences, mailing lists, programming classes, and code review. Skud's 2009 piece "The community spectrum: caring to combative" mentions a few groups who created caring technical subcommunities in response to a competitive or combative culture. Since 2009 we've seen more such efforts -- more and more tidepools where I feel welcome, where I gather strength between trips into the ocean.

Hacker School recognizes that dominance displays discourage learning. For years, Hacker Schoolers have worked to "remove the ego and fear of embarrassment that so frequently get in the way of education", to replace constant self-consciousness with a spirit of play. (Apply now for summer or fall!) During my batch, my peers and I balanced plain old webdev/mobile/etc. projects with obscure languages, magnificently silly jokey toys, and pure beauty. We made fun in our work instead of making fun of each other.

No one "wins" Hacker School. There is no leaderboard. Whenever possible, Hacker School culture assumes abundance rather than scarcity; attempts to rank projects or people would defile our ecology.

And now we have a conference, !!Con, with that same philosophy. It's by Hacker Schoolers but open to anyone* and encouraging talks by everyone.

I love that the !!Con organizers are designing this conference to inclusively celebrate what excites us about programming. If we learn and enjoy ourselves by writing implausible or derivative or useless or gaudy code, and by sharing it with others, the proper response is to celebrate. By focusing on sharing our personal experiences of joy, we let go of dominance-style objective ranking (which is impossible anyway), and instead celebrate a diverse subjectivity. The organizers' choices (including thorough code of conduct, welcoming call for proposals, and anonymous submission review) reinforce this.

I think about this stuff as a geek with many fandoms: programming, scifi, tax history, feminism, open source, comedy, and more. In the best fannish traditions, we see the Other as someone whose fandom we don't know yet but may soon join. We would rather encourage vulnerability, enthusiasm and play than disrespect anyone; we take very seriously the sin of harshing someone else's squee.

This is the fun we make. Not booth babes, not out-nitpicking each other, but wonder.

So, I'm submitting talks to !!Con, and I'm going to be there, May 17-18, soaking in this new warm mossy tidepool of love that's appeared right here in New York City. Join me?

* !!Con will be free to attend, but space will, sadly, be limited, as will the number of talks.

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# 29 Mar 2014, 12:09PM: The Good Kind Of Disorientation: I stepped off the train at Penn Station last night and emerged into Manhattan again new and gently buoyant and muted. I'd spent the last week at the code4lib conference, helping out with and soaking in another substream of the great conversation, a different one than I usually dip into.

"True voyage is return." - The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin.

I'm noodling around with various feelings and thoughts about abundance, play, and self-care. (One reason I feel pretty good right now is that I practiced self-care at the conference, taking naps or skipping big social gatherings when I needed to.) I'll post more about my talk and other conference bits later, but right now: a moment of peace and balance, where I can look back content.

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# 31 Mar 2014, 01:10PM: UX Is A Social Justice Issue: On March 25th, I had the honour of addressing the Code4Lib conference as their opening keynote speaker. My topic: "User Experience Is A Social Justice Issue".

....Maybe another way of thinking about it is, when we're building services for people, we often have a lot more practice seeing from the computer's point of view than seeing from another person's point of view. In tech I think we understand how to build arteries better than we understand how to build capillaries....

They liked it! You can enjoy it too. After a very short introduction, my speech goes up to 30:45 in the YouTube video (embedded below). It'll be on the Internet Archive & Wikimedia Commons as well.

You can read the script I read from, annotated with citations, links to resources, and links to tweets and blog posts about the talk. (I aim to get a true transcript sometime soon and update that wiki page accordingly.)

Thanks to the Code4Lib community for inviting me, and to those who helped me with my talk: Coral Sheldon-Hess, Mel Chua, Andromeda Yelton, Bess Sadler, Emma Molls, Leonard Richardson, Jared Zimmerman, and Sky Croeser.

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