# 01 Apr 2014, 07:03PM: An April 1st Linux Tip:
It turns out you can go into your init.cfg file and change the usability flag from 0 to 1, and that improves user experience tremendously. I wonder why distributions ship it turned off by default?
# 06 Apr 2014, 02:51PM: Yes, It Sucks And Is Not Your Fault:
Last night I was talking with some folks at Subcontinental Drift (open mic for South Asian-ish folks) who are paratechnical but find learning to program frightening or intimidating. It's not their fault; we (technologists and educators) basically suck at helping people understand that
Nothing here is particularly new. But we gotta say it, because there are so many people saying or implying the opposite.
# 06 Apr 2014, 03:18PM: Points of View:
I'm noodling around, thinking about vision, perspectives, and leadership.
In a 2012 interview with MIT Technology Review (in their compilation Twelve Tomorrows), Neal Stephenson spoke about science fiction's role in innovation (pp. 5-6):
Worldviews and ideologies sure are powerful things, and nearly all of Stephenson's fiction and nonfiction has focused on the effects of people's diverse perspectives. (See some of my previous thoughts on Stephenson.) I used to say that he and Le Guin were my favorite authors, and they have this in common. You see the arbitrage possibilities of a new, subversive perspective, and you see how much power you unleash by converting a whole community to a new worldview.
In the late nineties, Simon Stow introduced me to the idea that the social sciences provide many useful lenses. I still remember him in that ground-floor Kroeber classroom, miming an optometrist, checking whether A or B made things clearer, then B or C.
A few years later, a pal of mine said something about the difficulty of explaining scientific concepts to people who did not already have sufficient bootloaded prerequisites:
For each of us, certain clichés are as foundational as the G, A, T, and C in DNA. I ought to really catalogue mine someday, but here's a start. I tell people about the career Venn diagram, or my version of exit, voice, and loyalty, or my rhetorical triangle. We cargo cult, or expand the Overton window, or arbitrage, or decide it's an efficient market. We decide that at least we'll earn some XP, or satisfice or do cognitive load-balancing, or concentrate on our core competence, or try to fix the kyriarchy. I think about that law of user interface, that if you make something 10% easier then twice as many people will do it. I remember
the three skills of adulthood. Recently I started noticing the activist-organizer split in my work and in others'.
Wouldn't it be great if job interviews helped you check the other person's basis concepts? (Or if matchmaking sites offered that, come to think of it.)
You have to have lots of lenses if you're going to be a leader, because you'll get ambiguous and inadequate information about situations and you want to pattern-match to see what fits your plan and what doesn't. You need to develop a clear, robust vision, persuade others it's what they should want too, and negotiate with them.
And even if you don't aim for formal leadership positions, it's probably worthwhile to catalogue the lenses you tend to use. Blog it if you want.
... a less obvious utility, that science fiction can provide a coherent picture of an alternate reality in which some innovation happened. Not just the technical innovation itself, but the social context and the economic context that causes that innovation to make sense. It can be sort of like an invisible magnetic field that gets iron filings to line up. In big engineering organizations, you've got all these people working on small pieces of a bigger problem, and there's an enormous amount of communication that has to take place to keep them all working in a coordinated fashion. That communication is tedious and expensive, but if everybody's got the same picture in their heads, maybe you don't have to communicate as much.
That one sort of floored me, because radiation is one of my "basis concepts" that I use to explain other things. (Yes, I think of my scientific knowledge as being spanned by a basis set of conceptual eigenvectors. The basis set idea is also one of my "basis concepts". Yes, I also know that I'm weird.)
Eight years after that, I led a Foo Camp session called "Models We Use To Understand The World". We run into a lot of different situations, and pre-loading our 'scopes with different lenses provides requisite variety so we have a fighting chance to understand them. "Metaphors We Live By", right? Feel free to replicate that session at your next unconference, by the way.
# 09 Apr 2014, 12:29AM: Some Short Reading:
American Scientist is the good stuff. Accessible prose but not condescending, and covering a variety of biological, mathematical, physical, and social sciences. "Programming Your Quantum Computer", "The Toxicity of Recreational Drugs", and "Empirical Software Engineering" brought me much pleasure, as did Henry Petroski's engineering history column. In the March/April 2014 issue, Petroski goes on a tear regarding inaccurate graphical depictions of quadrupeds and sharpened pencils. For four angry pages. Whatever, it's Petroski, even his nerd rage is fun.
"Scalable Web Architecture and Distributed Systems" by Kate Matsudaira gives a general overview of web architecture; I found it helpful in understanding the context of "service-oriented architectures" and the challenges of big-scale web architecture in general. MediaWiki currently does NOT have a service-oriented architecture as Matsudaira describes it, but engineers are working on changing MediaWiki from a giant spaghetti ball into a more logical, convenient, and maintainable set of interfaces/services. (The overview also has a bit of humor; I especially laughed at Figure 1.6.)
"Little Ambushes" by Joanne Merriam portrays the thing I always want out of science fiction: making a real connection with the Other. Her "Harvest" and "Sundowning" tear my heart out, too. Her work reminds me of things I've loved in the work of Maureen McHugh, Nancy Kress, and Connie Willis.
# 18 Apr 2014, 07:30AM PST: Four Quartets:
Four sets of four:
# (2) 21 Apr 2014, 10:20PM: It's Nice To Have Some Things Cached:
The other day, our friendly performance engineer Ori, who loves to teach, whiteboarded Wikimedia's caching layers for me. Varnish, memcached, MariaDB's query cache, the browser's native cache, LocalStorage, and so on. I took notes and said "OH" a lot.
If you develop a web site that caches cleverly and thoroughly enough, you can avoid slowing down performance with gobs of CPU and database work, and give the user lightning-fast responses to common requests.
Similarly, I have accumulated a set of responses that I often have close to hand, such as:
Caching works great for slow-changing things, and for things you can say the exact same way every time. On the other hand, every once in a while, someone asks me about my career plans. Then I wave my hands and say things about leadership and open source and moving the needle. At least, this year I do.
# 22 Apr 2014, 10:12PM: Necessary Dreams - Content and Cover:
My household has donated a few books to the Hacker School library. RESTful Web APIs - easy. I also donated four interrelated books:
Author Dr. Anna Fels points out that the childhood or adolescent desire for fame is often a precursor to a more nuanced ambition, combining the urge to master some domain or skill with the desire for the recognition of one's peers or community. She also notes that women, especially, feel the need to hide that wish for fame instead of developing it into a healthy passion to guide our careers. This book blew my mind in the best way when I read it, and massively helped me guide my career development. It now informs my emphasis on explicit encouragement and mentorship of new open source volunteers, and my willingness to openly toot my own horn here on this blog.
The hardcover on my bookshelf (this edition or so) has a text-on-white cover. In contrast, check out the cover for the paperback edition I just bought: it portrays a businesswoman with an infant, and cuts off the woman's head with the title.
Fels, incidentally, discusses the visual language mass media use to discuss white-collar women:
Did Anchor (the publisher) use this as a spec for the graphic designer?
Geek feminist reading lists often mention the first three. I ran across Necessary Dreams in a thrift store several years ago and it changed my life, so I wanted to include it. The review Slate published in 2004, when the book came out in 2004, summarizes it pretty well; see also the Broad Universe review.
"...women shuttle back and forth between two dissimilar cultural contexts. Articles on professional women often visually represent the incongruity of their dual roles by photographing them in formal work attire -- a suit, a crisp blouse, pumps, stockings, jewelry, a briefcase -- awkwardly clutching a drooling, sprawling toddler."
-p. 190 (paperback)
# (2) 23 Apr 2014, 04:54PM: A Change Of Roles:
I did open source community management for MediaWiki for about three years. At first, in 2011, I was an individual contributor (see my February 2012 post "What Does A Volunteer Development Coordinator Do?"). After several months I became the team lead, and then about two years ago Wikimedia Foundation promoted me and I started managing my team. Dozens of people hit reply-all to congratulate me in messages I still treasure. (You have a "yay" folder too, right?)
I hired our new bug wrangler and our new volunteer coordinator. I got Wikimedia Foundation participating in the Outreach Program for Women paid internships, and we got way better at new developer intake in general. I introduced the Friendly Space Policy for WMF technical events (and we sure ran a lot of them). I introduced some innovations that took, and a few that didn't. When you fix one bottleneck you notice the next one -- that's the nature of bottlenecks -- and so we worked on harder and harder problems.
By external measures I was doing really well. But my management style does a lot better face-to-face, and I found it tiring to try to manage logistics and emotional nuance almost entirely via text - managing up, down, and sideways. And community management is often a customer service job with big gobs of emotional labor (example). By late 2013, I'd sort of plateaued; I wasn't learning as much and as fast as I wanted.
Hacker School gave me an opportunity to reset and to look at Wikimedia with new perspective, and to reawaken my interest in hands-on technical contribution and learning. I came back to a WMF that had just renewed its search for a FLOSS-savvy technical writer with programming skills. And, fortunately, my colleague Quim Gil was willing to make his interim position permanent, and keep on leading the team. So, as of about a month ago, I'm Senior Technical Writer at the Wikimedia Foundation.
And it's great. I've taken our Requests for Comment process in hand, started drafting improved architecture guidelines (not there yet) and our first unified set of performance guidelines, and started planning improved API documentation. And I've been learning bunches. I've learned enough to summarize REST and SOA and HTML templating systems as they relate to MediaWiki. I've learned how our caching layers work and how the new parser works. And I get to translate what I learn into prose and visuals to teach others, and I get to mentor intern Frances Hocutt as we both learn about the MediaWiki web API. For the last several weeks I've concentrated on understanding big things like how SOA will change our architecture, but post-PyCon I'm raring to code more; I'm looking forward to pair programming with Frances.
I feel so fortunate to have such a strong team. (This is one reason you hire people who could replace you - it gives you more room to change.) And I'm grateful to be at Wikimedia Foundation, an organization that nurtured and promoted me, gave me a three-month sabbatical to go to Hacker School, and helped me find different valuable work to do when I came back changed.
The two big problems I worked on as MediaWiki's community manager: inculcating empathy in others, and designing processes that scale. I made a dent in both, and I'll come back to them, and to management in general, in some future when I'm yet another Sumana, changed again.
# 27 Apr 2014, 09:07AM: Cool Open Source Bridge Proposals:
I have submitted a couple of talks to Open Source Bridge 2014: "The Outreach Program for Women: what works & what's next", with Liz Henry, and "A Few Python Tips", a solo effort and the most programming-centric conference talk I've ever proposed.
When I look at the proposals page I just grin so wide when I see so many proposals, on a zillion different topics, a ton of them from women and genderqueer folks! "You can be a kernel hacker"! Apprenticeships! "Power Tuning Linux: A Case Study"! "Replacing 'import' with 'accio': Compiling Pythons with Custom Grammar for the sake of a joke" and presenting as technical and stylishly female and "Making language selection smarter in Wikipedia" and dataviz and OpenStreetMap and mobile design and usability in privacy software and lessons from the Drupal Ladder initiative and Project Ascend and type systems and "Confessions of a DBA: worst and best things I've done in production"! And way more. What a set!
I last counted 189 proposals, 72 of them including as a speaker someone other than a cis man. That's about 38 percent. I hereby applaud the OSBridge organizers for making an inclusive all-genders tech conference where I'm never the only woman in the room.
I plan on going to OSBridge this year for the fifth year in a row
(Portland, Oregon in June), and this week I'll find out whether the organizers are accepting either of my talks. But I wanted to share this great feeling: I'm only one of many.
You can hire me through Changeset Consulting.
This work by Sumana Harihareswara is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available by emailing the author at sh@changeset.nyc.