I'm running a fundraiser for the Election Protection Hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE. No matter your position on the 2024 US election, I'm guessing you want the votes counted fairly. So I'm trying to raise USD $25,000 for …
My mother died recently, after a long decline in her health, and I was one of the main people who helped take care of her. (Here’s her obituary.) While caring for her, preparing for her …
Someone asked me for pointers on doing product management (and, to a lesser extent, project management) in Free/Libre Open Source Projects for the first time, after many years of experience in proprietary software. I basically …
Leonard and I frequently play edutainment webgames, and thus we're slowly getting better at various realms of human knowledge. Recently we've added a few new games to the rotation. Metaflora has clarified for us how …
My country's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) offers a bunch of free independent study online classes. I started poking around and there's some neat stuff in there.You can read all the material for free online, …
Someone in a group chat mentioned a particular annoyance in dealing with doctors, nurses, and similar medical experts. Sometimes you take pains to ask them a specific, deliberately-worded question, and they don't really seem to …
Colleagues ask me for advice on diversifying their hiring pipelines, recruiting and retaining volunteer contributors, and addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in marketing to and taking care of their users. Here are a few …
I have learned or re-learned a smattering of lessons in the last few months, concerning athletic activities and inhabiting my body in general.Sometimes, when I do crunches or sit-ups or similar abdominal exercises, my neck …
I started on a more systematic 2023 retrospective post, and found that a pretty significant amount of my 2023 centered on stuff I don't want to talk about on my blog. Feel free to ask …
You are a selected audience. That is to say, you have selected, yourself, to read this. You have a variety of reasons to do so, and I imagine that, for some of you, you do …
How should we think about trust when it comes to adding new maintainers to a project? Another way of saying that is: if I'm an existing project maintainer, considering whether to entrust you with co-maintainership, …
I'm partway through a wilderness medicine textbook from NOLS (formerly National Outdoor Leadership School). Something from the section on burns keeps ringing in my head because it's interesting in its literal truth but also figuratively …
(This is one of the "people are wrong on the internet!!!" posts I write to clear it out of my head. And then refer back to later in future arguments, in imagined triumph, as though …
Please help join a celebration for the 20th anniversary of the software project Beautiful Soup on May 19th, 2024! For twenty years, this screen-scraping library has made it easier to get data out of HTML.You …
A few times in the past week, I've spoken with artists who are working on uncomfortable art -- the kind of art that intentionally challenges the audience with displeasure. In one of them, it's like …
I love The Great Gatsby (if you absolutely loathe it, turn back now!) and recently got to watch a preview performance of a Broadway theatrical adaptation (opens April 25th). I have already inflicted several thoughts …
If you work on open source software, especially command-line tools, I want you to know about newly available research reports and design guidance, and a user research HOWTO, that you can pick up and reuse.The …
Today I’m giving the closing keynote address at PyCon US 2024, sharing “Untold stories from six years working on Python packaging.”I aim to post a fuller transcript with slides within the next several weeks. But, …
We live in interesting times.A friend of mine was taking an online class yesterday, and big national news (President Biden deciding not to pursue re-election) interrupted that class. The news distracted everyone and shattered concentration.Sometimes …
In mid-June I caught COVID-19 for, I'm pretty sure, the first time. The current dominant variants are transmissible enough that they got past my defenses. I believe I caught the virus either while wearing an …
The cybersecurity expert SwiftOnSecurity, a decade ago, wrote a parable called "A Story About Jessica" and posted it to their (now-deleted) Tumblr blog. I found it moving and insightful. The consultancy Superbloom pointed to it …
My friend Mel Chua died this week.I'm middle-aged now. I started this weblog as a young adult, and now it's been more than twenty years, and today I'm really feeling that change.Nearly eleven years ago, …
This week, US Presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced that her choice to join her on the ballot as running mate is Tim Walz, who's currently governor of Minnesota.A number of people on Bluesky, in the …
My friend Ned Batchelder posted, "A list of commits is not a changelog!" and spurred this post.Summary: We'd all benefit from restoring the distinction between a detailed changelog and brief release notes, but that's hard …
On a weekend morning many years ago, the constant low-level radiation of mailing list fracas led me to idly fantasize of sending a beseeching plaintive-yet-rousing post to one of them:Do you think there is no …
A fictional example:You're in a volunteer group that does a public service chore, like sprucing up a local park or maintaining a health information website. It's been around for many years. Most people treat each …