August 18th, 2020
Michael Kaminsky recently emailed me an interesting post he wrote about bounties in open source, and I took the opportunity to write up some thoughts that had been swirling in my head for a while. You can find the (lightly edited) response I sent to hi...
May 12th, 2019
A special characteristic of open source software (OSS) is that you don't need institutional support to get started. It's interesting to compare this to physical infrastructure, like dams or railroads. Before you can begin those projects, you need upfro...
February 8th, 2019
Alvaro VidelaProgramming as translationConverting the real world into digital abstractions requires distillation. And, like literary translators, developers must understand their biases.Part ofIssue 8 Feb 2019InternationalizationWhat does it mean ‘to ...
August 22nd, 2018
I gave in to my paranoid tendencies today and wrote a little backup script for Twitter, which I figured I'd share here.
Two requirements: github.com/sferik/t: A command-line power tool for Twittergithub.com/wireservice/csvkit: A suite of utilities for...
June 3rd, 2018
Epistemic status: High confidence about the pros/cons discussed regarding my own experience, fairly low confidence about the parts I heard secondhand.
Epistemic effort: Low-to-medium effort. I realized these things were connected while I was in the sh...