PyCon in April, comedy, GSoC/Outreachy help, and more
PyCon US next month: a play, and slots for in-person chats. And: open source resources, comedy, tools & advice.
Hi, newsletter subscribers! Thanks for being interested in Changeset Consulting and my open source project management work and writing.
Today I'll invite you to meet with me or watch my talk at PyCon US next month, share some recent writing and stand-up comedy, and list a few useful new tools and resources.
(For hyperlinks, view as HTML or see the archived version on the web at https://buttondown.email/Changeset .)
PyCon: my talk/play & meeting availability
I plan to attend PyCon US in person this year (mid-April, Salt Lake City, Utah) to co-present a play called "Argument Clinic: What Healthy Professional Conflict Looks Like" with Jacob Kaplan-Moss.
What does healthy disagreement look like? Many of us have never experienced healthy conflict at work, and so assume our only options are to either avoid conflict or have a nasty fight. But it doesn't have to be that way: professional disagreement can be direct without being nasty. We want to show what that looks like.
In this model argument, presented as a play, watch two engineering managers disagree about something. How do they work through their disagreement -- politely and effectively? Watch our characters figure out what they're really clashing about, learn about each other's perspectives, and come to a better decision than either could alone.
Register for PyCon now so you can watch in-person or via livestream at 5pm MT on Friday, April 21st. Or wait for the recording afterwards.
And if you're coming to PyCon, let's meet in person and chat! I've set up a SavvyCal calendar so you can book a short free in-person meeting while we're both in Salt Lake City.
Resources for maintainers, open source users, & more
If your organization is mentoring with Google Summer of Code or Outreachy, I have time-tested guidance for you at my Resources page. Read "How to Teach and Include Volunteers who Write Poor Patches," "English Tutoring for Internship Applicants," and "Case Study of a Good Internship" to help with the next few months. "Advice for careers in open source" helps you structure career guidance sessions for your interns.
Recent blog posts
I was talking with a colleague about the fundamental reasons why some open source projects are procedurally but not substantively open, and how to mitigate the problems that friction causes. Reluctance To Process Contributions, and Tips from InnerSource (September) has three tips.
What You Miss By Only Checking GitHub (September) discusses supply chain security, funding, research and infrastructure support, and how to reach beyond GitHub.
Too many researchers, entrepreneurs, marketers, open source sustainability activists, and commentators assume that activity on GitHub and data from the GitHub API is a reasonable proxy for activity in and data about open source as a whole. It is not.
Mastodon, the Fediverse, and A Warning About Mastodon.social (November) covers why I chose to initially use Mastodon.social, why I moved to social.coop, and how you can factor sustainability into your choices.
Whisper is an open source speech recognition tool, and its accuracy and privacy preservation make it a game-changer for audio I spoke myself. Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why (December) talks about logistics, my use cases, and accuracy, and goes into my approach to reasoning about whether I can ethically use it and other artificial intelligence/machine learning tools like it.
We can design command line experiences for better user experience (March): I curated a few resources on UX guidelines, accessibility tips, and examples of error message usability from Rust and Elm.
Also, I re-published and commented on two classic posts by Alex Bayley: "The Pathway To Inclusion" ("six steps everyone needs to pass through, to get from never having heard of a thing to being deeply involved in it") and "The community spectrum: caring to combative".
Comedy
In late 2022 I performed three stand-up comedy sets about being a technologist, participating in and leading open source, and life online more generally. I gave the closing keynote address for SeaGL, and performed for !!Con and for a MetaFilter fundraiser. Video recordings are available for all three.
Tools and advice
Signal-boosting others' work:
The Python Package Index (PyPI) has a new blog!
The Sovereign Tech Fund "invests in the development, improvement and maintenance of open digital base technologies worldwide" -- if you thought this program was only for contributors living in Germany, it isn't!
"Managing Episodic Volunteers in Free/Libre/Open Source Software Communities" by Ann Barcomb, Klaas-Jan Stol, Brian Fitzgerald, and Dirk Riehle: If you coordinate volunteer work in a vibrant open source project, I recommend you read this 2020 research paper from start to finish.
BobaBoard's "joining a sprint" document for volunteers answers a lot of "what if I....?" questions that novices might have. And check out their 2022 retrospective as an example of announcements/requests communications.
"A while ago I made an addon for myself. It was essentially a tab FIFO (First In, First Out). It would only allow 10 tabs to be open at a time. If an 11th tab was created, the least recently activated tab would be closed." Throttle Tabs is a Firefox browser extension (an add-on) by Eitan Isaacson to help manage open tabs.
Heads-up: OpenSSL 1.x will no longer be supported after 2023-09-11.
When you realize you want to turn a private group chat conversation into a useful public document, Sisi Wei suggests:
Many times, it is only because a conversation was off the record that we are able to learn the most --- and after learning it, we realize that the broader community could benefit from learning it too. So how do we share knowledge from conversations we all agreed would be private, in a way that builds more trust instead of tearing it down? I'm so proud to announce the launch of "How to turn 🔒 Private Conversations into 🌳 Public Resources through 🤝 Community Consent", a step-by-step guide for journalists on how to use a consent-based, trust-building process to turn off-the-record conversations into public, shareable resources.
That's a resource in the DEI Coalition For Anti-Racist, Equitable, And Just Newsrooms collection.
Thanks
Best wishes, as always.
If you'd like to ask for my availability for your projects, or invite me to speak, please reply to this mail or contact me in the Fediverse -- I'm on Mastodon as @brainwane@social.coop.
-Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset Consulting