Direct download link: Interview with Sumana Harihareswara.
In this week’s episode, Christie chats with Sumana about leveling up as a tech activist, what makes Recurse Center and !!Con special (see also, Toward a !!Con Aesthetic), her business Changeset Consulting, and much more!
Show Notes
- Miro and the Participatory Culture Foundation
- GNOME
- Open Source Bridge
- Sumana’s OSBridge keynote
- Changeset Consulting
- PyCon sprints
- GNU Mailman
- Zulip, Outreachy internships and eligibility, Zulip recruiting Outreachy interns
- Wikimedia Foundation
- Wikipedia editor decline
- MediaWiki and its API and architecture & performance documentation
- MediaWiki Request for Comment process
- Wikidata queryable open database
- TL;DR (now the developer relations group)
- Christie on remote work
- Sumana leaving Wikimedia Foundation
- Emotional labor
- Camille Fournier
- Recurse Center, RC diversity grants, Code Words, RC social rules RC blog RC Twitter
- Julia Evans
- Rust, a systems programming language
- Aaron Swartz
- Seth Schoen
- Sumana’s blog posts from RC
- Google, gossip, and gamification by Sumana — also see “the anxiety of learning and how I am beating it” and “From ‘sit still’ to ‘scratch your own itch'”
- Scheme
- Carol Dweck’s growth-versus-fixed mindset and learning strategies for programmers
- Choral explanations
- Greg Wilson
- Boston Python Workshop
- CodingBat
- “Missing From Wikipedia”
- firecat’s analogy on activism and chorus
- Outreachy internship where Sumana mentored Frances Hocutt
- !!Con
- Sumana on why Julia Evans’s blog is so great
- Allison Parrish & her talk “Lossy text compression, for some reason?!”
- “Upstream/Downstream: Discovering and Displaying Watershed Topology! By Mark Phillips”
- “Ink on fingers! The history of printing (with code!) By Mariko Kosaka”
- “Keynote: The Creative Programmer By Catt Small”
- Portland’s Resolution Fest, October 1-8
- Programming zines by Sailor Mercury and Julia Evans
- AlterConf
- PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) & GPG (GNU Privacy Guard)
- Andrea Phillips & Sumana use the Tron:Legacy soundtrack for work
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- HTTPS Everywhere
- @changesetllc and @brainwane
Community Announcements
The Responsible Communication Style Guide
We’re excited to announce our first book project! Part of what makes The Recompiler special is the attention and care we put toward writing about the users and creators of technology in a way that’s inclusive and respectful of diverse identities. This is so rewarding, and yet we’ve struggled to find adequate references to follow.
This fall, we’ll be working with Thursday Bram to create a book on inclusive writing and technology, called The Responsible Communication Style Guide: technology and beyond. It’s a big project, and we need your help.
Transcript
We’ve started adding transcripts to our podcasts! If you’d like to see this continue, we need your support. The cost of commissioning a transcript is about a dollar a minute, which means for a typical episode we pay between $30-60. Our podcast doesn’t have sponsors like you might see elsewhere, because we’ve decided to focus on communicating as directly as possible with our listeners and readers. So here’s the pitch: pledge at least $1 each podcast, and if enough of you do this to cover at least half the expense of transcription for the podcast episode, we’ll make sure it continues.
Issue 4: Legacy Systems
Our latest issue is in the shop and online now! Issue 4: Legacy systems focuses on how systems and code change over time, and how we maintain them. In this issue we have tips on how to maintain legacy code bases effectively, a history of the GNOME project and how it relates to urban change, a case study on working with legacy data, and other interesting and informative articles. Order now!
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