For posterity, a few threads from this past week’s Sackler Colloquium. Maneesh Agrawala’s talk deconstructing data visualizations .@magrawala is deconstructing charts and graphs for us at #createcollab2018 @theNASciences — nikki stevens (@drnikki) March 13, 2018 A thread on Fernanda Viegas’s talk about Visualization in Machine Learning...
This month I didn’t do a very good job of what I’d tried to do last month - which is focus on only a few things. I read widely for a few reasons...
This month, I’m focused on getting a few big presentations ready, and writing a three large projects. I’m trying not to get interested in anything new (which is hard, because there’s so many good and interesting things!...
i write code in public… Over the semester break, I cleaned up my filing system and archived all of the writing that I did last semester - approximately 30,000 words. As I was putting it away, and sometimes even as I was writing it, I thought - what a shame that I can’t do anything else with all of this work…...
(this was originally posted on the HASTAC website as part of my HASTAC 17-19 Scholars participation.) The bibliography that follows is a first iteration of works that I’m gathering to explore epistemological and structural parallels between distributed ledger technology (aka blockchain) and whisper networks (as defined as “An informal chain of conversations among members of an oppressed or marginalized group about oppressors who need to be watched because of predatory behavior” expanded from definition here)....
(this was originally posted on the HASTAC website as part of my HASTAC 17-19 Scholars participation.) I started a PhD program this semester, and I vowed not to repeat some of the mistakes of my master's thesis....
The semester is finally over! I made it out without too many tears, and I spent the semester break doing some school reading but mostly I read junk and loved it....
November was a shorter school month, and was mostly filled with doing everything I could to get things ready for spring and wrapped up for fall. I did a lot of writing for assignments and projects, and made a conscious effort to not read more than I needed to and to instead work to integrate what I’d already read....
I spent October juggling projects (many not my own), and found that I was returning to some fundamental questions that I left unanswered (or didn’t answer satisfactorily) at the start of the semester:...
Sharing some thoughts about Robert Pielke’s The Honest Broker and whether it’s applicable to technology contexts. Often, when we talk about science and technology, we talk about them as one field: “science and technology....
I spent September struggling to stay afloat. The way work was structured, I was able to spend time thinking about fewer ideas, but exploring them more fully. This month, those ideas were:...
Before it all evaporates into internet ephemera, and in lieu of a proper blog post, here is my OSSummit in tweets: Say hi if you are also at #OSSummit pic.twitter.com/hpr0xOLYgH...
I spent August getting used to being back in class, and thinking about: how do engineers think about engineering ethics on a day-to-day basis (if at all)? just because we can build something, does that mean we should?...
I spent July thinking about open source community health: how do measures of open source project success interact with measures of community health? (they don’t, because no measures of community health exist) what would a “healthy” open source community look like?...
I have often thought, “I wish I knew what people in [insert name of PhD program] were reading.” because I wanted to do that same reading. Some courses had syllabi available, some had notes, but it was hard to get a sense of the themes that were being discussed....
Nick and I met at Drupalcon New Orleans to discuss doing a survey to get some data about the diversity within the community of people who make the internet. Many such surveys have been done (here two: Slack and New Relic) but we wanted approach everything differently....
At Drupalcon New Orleans, I held a BOF entitled “Keeping it Exciting After All these Years.” It was a small group - seven people, including myself. We discussed some the ways that we find technology work to have transformed from genuine enthusiasm resembling “I can’t believe people pay me to do this!...
Making bad hiring choices I’ve been actively interviewing and part of the hiring process for engineers, project managers and product owners for the last 8 years. In that time, I’ve probably hired about 30 people (fewer if you exclude long-term contractors) to work with me directly, and been a voice at the table for the hiring of about another 20 people....
Several times in my career, I’ve entered companies with the opportunity to “build my own team.” For whatever reason (and that reason will become important later), the company had been outsourcing all of their web development to an (often offshore) agency....
(Update as of September 2022: Folks it is. I leave these old posts up in the spirit of open source and as an act of transparency — we are all growing, still, and I can look back at old posts like these and see how my thinking has changed....