(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.) ...
No binders They may not be in Binders, but it's a room full of womentechies. #TechInMotion twitter.com/mmsuperflyjr/s… — Mallory Johns (@mmsuperflyjr) March 21, 2013 Last night at AlleyNYC, I was part of the Women in Tech panel at the Tech in Motion meetup. On the eve of the SendGrid/Adria/PyCon debacle, we met to talk about being women in leadership positions, obstacles we’ve overcome, and advice for women who want to be leaders (and the men that are in their lives). ...
I recently became a Director of Engineering at a startup and one of my first official tasks was to revitalize the company’s very stale developer blog. I started thinking about what makes a good dev blog, and began writing up recommendations for what I thought the team should do. I got all the way through these and realized that I could have gone into nearly any startup and given this same advice. So, here is some advice on how to run your startup’s developer blog. ...
Next Friday, I’ll be presenting at SandCamp on best practices for teams. Naturally, I’ve been thinking about what makes a good team in general, and a good software development team specifically. For most of my career, I’ve been part of development teams at development shops or technical companies. Those places already had forward-thinking technical people making infrastructure decisions and crafting the technical culture (for better or worse). By the time I came along, most of the kinks had been worked out. ...
Recently, I worked on a project where the client controlled their production environment. They’re using EdgeCast and we didn’t have access to force a cache clear when deploying new releases to production. So we’d push, ask them to clear cache, and wait as many as 8 - 10 hours to make sure everything was working fine. This sucks, but what I didn’t expect was that even after they cleared the cache, old files were still being served. So we’d ask for another cache clear, and wait. This was as painful as it sounds. ...
One of my favorite things about being a programmer is that I can figure out ways to solve little problems. Little non-problems, even. Over the last week, there have been Time Warner internet outages in my neighborhood. ...
I spent today debugging a multilingual django app that I didn’t write. The problem is that the site’s language was being changed when you used the language switcher, but not if you typed in the url. So http://example.com/fr would only occasionally land you on the French version of the site. When you’re using custom language codes for any reason (in our case, we were matching the client’s lang codes) you’re going to have to set the app’s language. ...
We (LBi US, where I’m a developer) just launched TweetSinger.com, a Sony Mobile campaign site for their new Xperia series phones. This was my first large non-Drupal project in a while and it was fun to get to do something different. ...
Update: Just so it doesn’t get lost, there is also this post on g.d.o: During introductions at last night’s New York City Drupal User Group (NYCDUG) meetup, each person said a variation of “Hi my name is _____. My drupal.org name is ______. I’m a __________ at _________.” Some included how long they’d been working with drupal, usually because it had only been a few months. It’s a nice thing to share because it reminds the rest of us to make sure we’re not leaving anyone out when we casually mention advanced concepts. I think the community is pretty good at embracing the tentative and uncertain beginners and making them feel included. ...
In case you missed my presentation this afternoon, you can get slides, see tests, read notes and etc. etc at https://github.com/drnikki/Drupal-Camp-NYC-10 If you were in my presentation and had a question we didn’t cover, check out the README.txt. ...
(October 12, 2017) What follows is my thesis from the University of Hawai`i. It’s included here for anyone interested in grassroots activist organizing and its impact on the participants. Reading this over, it feels like I wrote it 20 years and 100 books ago, and I’m thankful that my opinions and insight have evolved (for better or worse) since I wrote this. I believe that it’s important to practice openness wherever possible, and am publishing this in that spirit. ...