16 May 2017, 17:56 p.m.

PyCon & WisCon

I just updated my "Talks" page -- I'll be at PyCon May 19-25, to represent Zulip at a booth and then to help run the Zulip development sprint. I will likely also have a new …

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10 May 2017, 9:59 a.m.

OSCON, For a Single Day

I'm going to be at OSCON in Austin, Texas to represent Zulip in the Open Source Alley tomorrow (Thursday) 10am-4:30pm. Please consider coming by and getting a demo, or just talking with us about Python …

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07 May 2017, 8:18 a.m.

Timesaving Negativism or Masculine Calumnies?

"Do your lairstone relations HAVE to come over?" she snooted. "Look, my uncles are almost done repairing their peatship, so happiest case, this is the last time for a long while." "After all day patching …

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20 Apr 2017, 12:02 p.m.

Penguicon, Orwell, ETAOINSHRDLU, and Being Important

When I was eight or nine years old, I think my parents went through a chunk of "how do we support this weird kid?" planning and work. Around this time I remember coming across a …

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17 Apr 2017, 9:15 a.m.

Alternate Questions

Is it still in vogue for US tech companies to ask quantitative estimation/implausible-problem questions like "how many phone booths/piano tuners are there in Manhattan?" in hiring interviews, particularly for programming-related jobs? Fog Creek asked me …

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07 Apr 2017, 15:36 p.m.

Inclusive-Or: Hospitality in Bug Tracking

Lindsey Kuper asked: I’m interested in hearing about [open source software] projects that have successfully adopted an "only insiders use the issue tracker" approach. For instance, a project might have a mailing list where users …

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07 Apr 2017, 9:08 a.m.

Changing How I Deal With Those Humiliating Teenage Memories

When I was in high school in Lodi, California, I worked on the school newspaper. It came out every two weeks; we gave it to the printer on Tuesday night or early Wednesday, I think, …

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05 Apr 2017, 17:49 p.m.

The Rumpelstiltskin Fallacy

I sometimes sum up the lesson of a liberal arts education as: socially constructed things are real, too. And you are not immune from their effects, no matter how smart you are or whether you've …

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04 Apr 2017, 12:37 p.m.

How to Teach And Include Volunteers who Write Poor Patches

You help run an open source software community, and you've successfully signalled that you're open to new contributors, including people who aren't professional software engineers. And you've already got an easy developer setup process and …

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03 Apr 2017, 12:41 p.m.

A Small Language Note

I try not to say "don't get discouraged," because to me that sounds like telling someone not to cry or telling someone to calm down. It's a way of saying "stop feeling what you're feeling." …

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