Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

Tag
Work

18 Sep 2017, 11:01 a.m.

On Noticing That Your Project Is Draining Your Soul

I was talking with a fellow consultant about what to do if you have a gig getting you down. Especially when you realize that the client isn't being helpful, and there's a bunch of learning …

Read More
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 …

Read More
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 …

Read More
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 …

Read More
16 Mar 2017, 17:37 p.m.

What Does An Award Do?

I posted on MetaFilter about the new Disobedience Award that MIT Media Lab is starting (nomination deadline: May 1st). And in the comments there, I stumbled into talking about why one might found an award, …

Read More
31 Oct 2016, 11:47 a.m.

How Do We Encourage Technologists in the Public Interest?

As I mentioned when the Recompiler interviewed me, my inspirations and role models in technology are technologists who serve the public interest. The person who introduced me to free and open source software, Seth Schoen, …

Read More
27 Oct 2016, 11:06 a.m.

Learning Styles

For years, while mentoring others, I've been using these engineering learning styles as a tool to help newer engineers reflect on how they learn, and to give them a sense of the possible toolbox of …

Read More
12 Oct 2016, 11:00 a.m.

Rough Notes for New FLOSS Contributors On The Scientific Method and Usable History

Some thrown-together thoughts towards a more comprehensive writeup. It's advice on about how to get along better as a new open source participant, based on the fundamental wisdom that you weren't the first person here …

Read More
10 Aug 2016, 10:17 a.m.

Grief

It's been a tough week. Wednesday of last week, I learned that Kevin Gorman had died. He was only 24 years old. I met Kevin through my work at the Wikimedia Foundation. He was a …

Read More
04 Aug 2016, 15:51 p.m.

Advice on Starting And Running A New Open Source Project

Recently, a couple of programmers asked me for advice on starting and running a new open source project. So, here are some thoughts, assuming you're already a programmer, you haven't led a team before, and …

Read More