Oh hey, Iām going to be speaking at Crater Remote Conf on July 13th! Tickets are up for sale. And React Europe is coming up soon, too. Itās going to be a busy summer.
What I did last week
- I finished my first major colorwork project! I think that stranded colorwork is pretty fun.
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Attempted a laser-cut of a set of Esperanto Scrabble tiles. This did not go quite so well, though I think I learned some useful things from it - hopefully Iāll do a write-up soon.
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I made my first 3D print! I downloaded this awesome Bulbasaur planter off of Thingiverse and took some notes. Now I just have to find a plant for itā¦
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Swatched for my next big knitting project - Iām going to start a sweater soon, I think.
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Ordered a bunch of things from Adafruit, mostly class supplies. Theoretically Iām going to teach that soldering class?
What Iām reading
I feel like my RSS and Twitter feeds have been full of great stuff this week.
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My friend Jonathan Balsano published a blog post on reducing jank in D3 when working with large datasets for Mongoās engineering blog. Iām largely a dabbler in D3, so itās always interesting to read about people using it on more substantial projects.
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Open datasets and accountability: I Quant NY writes about identifying spurious parking tickets and contacting the NYPD. Thereās a happy ending!
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An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design, a paper by Casey Fiesler at CHI 2016. A cool read about how an open source project attempted to incorporate existing community norms into design. Abstract:
Rarely are computing systems developed entirely by members of the communities they serve, particularly when that community is underrepresented in computing. Archive of Our Own (AO3), a fan fiction archive with nearly 750,000 users and over 2 million individual works, was designed and coded primarily by women to meet the needs of the online fandom community. Their design decisions were informed by existing values and norms around issues such as accessibility, inclusivity, and identity. We conducted interviews with 28 users and developers, and with this data we detail the history and design of AO3 using the framework of feminist HCI and focusing on the successful incorporation of values into design. We conclude with considering examples of complexity in values in design work: the use of design to mitigate tensions in values and to influence value formation or change.
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Sexism, science reporting, and the biological clock: the Guardian has a great piece called The foul reign of the biological clock that traces the appearance of this idea to a 1978 article.
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White people donāt use white emoji, or so claims Andrew McGill in the Atlantic. I love talking about emoji! And the squeamishness around using the white emoji is definitely something that Iāve observed.
White people donāt have to use racemoji or risk denying their identity, as Mukerjee does; the default works fine. Perhaps the squeamishness on the part of whites has more to do with the acknowledgement that only white people hold this special privilege; to use the white emoji is to express a solidarity with people of color that does not exist.
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Bad advice I have received on learning to program / be a developer, by Kylie Stradley. āWhen you are learning to code, you often receive a lot of advice. Some of it you ask for, but there is also some advice given freely without request.ā She also has a great post on how to ask for career advice.
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The legal structure behind Kickstarterās commitment to ādo goodā is really interesting. Kickstarter has a legally binding duty to provide benefits to society. I think thatās awesome and Iām really curious to know more about how that works. I think thatās there something really cool about using the legal system to compell a company to do good instead of compelling the company to make money; I wonder how it plays out.
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Facebook has open-sourced their Capture-the-Flag hacking challenges. Iāve never done a CTF before and Iām kind of curious! Maybe at some point Iāll get around to it.
What I didnāt do
I didnāt get language practice time in this week. I also didnāt have time to work on my video tutorials. Maybe next week!