Eldercare, Family Caretaking, and End-of-life Logistics: Stuff I Learned My mother died this year, after a long decline in her health, and I was one of the main people who helped take care of her. While caring for her, preparing for her death, and handling logistics afterwards, I learned a lot from online resources (including MetaFilter), various professionals, and friends. So I'm trying to pass on some things I learned -- about paperwork, patient advocacy, body donation, delegating to friends, coping with Mom's delirium and incontinence, and more -- by sharing them in a blog post I have been working on for months. It was pretty hard to write in places, and I hope it saves people a few unpleasant surprises.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by brainwane at 9:20 AM on November 9, 2023

Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day Lots of important things depend on volunteer labor - local civic groups, open source software projects, and more. But maybe you are getting exhausted, burned out, from trying to volunteer too much. So: every solstice (the next one is December 21st), it might make sense to take a look at your volunteer responsibilities, and see if it's time to pause, rotate, or sunset one of them. Feel free to point to the Volunteer Responsibility Amnesty Day page as a way of saying: I need to put a few things down. I hope other people pick them up and carry this work forward. But even if no one does, I need to stop, or at least pause for a while.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by brainwane at 9:19 AM on December 1, 2021

What caused institutions to take Y2K seriously? When you know there's a big upcoming threat, how do you get big institutions to commit and follow through? And in particular, how useful is it to frighten whole populaces? Someone in a MetaTalk discussion of doom-saying and climate change made a claim that led me to ask: how did institutions get convinced to take the Year 2000 problem seriously and mitigate it? Was widespread consumer panic a necessary precondition? Would similar preconditions need to hold in order for institutions to take climate change seriously? I investigated the research literature and wrote up my findings in a blog post.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by brainwane at 2:01 PM on September 5, 2020

autoconf 2.69b GNU Autoconf is "a tool for producing configure scripts for building, installing and packaging software on computer systems". It's been around since 1991 and it's been neglected -- eight years since the last release. I've helped Zack Weinberg make a new beta release, 2.69b, on the way to a proper release of 2.70 in a few months. If you care about things like Makefiles, check this out and test it.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by brainwane at 12:41 PM on July 14, 2020

The Art of Python: theater/video festival about programming "The Art of Python" was a miniature arts festival on Friday, May 3rd, at PyCon North America 2019, focusing on narrative, performance, and visual art "that helps us share our emotionally charged experiences of programming (particularly in Python)." It featured 4 short plays, a song, and a video remix. I started and chaired the festival. Then I wrote up a retrospective with photos, discussing why I started "The Art of Python", what led up to it, and how I feel about its future. Since I cannot be one of the co-organizers for "The Art of Python" at PyCon North America in 2020, I’ve also prepared a HOWTO guide for people who want to do this sort of thing in the future.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by brainwane at 1:34 PM on November 4, 2019

18 short plays about Python and programming At the PyGotham 2018 tech conference, Jason Owen and I presented "Python Grab Bag: A Set of Short Plays", inspired by the Neo-Futurists' show "The Infinite Wrench". The 40-minute video is up on YouTube and my blog post links to the script and slides, credits the crew and cast, deep-links to the specific timecodes for individual plays, and gives citations for the references we made.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by brainwane at 10:31 AM on March 29, 2019

Code Review, Forwards and Back Your team’s code review practices cause ripple effects far into the future. In this play, see several ways a single code review can go, then fast-forward and rewind to see the effects – on codebase and culture – of different code review approaches. Video recording of a 22-minute play about code review, mentorship, tech management, and regret. Premiered on October 6th, 2017 at PyGotham in New York City. Announcement blog post ("it's Run Lola Run but about code review") and wrapup post (audience responses included "I used to be that reviewer and I'm trying not to be anymore" and "I don't code at all but this is a marvelous management parable").
posted to MetaFilter Projects by brainwane at 6:54 AM on November 20, 2017

Pipeline: a vid critiquing the tech industry I made a political video remix/fanvid using Taylor Swift's song "Blank Space" to criticize hypocrisy in the tech industry's recruiting narratives. Specifically, I wanted to vivisect the ways the mainstream US software industry tries to attract marginalized people, especially women, into engineering careers, but doesn't take care to keep people who have entered the "pipeline." I montaged visuals from documentaries, movies, TV, comics, coding bootcamp ads, blog posts by tech feminists, and more. I've also posted a detailed making-of essay with links to nearly all of my video and web sources; I used free and open source software. All in all (including learning how to vid), this took about 75 hours to make.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by brainwane at 8:01 AM on October 29, 2015

Randomized Dystopia Are you tired of the same old dystopias? Why not write about tyrannies that deny different rights? Try Randomized Dystopia!
posted to MetaFilter Projects by brainwane at 10:56 PM on March 23, 2015

Joel on Coal Software blogger Joel Spolsky has a new blog, where he discusses coal mining and its astounding parallels to software development and management. "The other crucial thing about having a schedule is that it forces you to decide what seams you are going to choose, and then it forces you to pick the least safe corridors and cut them rather than slipping into pillar-robbing (a.k.a. slope creep)."
posted to MetaFilter Projects by brainwane at 10:10 PM on March 31, 2011