Januar 2022 Archiv

Ca(r)ton.

Kartonkatzen können Leben retten.

Sabrina Burtscher: Was hat die Kartonkatze mit Informatik zu tun? (Science Slam Metropol 2017)

Less HOT, more ACDC.

Let's pause and summarize: our culture wants heroes and this leads us to expect maintainers to be superhackers and superactive hotlines. This is the HOT mindset of maintenance, where the maintainer is the Headmaster Of Tweaks and soon becomes the Headmaster Of Troubles.

To resist this HOT mindset, let's redefine maintenance as ACDC: Asynchronous Collective Distributed Care:

  • Asynchronous because time management is a private matter and we are all volunteers.
  • Collective because, well, no man is an island.
  • Distributed: the more power to the "edges", the more resilient the project is.
  • Care because this is all about care: with each other as users or as contributors, with the project's infrastructure (servers, websites, bug trackers, etc.) and care about having a useful product.

Bastien Guerry: How to help GNU Emacs maintainers?

Iumiumium.

Ab wann ist ein Sammelsurium eigentlich ein Brimborium?

The good and small life.

Caroline-letters tended to be full of talk about trees she had climbed, squirrels who had admitted her into their circle of trust, boys who had disgusted her, chess-games she had played via post against Leibniz, dreadful books she’d studied, wonderful books she’d read, the weather, logarithms, and timeless disputes among domestic animals.

Neal Stephenson: The Confusion

Reducositionality.

If the only way to understand anything, would be to understand everything, then we could understand nothing.

Samson Abramsky