Posts tagged python

We don’t do that here: Setting social norms

I have long been a fan of social rules to make events more inclusive. Ever since I attended my first tech conference, I’ve seen the career-enhancing power of events, but they have never been equally accessible to all people.

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One Percent for Open Source

The open source ecosystem is the most valuable part of the software industry today. From the programming languages to the web frameworks, the operating system to the cryptography, all software companies today use open source.

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Conference Mentorship

I have had the opportunity to provide mentorship to folks who have organized conferences twice in 2017. Through this process I have realized the value in this practice, and I’d like to write this to promote others to do to same for first year conference organizers.

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The post I never published

Looking back, the file was created on my 29th birthday:

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Breaking Cliques at Events: The Snowball Rule

I’ve been going to professional events for a number of years, and one of the trickiest dynamics I have seen is that most events develop an “insiders” group who has been going for a long time. These groups tend to feel like exclusionary cliques for first-time attendees, and actively hurt the community’s goal of inclusion.

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Documentation is JSON for the Brain

When you are writing software, you build a mental model of the program in your brain. This is how you make decisions and reason about how the program might work, how data flows, or what designs make the most sense.

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Semantic Meaning in Authoring Documentation

Semantic Meaning in documentation is the separation of what something is from what it looks like. What we mean and what we display are very different things.

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Funding Open Source with Marketing Money

Often times as developers we see funding open source as a charity. We will give our personal money to projects we believe in. If we’re lucky, our company might have a matching program for our donations. This has proven not to be a sustainable way to support open source.

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Hey there! I'm Eric and I work on communities in the world of software documentation. Feel free to email me if you have comments on this post!