Questions from the Open Source AI Definition session
What was discussed in the Q&A section of the Open Source Initiative’s session at Open Source Summit Europe 2024?
julia ferraioli
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The Open Source AI Definition: where's the data?
Two years into the “multi-stakeholder process” to define what constitutes as “open source AI”, we are facing a number of issues that are immense, fraught, and nuanced. Why are data excluded from the proposed definition, why are they important, and why are we even doing this?
Understanding open source licenses
How developers interpret and understand open source licenses, with a love letter to good research.
Open source licensing, creativity, innovation, freedom
The definition of open source isn’t arbitrary; it was designed to preserve the rights of those who create open source and codify the responsibilities of those use it. Its hard-won definition deserves defending, even if it is at times inconvenient.
Valuing undervalued superpowers
On doing glue work, a critical role that is too often considered expendable.
A critical look at the disparity of failures in demographic inference tools
What’s in a name? What’s not in a name? And why does this rose not smell so sweet?
Breaking down implications in data and data collection
Who is present in the data we collect? Who isn’t? And what does it matter?
Accessibility is More Than Ramps
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. While the day focuses on digital accessibility, I’d like to take the opportunity to talk about an important aspect of prioritizing accessibility in the technology that we build: creating environments that include disabled employees.
What chickens can teach us about storytelling
🐔🐔🐔
Disability realism and emotional labor
This month’s influential articles dive into discriminatory behavior along two different axes.
Using Dataview with the Obsidian Rolodex
Turning my Obsidian Rolodex into a queryable database!
How we write, what we write, and the art therein
This month’s influential articles take a close look at expression.
Changing how we impact culture and engineering complexity
Over the years, I’ve built up a repository of resources that have shaped my thinking about software engineering, open source, work, life, and so much more. Every so often, I reference them in conversation and am asked for links, other recommendations, and thoughts or commentary about them. This year, I’ll be posting two or three every month, both as a way to revisit them as well as…
Using Obsidian as a Rolodex
As someone who grew up without always having a computer on hand, I have an endless supply of notebooks that are scattered throughout the house. If you leafed through one, you’d discover everything from sketches to hastily jotted down dimensions to contextless phrases that surely were important at the time. I do love the act of writing, but it doesn’t work amazingly well for…
Open source and social systems
Shifting the view of open source from the resulting code to the social systems that create the code is critical when driving towards long-term sustainability of technology as a whole.
Bringing together a social model of open source
What can we do with a social model of open source? The opportunities are endless.
Identifying and sharing the status of open source projects
Identifying and sharing the status of open source projects.
Five ways to care for your open source contributors
How to encourage a thriving open source community.
Why your git email address matters
The email that you use with your open source commits isn’t just perfunctory—it can communicate intent and important context
How to empower your open source users and contributors
Breaking down the barriers to open source contribution.
Why open source projects should embrace operational transparency
There’s so much more to open source than what fits into a license.
A vision for a social model of open source
There’s so much more to open source than what fits into a license.
So you're working from home: a primer, part 2
Hopefully you’ve identified rituals for your “commute” and have set up your space in a way that’s conducive to work. But how do you go from turning around and asking your colleague a question to communicating and collaborating in a much more…intentional way? The virtual “turn around” (🎶bright eyes🎶) If you work on a team that’s used to being largely in person together (or in clusters),…
So you're working from home: a primer, part 1
With so many people suddenly working remotely, I thought I’d share some tips that I’ve learned over the years as I’ve worked from home. As many are discovering, it’s not just a matter of opening up your laptop on your couch and getting to work. There are lots of distractions and differences – some subtle, some not – when working from home. Getting ready and winding down If you’ve been…
Using image descriptions in Instagram posts
It’s pretty common knowledge now that you can set image descriptions on Twitter, but did you know that you can set them on your Instagram posts too? Here’s a quick tutorial on how to do it. Let’s say I want to share a photo of my dog, Luna. The first steps are the same as the usual Instagram process: I select a photo, apply a filter, and write a description.
Building Compassion
A talk presented at Monktoberfest 2019. Full slides: PDF Video Transcript I’m really grateful to be here, thank you Steve for inviting me. I wonder if he really knows what he got himself into! Some people know part what I’ve gone through over the past six years that have led to this talk, but very few people know the impact it has had on me as a person. I’m a pretty quiet person…
Using buffer to set image descriptions
Descriptions on images, also known as alt-text, are important for people reading your content using a screen reader or other assistive technology. Screen readers synthesize on-screen text, which allows people who are blind or have low vision to interact with technology. However, images cannot be “read out loud” the same way that text can, so screen readers rely on the person posting…
Conference: All Things Open 2018
All Things Open is a conference dedicated to open source tech and practices. Although ostensibly focused on tech in the enterprise, many of the talks applied to non-enterprise audiences as well. It’s a multi-multi-multi-track conference, with 4000+ attendees, held in Raleigh, NC. I hadn’t attended before, and since I live so close now, I decided to go! I’m all for the hallway…
Writing Accessible Go
A talk presented at GopherCon 2018. Full slides: PDF Transcript Hi, my name is Julia Ferraioli and this is Writing Accessible Go. First off, for those who would prefer to read a transcript alongside this talk, you can find a preliminary one here. Once the video is posted, I’ll go update that transcript to match what I’ve said here – hopefully there won’t be too many…
2FA, SMS, and you
2-Factor Authentication (2FA) or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) are ways of securing accounts above and beyond normal password protection. Typically, we think of 2FA as something you know (your password) and something you have (a device). The idea is that if you compromise one, you still can’t get access to the protected resource. A room protected by a keypad and ID card reader is a great…
Testing in Go: testing floating point numbers
I’ve been working on a library that includes some vector manipulations in Go, trying to follow good development practices and starting with writing my tests first. But early on, I ran into a bit of a problem: floating points. The problem Now, we know that floating points are an issue in programming, by the very nature of how they’re represented in memory. I loved Julia Evans’s…
Preparing a talk: presenting
I’ve given a number of talks, and over the years I’ve made the journey from completely unprepared to mostly knowing what I’m doing. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve settled into a routine that works for me. This has been the advice I’ve given to a number of folks who are looking to start speaking, or improve their existing technique. I’ll break it down into…
Preparing a talk: writing your talk
I’ve given a number of talks, and over the years I’ve made the journey from completely unprepared to mostly knowing what I’m doing. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve settled into a routine that works for me. This has been the advice I’ve given to a number of folks who are looking to start speaking, or improve their existing technique. I’ll break it down into…
Preparing a talk: before you start
I’ve given a number of talks, and over the years I’ve made the journey from completely unprepared to mostly knowing what I’m doing. After a lot of trial and error, I’ve settled into a routine that works for me. This has been the advice I’ve given to a number of folks who are looking to start speaking, or improve their existing technique. Empty Auditorium, Flickr image…
One Piece of Advice
A couple of weeks ago, Jessica Rose posed this question to the tech crowd: What piece of advice do you wish you had been given when you entered the industry? — Jessica Rose (@jesslynnrose) August 7, 2017 It’s a great question. Previously, I had different answers depending what age range I was addressing – one for middle school students, and another one entirely for college students.…
Exploring the world on-the-go using Google Cloud Vision and Twilio
Getting a computer to see and understand stuff is hard. Way hard. Like, hard for a long time. For a bit of context, slide 15 seems to be the definitive abbreviated history, dating all the way back to 1966. If you want to dig into the details, there’s a free Udacity course on computer vision offered by Georgia Tech. However, you can add computer vision and intelligence capabilities to your…
Containers & Compute Engine: creating Minecraft Roulette with Kubernetes
In the last few entries on creating a containerized Minecraft server, we created the container, launched the server, moved data to a volume, created regular backups of our world, took a look at customizing the server’s properties, and updated changes to the container. Right now, our setup is pretty solid! So, let’s get to that fun and impractical thing I mentioned that we’d be…
Minecraft, Docker, Google Compute Engine: an interlude
Last time, I said that in the next entry in this series I would do something fun (and likely impractical) with kubernetes. I lied; sorry. Since then, I received several great questions that I didn’t manage to cover, so I thought that I’d address a couple of them now. This entry will be rather piecemeal, but hopefully much shorter than the prior ones! Customizing the server.properties…
Saving the world: using persistent storage with a containerized Minecraft server
This is Part II in a series on running a Minecraft server in a container on Google Cloud Platform. If you missed Part I, make sure to glance over it for context. Last time Last time, you took an existing application (a modded Minecraft server) and containerized it, using the Debian base image. You used a Google Cloud Platform container-optimized image to build our image and run the resulting…
Running a Minecraft server on Google Compute Engine with Docker
I only started playing Minecraft a couple of years ago, and rage quit after I set my house on fire due to a misunderstanding of lava dynamics. It reentered my life when I saw an article on qCraft, a mod that incorporates elements of quantum physics into gameplay. From there, I discovered the amazing world of Minecraft mods, accompanied by YouTube videos and collections on imgur showing off…
Evolving your hierarchy of developer needs: when things go wrong
Last week at [APIStrat Chicago](www.apistrategyconference.com/2014Chicago/ APIStrat Chicago), I gave a new and improved version of my Hierarchy of Developer Needs keynote that I initially debuted at [Glue Conference](http://gluecon.com Glue Conference) in May. That first version of the talk and blog entry addressed primarily how to go about identifying your developer and constructing your…
Do you even...?
What happened? Last Monday in Seattle I ran logistics for a monthly meetup. I secured the speaker, arranged the room, and secured us food. I wanted to make it an awesome event because I’ve enjoyed working with the technology in question and have even given a few talks on the subject. We had a lot of interest from the Seattle community, the speaker gave a fantastic presentation, and answered…
Hierarchy of Developer Needs
Last week, I traveled out to Colorado to give a keynote at Glue Conference on the hierarchy of developer needs. Video: Slides: Hierarchy of Developer Needs on SpeakerDeck It is a talk that I’ve wanted to give for a while, and what better place to debut it than one of the best developer conferences out there? However, as I rehearsed it, delivered it, and talked to developers afterwards, I…
Julia on Google Compute Engine: parallel programming
This is the third part of the Julia on Google Compute Engine (GCE) series. The first entry discussed how to set up Julia on a standard GCE instance, and the second walked through working with Google Cloud Storage from within a Julia program. In this entry, we’ll be diving a little deeper into Julia, and talk about parallel processing. Setting up your instance (reprise) This is when your…
Julia on Google Compute Engine: working with files
This is the second part of the Julia on Google Compute Engine (GCE) series that I started a few weeks back. The first entry addressed how to set up Julia on a standard GCE instance, and how to run simple scripts. Today, we’ll be doing less with Julia, and more with setting things up so you can efficiently write Julia programs and scripts, and make it easy to get the results of your…
Julia on Google Compute Engine: installation and first steps
This blog entry is part one of a series on using Julia with Google Compute Engine. It was inspired by a bit of narcissism, a burning passion for scientific computing, and lackluster experiences with other comparable languages. I recently had the opportunity to answer a question about running Julia on Google Compute Engine (GCE), and thought I’d dust off this half-finished blog entry to round…
Misadventures in sleeping
My enemy, nighttime Starting from a really early age, I had difficulties sleeping. Let’s call these difficulties insomnia on steroids. I couldn’t fall asleep, and when I did, there was no way I could stay asleep. It impaired my life so much, that I would frequently fall asleep at various points during the day out of sheer exhaustion. Words like narcolepsy were thrown around. Those…
#obligatory 2012 review
There’s a reason that so many people write reflective blog entries at the turn of a new year. We find a need for closure at the end of the old year, to prove to ourselves that it wasn’t wasted, to show the world our accomplishments and failures. As I thought about why I see a flood of entries at this time of year, I realized that I wanted to write one too.
Are We ready for the Next On-Ramp: Big Data, Analytics, and Human-Centric Computing (another perspective)
I was really excited for this particular session, as big data an area that people are increasingly tackling, with fascinating results. The panelists included Janet Ramey who is a Senior Director at Cisco, Moira Burke who is a data scientist at Facebook, and Eva K. Lee who holds a professorship at Georgia Tech. Monica Martinez-Canales, a Principal Engineer at Intel, hosted the panel. We started…
GHC12: Tempering the Impostor Syndrome by Managing the Fear of Failure
As I walked into this session led by Francine Gordon (F Gordon Group) and Sabina Nawaz (Sabina Nawaz Consulting), I was a little surprised. Instead of rows of chairs facing the front, it looked like we were about to sit down to an organized lunch. Worksheets On the tables were worksheets for attendees to fill out, looking something like this: If you’ve filled out any psychological survey, there’s…