'This' considered harmful
I wrote about Google's Technical Writing course before, tl;dr, if you're a software engineer, and you haven't yet read through Google's Technical Writing course: I recommend it.
Kosta Harlan
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Meetings
I spend a lot of time in meetings. Some things I've learned: Every meeting needs notes. Writing things down means something.
Finding lost Phabricator pings
Antique mosaic of Mnemosyne. National Archaeological Museum of Tarragona, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons Some sketches of a project I've had in mind that I am thinking of with the name mnemopynge (mnemo = memory, pynge… well, like ping-y), i.
Getting better at blocking bad activity on wikis
Happy new (nonprofit fiscal) year! 🥳 July 1 marked the start of the FY24-25 annual plan for Wikimedia Foundation. Together with colleagues, I've been working the last couple of months on lining up some interesting projects for improving anti-abuse capabilities on the wikis under the WE4.
Loading Spur JSONL data into OpenSearch
I recently had the experience of working out how to import a daily feed of tens of millions lines of JSONL data into OpenSearch.
Recent changes, 27 May 2024
What is this guy talking about? Robert Sim, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Common At the beginning of this month, I had the good fortune to attend the 2024 Wikimedia Hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia.
Importing notes from Google Docs to Emacs Org Mode
If that demo is intriguing to you, read on! Why I use the superb denote package for my personal notes repository, with org-mode for formatting.
Recent changes
It's been a strange month. There were several deaths in and around my field of view, each one sudden and unexpected.
Recent changes
Reading On a bit of a whim, I picked up and read through Slow Productivity. I found parts of it insightful but was struggling to see how it would really apply to e.
Tracking time
Time sheet from 1909; Halbert Powers Gillette, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons I spent nine years working for digital agencies, where one lives and dies by the sword 15 minute billable unit of time.
Recent changes
Organizing I'm testing some adjustments to my organizational system: Keeping all 1:1 notes in a single file per person / recurring meetings in a single file per meeting, rather than one note per meeting.
Recent changes
I started reading Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month and am enjoying the La Brea Tar Pits metaphors & writing (though I wish someone had thought to update usages of 'man' everywhere to neutral terms).
Recent changes
A dazzling city rose up from the marches, adorned with glorious churches and beautiful palazzi, built on the lucrative proceeds of prolific trading with the east.
Recent changes
The main thing is that, you can hear the birds in the morning now, and green is returning to the forest.
Recent changes
The tens digit has moved a notch forward–I'm not sure what to make of that, really. But overall, I feel good.
Recent changes
I've been thinking about what it takes to learn a system, prompted by some discussions about the ease (or lack of) of being a proficient developer with MediaWiki as deployed in Wikimedia sites.
Recent changes
German winter rolls on. This week we had at least a few centimeters of snow, enough to make our way to one of the handful of hills around here.
Recent changes
Wieder zurück. On the last day of 2023 I got COVID and was sick for ~10 days, so I skipped last week's recent changes and normal weekly review routine.
Recent changes
This is going to be a short one, because while it's not the last week of the year, it's the last one where I plan to be at a computer and thus time is short.
Recent changes
My wrist is better, though still hurting, and I'm back typing away on the Model 100 which is a superior experience to the Atreus in nearly every way.
Recent changes
I sprained my wrist on Thursday night, probably worse than I ever have before, while goalkeeping in a football match with friends.
Recent changes
Winter's here. First snow (0.01 cm or so!) during A's football match on Saturday. This time of year is hard; the sun sets by 4pm, the forest becomes muddy and leafless.
Turn off MariaDB verbose logging when you're done
tl;dr: Make sure you switch off verbose logging for MariaDB once you've finished debugging. Last month I was troubleshooting some connection issues with a NodeJS app.
Recent changes
Like last week, I'm thinking a lot about Gaza. One thing I've been reflecting on is the 'reality' of the conflict I experience as mediated by different platforms.
"and" as anti-pattern in git commit subject
I try to avoid the word “and” in git commit subject messages. If I find myself typing “and” in the subject, I usually stop what I’m doing and rethink the scope of the commit.
Recent changes
(What is this?1) I’ve been thinking a lot about Palestine. I went to a local demonstration calling for a ceasefire on Saturday.
New tools
I’m experimenting with a few replacements for my existing workflows: Todoist, in place of org-mode for task organization Obsidian, in place of org-mode for notes Zotero, in place of trying to locate things I read by typing characters into Firefox’s address bar and hoping for a match I chose Obsidian (and started using Zotero) after reading How to take smart notes.
A week with Do Not Disturb mode
One Sunday afternoon this month, I set my phone on “Do Not Disturb” mode, then decided to leave it that way for a week, as an experiment.
Notes for a presentation to high school CS students
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to speak with computer science high school students about career advice & a what’s-a-day-in-the-life-like type of thing.
New focus
In June, I reached the five year mark at Wikimedia Foundation.1 Wow, that feels like a long time! 🌻 ⏳
org-mode and the magical WAIT keyword
I recently made my way through Getting Things Done (GTD). I wish I had done it a while ago! I’ve read many surface-level summaries in blog posts or in tutorials for organizational tools about how to use GTD.
Notes on the Wikimedia 2023 Athens Hackathon
Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Earlier this month I had the pleasure and privilege of attending the Wikimedia 2023 Hackathon in Athens, Greece 🇬🇷.
Meeting attention for software engineers
Much of my day-to-day work as a software engineer involves multi-tasking, more multi-tasking, and then multi-tasking while multi-tasking.1 Transitioning from that to sustained focus in online, multi-person meetings is hard (relevant Calvin and Hobbes comic).
"Please read before scheduling"
A while back, a colleague wrote two brilliant posts time zone trickery, and practicing inconvenience for a more equitable workplace. If you haven’t yet read those posts, really, head over there now and go read them.
Turkish Makam in Leipzig
If you’re in Leipzig, DE and interested to play Turkish makam / classical Ottoman music / traditional Greek music, please contact me!
Pomegranates in January
It snowed, I remember that, the wheelchair ramp covered by a thin sheen of ice. Roland, the hospice nurse, appeared in our lives.
I deleted Slack from my phone
I have, once again, deleted Slack from my phone. It was an early new year’s gift to myself. This time I hope it will stick.
A year of writing club
The current configuration of my writing club at work has lasted for more than a year. We tried to find a time to meet for reflection and celebration, but it is tricky to find a convenient time for Colorado and Croatia / Germany.
Craft your own d3 build
File this in the maybe-it’s-obvious-to-others-but-not-to-me category: here’s a quick post about how you can craft your own d3.js build with just the d3 packages that you need.
Rolling my own Mastodon
I admit I had not paid much attention to Mastodon. Sorry! But along with 70,000 others, recent events1 pushed me enough to check it out.
Building your own client for Wikipedia's image suggestions API
In a previous post I wrote about how we built the image suggestions feature for Special:Homepage on Wikipedia. But that is just one implementation, bound specifically to a web client accessing Special:Homepage.
25 October 2022
[reading] Wikimedia is adding new tools to make Wikipedia more fun to edit - The Verge [reading] Clean Architecture by Robert C.
17 October 2022
“knock on effects”, thinking about how one patch then breaks downstream tools, and how we could avoid this as it’s so time-consuming https://gerrit.
14 October 2022
TIL: Divje Babe flute: The Neanderthal musical instrument from Divje babe I meets all the requirements to be called the oldest known musical instrument.
11 October 2022
Fixing an unbreak now issue affecting authentication in CI and beta cluster. From the perspective of it’s not your fault, should probably write about some systemic issues: not allowing force-merge, automated architecture fitness function review of e.
10 October 2022
[engineering] Publishing notes from an org-mode file (one section per day) with ox-hugo, let’s see how it goes. [music] Nihavend Saz Semai, Hasib Dede colleague pointed out how Google Docs “unfurl” function fails weirdly for some Gerrit patches.
Shipping to production faster (?)
Earlier this week I facilitated an impromptu “unconference” session at my team’s offsite: Shipping to production faster: can we? should we?
Book report: A Philosophy of Software Design, John Ousterhout
I’ve recently been re-reading A Philosopy of Software Design by John Ousterhout. The origin of the book is interesting. The author taught a university course on software design in which students worked together to build software projects, then perform code reviews and retrospectives to analyze weaknesses and improve on the design.
Behind the scenes of Wikipedia's image suggestions feature
My team at Wikimedia Foundation (the Growth team) recently completed an iteration of work on Wikipedia’s image suggestion feature. We built the feature on top of a data pipeline, MediaWiki (the PHP framework behind Wikipedia), VisualEditor (MediaWiki’s WYSIWYG editor), and ElasticSearch.
Four years at Wikimedia Foundation
Last month I celebrated four years of working at Wikimedia Foundation. 🎂🥳✨ That’s eons in tech, so to commemorate this milestone, here’s a post with four notes about these years–plus a bonus, fifth announcement at the end!