Sumana Harihareswara / is on Nostr

Indian-American gal who likes to make people laugh. #OpenSource entrepreneur, programmer, tech writer and encourager, stand-up comedian, advocate for transparency in government software and data.

New York City #NYC, Changeset Consulting, #RecurseCenter, #WisCon, #MetaFilter, #Python packaging, Geek Feminism, #Dreamwidth, harihareswara.net.

Hope you're having the best possible day.

Pronoun: she
Changeset Consulting: https://changeset.nyc/
Blog: https://harihareswara.net
MetaFilter posts and comments: https://www.metafilter.com/user/98835

Last Notes

2024-09-18 20:06:47

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how institutions upholding library values ought to frame/make ethical decisions about using or providing AI/ML tools
a version of https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/14/pycon/ targeted at code4lib (what can these things do/not? how should we think about them?)
what you learned, from being in formal leadership positions, that people ought to know so they can be more effective participants
a lightning tour of, like, 5 major languages or deployment tools, covering the current state of things

2024-06-15 01:50:38

This afternoon I tested positive for COVID-19 for the first time.
I tested positive on a Metrix molecular test; also, on an antigen test, the positive line showed up within a few minutes.
I woke up this morning with a dry/sore throat, fatigue, & some nasal congestion. Symptoms currently remain mild.
Yesterday I spent multiple hours indoors (masked) & outdoors (unmasked) with several people at the #Fastly event in New York City; if you spent time near me, please test. I've tried to email also.

2024-06-10 13:20:02

BTW it's been twelve years since the XKCD that introduced the phrase "today's lucky 10,000" into common parlance: https://xkcd.com/1053/
I recently revisited this blog post I made on the day Randall published it, which gets pretty raw and emotional: https://harihareswara.net/posts/2012/common-sense/ : "Today's xkcd approaches it from an unimpeachably quantitative point of view, and I hope that helps prevent some of the qualitative hopelessness and despair I felt."

2024-06-05 18:04:04

If anyone here has a tip for an easy workflow to export a LibreOffice Impress slides + speaker notes file into a single HTML page that's organized something like https://www.changeset.nyc/resources/quick-intro-to-grants.html (slides side-by-side with speaker notes), I'd love to know it. The default HTML exports, at least in LibreOffice 7.0.4.2, don't do what I want.

2024-06-05 14:24:37

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Also, I just spent a few minutes trying to look up more about this guy, Parameter One, Dropnumber, or any of his projects, and that's been a strange experience as well!

2024-06-05 14:03:35

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WOW.

2024-06-03 13:34:23

My friend made https://amtrack.live/ and it's neat!
If you take Amtrak and want info on train status/delays, it's annoying that the official Amtrak website is slow to load & doesn't have train status perma-URLs to bookmark/share. https://railrat.net/ is pretty good but has ads. amtrack.live is faster & has no ads.

2024-05-24 13:47:46

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Re: this year's PyCon US, https://pythonbytes.fm/episodes/transcript/384/force-push-lightly mentions acoustic problems on the expo floor.
And outside of PyCon, I've known people who deal with masking causing:
* significant physical discomfort/pain when worn continuously for hours
* inaudibility: the frequencies of this person's voice + mask muffling just make them inaudible to most people, in their experience
(People who don't know me: I wrote https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2023/my-current-covid-risk-approach/ & I kept my N95 on even while speaking onstage at PyCon US.)

2024-05-23 12:55:32

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Thank you for writing this!
https://www.python.org/community/awards/psf-awards/ doesn't have any awards after late 2022, and doesn't mention the 3 awards you pointed to in the March 2024 board meeting https://www.python.org/psf/records/board/minutes/2024-03-13/#new-business . So maybe those recipients haven't accepted their awards yet?

2024-05-19 20:42:09

Here is a blog post with links and references to accompany my closing keynote today at #PyConUS , on stories from a few years working on #Python packaging.
http://harihareswara.net/posts/2024/references-pycon-us-keynote/
#PyConStories

2024-05-19 12:18:25

http://www.crummy.com/2004/05/20/1
"But other parsers know too much about HTML. They choke on or try to rewrite bad markup. They assume you care about the whole document. A pirate might make you walk the plank, but only a parser would make you walk the whole tree."
Happy 20th birthday to the #Python screen-scraping library Beautiful Soup by @npub14hs…swac .

2024-04-16 02:32:10

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The thing I want to shout from the rooftops is: THIS IS POSSIBLE.
#opensource projects can hire UX experts, who gather quantitative & qualitative data, and who then recommend specific choices. Maintainers don't just have to guess how to design good, usable features and interfaces.
Yes, even for command-line tools.
Yes, even without a big company running the project. We got grants: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2019/12/moss-czi-support-pip.html
And tool*chains* can pool resources to invest & learn together! https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2023/user-support-equanimity-potential-cross-project-tools-practices-open-source/

2024-04-16 02:23:58

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It was so valuable to get to work with UX experts on pip. Example: https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/8377 their research findings helped us improve the format and content of the "ResolutionImpossible" error message, so users could actually work out what went wrong and how to fix it.
There's a wealth of information in the resources that Superbloom (formerly Simply Secure) developed.
Not just for for Python packaging tools developers! For anyone working on developer experience, especially on the command line!

2024-04-16 02:11:09

Really happy to share https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/ux-research-design/ !
Back in 2020, during grant-funded work on the next-generation pip resolver, [@sprblm](https://mastodon.design/@sprblm) did fascinating user experience research & design work. https://pyfound.blogspot.com/search/label/pip
They wrote several useful documents that took a while to get merged, but now live in pip's documentation! Like:
how to design a survey https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/ux-research-design/guidance/#designing-surveys
how users think pip should react to dependency conflicts https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/ux-research-design/research-results/override-conflicting-dependencies/
security practices https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/ux-research-design/research-results/users-and-security/