Ricardo J. Méndez @ricardojmendez@mastodon.social
Technical Director @ Samsung NEXT Europe. \o/ Tech, Clojure, open source, privacy.
We've got 3 new opportunities to join our team!
- Fundraising Director
- Project Manager for Network Projects
- Project Manager with Product Exp
These full-time positions can be performed remotely or from our office in Seattle. https://www.torproject.org/about/jobs
Theo Schlossnagle's Monkigras talk about ethics and software development is a must-watch - specially on this age where technology controls so much of people's daily lives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdZ_NjbLLfc
“Everybody is looking for talent. I’m looking for professionals.”
A Monkigras 2018 talk by Luis Villa on friction, how it has its uses, and how introducing friction can be a source of autonomy and help solve the #opensource sustainability problem.
"Oh, it also tracks your every move and taps your smartphone's microphone, supposedly in the name of helping to root out unauthorized match broadcasts in bars, restaurants and cafes." #privacy #futbol https://boingboing.net/2018/06/11/spanish-football-app-turns-use.html
Google is trying to patent an algorithm from public domain
Peter Watts can throw around scientific details or quantities in his stories which would be natural for his characters, but are conversions an average reader would never have had to make.
It just dawned on me Wolfram Alpha understands these, can help you subtitle Watts the way his _Blindsight_ characters subtitle each other's lingo.
We live in an age of informational plenty.
http://www.rifters.com/Eriophora-Root-Archive-Log-Ahzmundin-frag/derelict.htm
recommend checking out some short stories from the Freeze-Frame Revolution universe if you're in a mood for some hard sci-fi reading:
http://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Hotshot.pdf
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_09_14_reprint/
http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_TheIsland.pdf
http://www.rifters.com/Eriophora-Root-Archive-Log-Ahzmundin-frag/derelict.htm
One thing I've learned over the years is that it takes a lot more skill to solve a problem by writing code that's simple rather than clever.
This is all from a 4-month period at the end of 2017. I'd used it myself for years and had run an on-site instance for a different team before which, albeit quirky, behaved much better.
Not sure what happened with them. Maybe it all got borked on the rush to add new features, maybe we joined at a bad time.
For a team willing to pay but which needed it to be plumbing and "just work", Gitlab fumbled every chance we gave them.
Some notes on #Gitlab, in case you're considering it:
- Usability is OK;
- SLA was a joke. We were paying for silver, but we didn't get replies to issues for days/weeks unless we raised a ruckus on Twitter;
- That doesn't mean the issues were solved, just acknowledged;
- Build runners may or may not start, depending on the weather;
- When we decided we going to self-host it, we found the export/import was broken, was a known issue for months, still unfixed.
It was a mess.
I like that people are discussing alternatives to #github (yet again), and I also am fond of #gitlab and what they've achieved in the past.
Having said that, I had to work with GitLab recently, and it was a nightmare. It's just trying too hard to be too many things at once & failing to be a serious contender for any of these purposes.
Please also consider alternatives like Gogs or Gitea. They both work incredibly well and are scaling to any size https://gogs.io https://gitea.io
"Looking at last year’s California DMV disengagement reports, Nvidia-equipped cars could not drive ten miles without a disengagement."
A vehicle drove itself (on average) for ten miles in an actual city's expressways and highways without human intervention. Commentator doesn't think that's cool enough.
Technological progress has us spoiled.
Not bothering giving the post more eyeballs.
I've been active as a professional since the 90s. I saw #Microsoft at the height of their predatory practices. I saw the Ballmer years.
Even so, the reactions around their acquiring #Github feel like hysteria and histrionics.
Run your projects where you will. I use Gitlab for my own things. But do it because you evaluate the trade-offs and choose, not because you get swept up in some meme.
You may find the alternatives aren't as stable, usable or available as you'd expect.
Do we need more takes on the #Microsoft #GitHub acquisition? Well...
The average FOSS dev doesn’t have a lot new to worry about here, IMO. GitHub wasn’t ever a not-for-profit, people were already worried about over-centralisation.
However GCE, IBM, Oracle and other small cloud providers should be very worried. The entire “MS ❤️ OSS” strategy has been about driving Azure adoption. Every foothold they gain in the ecosystem will be used to steer towards that. Bad news for cloud competition.
Catherine Dixon's sensational talk at Monkigras 2018 about making things and design being more than nice layouts.
She quotes Norman Potter about it being "the conceiving of an action, and a fashioning of a means to carry it out, and an estimation of its effects".
