@grimalkina@mastodon.social
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

grimalkina

@grimalkina@mastodon.social

Social & Evidence Scientist. Defender of the mismeasured. 🦄🏳️‍🌈 she/they

I do #psychology and #measurement theory and #research with #software teams on how developers thrive. My focus areas include how people form beliefs about #learning and build strategies for #resilience #productivity & #motivation. Quant Psych PhD (but with a love for qual) and VP of Getting Tech to Do Real Open Science.

Founder of the Developer Success Lab ❤️
Neighborhood Cool Science Aunt

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grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

This post made me feel like maybe I would consider allowing knowledge about Linux into my brain

https://kind.social/@PurpleJillybeans/112480588977913630

shom,
@shom@fosstodon.org avatar

@grimalkina, we need more ushers instead of gate keepers!

If anyone wants to learn more about Linux and if it's even the right choice / feasible for you, I would love to chat. I can help figure out a concrete path for you and provide tech support as best as I can. Get in touch!

Here's a very friendly video (not mine) that shows you how to get started: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BoqSxHTTNs

ProPublica, to Futurology
@ProPublica@newsie.social avatar

Toxic Gaslighting: How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe

Decades ago, Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people’s bodies.

Her bosses halted her work.

As the now forces the removal of the chemicals from drinking , she wrestles with the secrets that 3M kept from her and the world.

https://www.propublica.org/article/3m-forever-chemicals-pfas-pfos-inside-story?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

I have NOT read this paper yet so this is not a Cat endorsement yet but the title and premise is good enough to share 👀

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(24)00105-0

BarbChamberlain,
@BarbChamberlain@toot.community avatar

@grimalkina Ah, thank you for this! Taking this straight to the team I'm on working on traffic safety planning.

grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

Life would be easier for many scientists if the general public would get past the stereotype that all science is just about "surprise" and novelty and completely unknown things and that studies don't matter if they match your lived experience 😭 there is massive need to document well known things into the scientific record and establish specific evidence examples for them in ways that will be legible and useful for policy, public action, etc....!

Media really fuels this misconception

natematias,
@natematias@social.coop avatar

@grimalkina I agree it’s a tough one, especially when there’s a lot of money to be had in lowering public trust in scholarship and many (overworked) scientists are dis-incentivized to engage with (or respect) the public.

My work on this is public engagement and the protection of scholars at risk, but even work on both fronts feels very insufficient given the kind of money and power on the side of merchants of doubt

natematias,
@natematias@social.coop avatar

@grimalkina unfortunately, the novelty/surprise framing is also deeply integrated into funding, award, and promotion structures too.

Note: I remember being pretty surprised to see in this analysis of scientific articles and news stories that on average, journalists actually tend to temper rather than exaggerate scientific findings. I would love to see a more in-depth analysis

https://news.umich.edu/journalists-tend-to-temper-not-exaggerate-scientific-claims-u-m-study-shows/

grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

I'm sorry WHAT and none of you told me?????

Position ENTIRELY reversed on Python. Literally going to learn it now. Call me pythonista Cat. I am so serious. WHAT.

https://masto.machlis.com/@smach/112462436451472935

juliaferraioli,
@juliaferraioli@floss.social avatar

@grimalkina it is lovely. Everyone here is wonderful. Masks. Everything about this event telegraphs that the @pycon cares deeply about the well-being of their attendees. 💖

Sevoris,

@grimalkina holy crap this is some awesome social integrity from PyConf. This is amazing. This is awesome. I think my heart is bursting a little? Thank you to whomever pushed this through.

RainofTerra,
@RainofTerra@terra.incognita.net avatar

@grimalkina I loved python before but I love it even more now.

grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

I stumbled across this post while looking for our workbook and omg! What a very thoughtful and understanding summary of our code review anxiety paper, model, and takeaways. I don't know this person to tag them but 👏👏👏

https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-understanding-and-effectively-mitigating-code-review-anxiety.html

mononcqc,
@mononcqc@hachyderm.io avatar

@grimalkina you apparently follow me on here already ;)

I think you may like to hear that I used the paper (shared to me by @RainofTerra) as an inspiration for a discussion session with our on-call engineers titled “Can Stress, Fear, and Anxiety be useful in Ops, and if so, when?”—just hoping to make room for the topic.

We ended up having a few people commenting along the lines of “I’m so glad to hear this isn’t just a ‘me’ problem,” which is great.

RainofTerra,
@RainofTerra@terra.incognita.net avatar

@grimalkina @mononcqc @CSLee yeah I feel like only very recently has there been any real guidance for folks above senior at all and we’re just on the cusp of a broader understanding of the ways it can look like. Sometimes it’s “here is this amazingly detailed technical blog post” but a lot of the time it’s going to be what used to be considered “soft skills” like “here is how I’m learning to use my seniority to be comfortable being vulnerable so I can model it for others” - and yes, the cost that comes with that.

RainofTerra,
@RainofTerra@terra.incognita.net avatar

@grimalkina @mononcqc @CSLee I love any opportunity to point out both that:

  • Even for staff/principal/etc. engineers this stuff can still feel bad/be complicated, so it’s very ok for more junior folks to feel that way.
  • It doesn’t always have to be terrible, we can make it better - with science! 🧪
mrcompletely,
@mrcompletely@heads.social avatar

@RainofTerra @grimalkina @mononcqc @CSLee the group was staff engrs plus dev team leads plus a couple very senior senior titles. Originally created to handle a long platform migration task, this group crossed all depts and just put every super senior tech talent in the room for a short but fairly frequent meeting. They became not just tech advice but emotional support for each other. I knew it was really working when we finished the migration and they unanimously asked to keep the meeting. 🧵

carol, to rust
@carol@crabby.fyi avatar

I love what @leahawasser is doing with the pyOpenSci open peer review of packages https://www.pyopensci.org/about-peer-review/ that results in a list of recommended packages https://www.pyopensci.org/python-packages.html

This seems like a way more effective and accessible solution to the "what libraries are appropriate to use" problem than, say, cargo-crev.

grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

A public service announcement with an expiration date: if you've loved my writing and science, I have a book proposal+sample chapter out on submission right now. The pitch is "The Psychology of Software Teams": a general audience, warmly human, accessible book for teams, leaders, and curious minds, filled to the brim with practitioner stories AND the new empirical social science of technology innovation. 🙌❤️

Let me know if you know editors who might be interested in this uniquely cool project.

bynkii,
@bynkii@mastodon.social avatar

@grimalkina @MartinVeart after 30 years in IT, the technical part is laughably easy compared to the human factors. The psychology, sociology and anthropology of tech and IT are so important and utterly trivialized within the industry, but they wonder why they keep having the same problems over and over.

MartinVeart,
@MartinVeart@mastodon.scot avatar

@grimalkina You are welcome but my comment is not motivated by kindness. You are writing about an area where mistakes can be costly and disastrous. Unlike most human factor where the challenge is reducing risk of folk getting things wrong despite their best efforts, IT faces the additional challenge of bad actors actively trying to undermine their products and steal their IP. Please do write this book.

mt,
@mt@mstdn.social avatar

@bynkii @grimalkina @MartinVeart I look at this from a core team at a company where our decisions cause consequences to the devs, this is so true. It's easy to say "make the change and they will deal with it" but if all the core teams decided to do that on top of the stuff the business side can push them into it's a recipe for disaster. Sports teams take psychological tests but outside a direct manager I don't think any company I've worked for has ever genuinely asked the devs how they feel.

diana, to random
@diana@hachyderm.io avatar

@yvonnezlam Made famous in the NewCrafts closing keynote … was a perfect moment set up by other talks here.

CSLee, to random
@CSLee@mastodon.social avatar

THE CODE REVIEW ANXIETY WORKBOOK IS OUT

https://developer-success-lab.gitbook.io/code-review-anxiety-workbook-1

This workbook takes the code review anxiety intervention that we designed and tested in our empirical research (https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/8k5a4) & distills it into a self-paced workbook for you. It's designed for you to read & work through as many times as you wish and provides you with the tools you need to mitigate & manage your anxiety about giving or receiving code reviews.

@seresearchers

1/3

CSLee,
@CSLee@mastodon.social avatar

Why create this workbook? From the start, we've known that in addition to developing and empirically testing an evidence-based intervention for Code Review Anxiety, we wanted to disseminate this intervention to the folks who stand to benefit from it most. This is a value I hold deeply as an applied clinical & intervention scientist, and one that Developer Success Lab (devsuccesslab.com) shares as well. The result is not only our empirical research, but also this workbook.

2/3

CSLee,
@CSLee@mastodon.social avatar

So bookmark this workbook, download the fillable pdf, and/or print it out. This workbook is truly yours to use. I sincerely hope it doesn't just reduce your anxiety, but also inspires you to be kinder to yourself, empowers you during code reviews, and, above all, shows you that you are not alone. 🙂

3/3

grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

"Each assemblage gains emergent properties produced from interactions between its components and relies on those interactions to continue existing. For instance, a tight- knit neighbourhood can build a collective memory about the reputation of all of its members and develop norms to promote prosocial behaviour. "

(still reading this paper https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112440065311802043 )

sakhavi,
@sakhavi@aoir.social avatar

@grimalkina @cyberlyra Latour and especially Leigh Star brilliantly illuminate how social categories stabilize, bash against each other & evolve. But for my $, J DiCaglio’s Scale Theory is even more where it’s at, especially in a software context where categories nest within categories & impinge on each other as contexts & ingredients for each other. Looking forward to reading the Cikara et al.! https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09505431.2023.2240849

MarekMcGann,
@MarekMcGann@sciences.social avatar

@grimalkina If I could recommend a paper that resonates here. Heft's work is great, and the links to other research approaches here very useful. (Heft's work has triggered a wee resurgence of behaviour settings work, there are some interesting extensions toward digital places in some of it.)

Heft, H. (2018). Places: Widening the scope of an ecological approach to perception–action with an emphasis on child development. Ecological Psychology, 30(1), 99–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2018.1410045

grimalkina, to random
@grimalkina@mastodon.social avatar

Sharing depthful open access materials that loads of people asked for based on our empirical research into pressing topics that impact so many developers 🥰 /on the same day literally struggling to find funds to even go to a conference, struggling to find a journal to publish our social science, struggling to get reviewers to not reject established social science methods because they're "not computer science" 🥲. Lord I love this work but the slog is so brutal and unnecessary

dneary,
@dneary@mathstodon.xyz avatar

@grimalkina Reminded of your line from Monktoberfest re "I'm studying software development teams now": "I thought you worked on people!"

coderbyheart, to random
@coderbyheart@chaos.social avatar

Now learning from @kenny_baas about the role of men in debugging patriarchy in IT.

coderbyheart,
@coderbyheart@chaos.social avatar

"Patriarchy influences who and what can be discussed,
thereby affecting the knowledge that is incorporated into our software design."

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