Even though I'm not and will never be a software developer, I can't tell you how it has enriched my life with technology to understand and immediately think about developers so constantly, those who made what I encounter every day. When my texts work and when I get a security message and when I notice some feature I have this little ping of empathy & awareness that someone built that. It has un-alienated me from so much technology and I wish more people-who-aren't-developers felt this with me
One of my favorite things about playing lever harp is that all my folk music books have "easy arrangement" on one side and "hard arrangement" on the other and I feel like more things in life should present us with that choice in our day
@grimalkina@dys_morphia Are you working with Sylvia Woods books? I believe a large part of that pattern is due to her work, and if you could get a hold of her, I’d love to read/hear some sort of interview about her approach to making lever harp easier to learn. She’s had a huge influence on multiple generations of harpists at this point, including me!
@brittag@dys_morphia yeah I have some of her books! I primarily learned in oral tradition so I actually don't have a lot of sheet music but yeah major influence in harp revival wasn't she
We are trying to find/pick a place to stay for a few months for my wife's sabbatical and omg. We're not even going that far from home for that long and we are so stressed about it. How do people even do this.
@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!
I have enough followers on here (👋 💞) that I think it is worth a little thread on how I relate to social media and online conversations & try to cultivate community
I am a person, not an object. I have personal thoughts, feelings, experiences, a family, & a life. Angry interactions from strangers & esp those interested in exploiting me as An Example Of Some Battle of Yours are dehumanizing & will get blocked (e.g.: "this is why those Ex Twitter people should be banned by default")
The quickest route to a block from me is creating contempt culture. I value when people want to interact with my conversations (esp on social science in tech) as a space to ponder WITH me, & I am honored when people share with all of us their personal experiences and deep feelings in response to & alongside science. Plus, I work in topics where many people have felt little room for it and have many scars.
Contemptuous dismissive reactions against those feelings is brutal & not the vibe here.
I think these are my main "rules" (more like guidelines, really :D ) that I keep in my head to try and cultivate the type of social media that I want for me and the folks who join me in conversation around here.
Feel free to share your own strategies for wellbeing, dialogue, and online social communities in reply to this thread, I do really enjoy knowing how others think about this!
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....!
The framing of all scientific findings as "SURPRISE! SCIENTISTS DISCOVER X" is so driven by media headline writing! Yes sometimes this is a lovely human version of discovery, the "oh my goodness new species we never imagined" type of thing. But so often it distorts the true work of iteratively building a shared scientific knowledge base for humanity.
Also it is terrible when a great study gets rejected by reviewers for "lack of novelty". Centering novelty above all really leads to problems
Also like, if you're not in a field not all scientific progress is apparent to you from the headline and the bullet point. This is hard technical work folks and why are we so bad at allowing for the fact that much is lost in translation? So many of my friends have worked on "useless" basic science that turned out to inform huge medical advances later but no one is ever like "sorry I made fun of the fact that you studied flies and told the govt to defund you"
"behaviors that might initially seem irrational may be modeled as optimal use of information available to people within the task"
"researchers and policymakers need to exhaust alternative explanations based on people’s goals and social environments before assuming irrationality and to use methods that engage participants as partners not just targets of interventions."
All applied scientists nod. (I disagree that this argument is new)
"Assuming that people are reasonable highlights the need to engage with people who are the targets of interventions. This turns them from targets into partners and also acknowledges the systems they inhabit. This more participatory and deliberative engagement can manifest in methods such as qualitative interviews, focus groups, citizens assemblies, engagement with citizen science initiatives..."
again 👏 ! But also widespread in areas that would've been nice to cite here
Always surprised when basic observations from the disparity toolkit get boosted but I forget not everyone does social science 🙂 when you work with education data, achievement data, and anything STEM education these kinds of effects are pervasive so of course they show up in software communities as well. I have a great bookmarks folder for studies on these effects I named Gender Delusions lol I should share that syllabus sometime.
Wow actually so emotional about this because every time my wife goes to a conference even though she masks, she books an extra couple of nights away from me to be extra safe because of my high risk status. It is exhausting and expensive and always makes us miserable and sad. To imagine a conf we could conceivably even BOTH go to and just not shoulder the burden of being the only people masking would be a completely different experience.
@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.
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 👏👏👏
@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.
@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.
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.
@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.
@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.
Every day I recommit to being in tech for the stupidest but cutest reasons!!! I just saw a customer support exchange that was so wholesome!! Or somebody said "oh I'm not technical" at a conference and a bunch of extremely intimidating og tech people spontaneously organized to be like "YOU DID A DEMO LOOKS TECHNICAL TO ME"
The human breaks out, y'all. The human breaks out. It's there. We deserve this version of tech not just in nooks and crannies but everywhere.