Last week Sherri and I met with my neurologist to review the findings of blood and cerebral-spinal fluid lab analyses. I received a diagnosis of Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis. If you ever watched The West Wing, you might recall this was the illness President Jeb Bartlett had and tried to keep secret. Well, I’m not planning …
Open Source Licenses and the Ethical Use of Software
Recently Coraline Ehmke announced a new software license, the Hippocratic License, a modified MIT License, amended “to limit the impact of the unethical use of open source software.” Coraline states that she intends to submit the license to the Open Source Initiative even though she acknowledges it does not meet their criteria for an open …
Valerie Aurora and a pattern of problematic behavior
The purpose of this post is to publicly document what I understand regarding the problematic behavior of prominent tech feminist activist and diversity consultant Valerie Aurora. It is not meant to be an unimpeachable accounting but more of a connecting of the dots and a conversation starter. The content here, in its most recent iteration, …
10 Years of Open Source Bridge
The following is the text of the keynote I gave at this year’s grand final for Open Source Bridge on 29 June, 2018. See also Audrey’s post Saying goodbye to Open Source Bridge. Opening 10 years ago planning for the first Open Source Bridge began. 10 years later we are kicking off our 10th and final event, …
My theory: Patreon doesn’t want to be a money services business
tldr: Patreon is changing their fee structure, in part, because the batching of pledge payments from one patron to multiple creators and the use of Patreon balance to pay pledges without processing an external payment requires “holding funds in a balance that can then be redistributed” and makes them look like a money transmitter money …
Join me in Supporting the Recompiler for Year 3
My good friend and colleague Audrey Eschright runs indie publishing company Recompiler Media, which produces the feminist tech zine Recompiler and a companion podcast of the same name that I co-host. It also publishes important books such as the Responsible Communication Style Guide, edited by Thursday Bram. Right now, Audrey is running a Kickstarter campaign …
Using Zapier and OmniFocus to stay on top of meetings
(If you like this post, you might also like Using Zapier to import GitHub issues into OmniFocus.) I use OmniFocus for personal task-tracking and Zapier to automate work when possible. One way I use these two tools in combination is to automatically create tasks when a new event is created on my work calendars. The two …
Using Zapier to import GitHub issues into OmniFocus
I use OmniFocus for personal task-tracking and Zapier to automate work when possible. I also coordinate open source work on GitHub. Recently I was wondering if there was a way to make OmniFocus automatically import any GitHub issue assigned to me. It turns out there is! What you need: Zapier account OmniFocus Pro (desktop) OmniSync …