I’ve been kind of rubbish about posting life updates over here, so I just thought I should make a note that I’m planning to move to Ballarat by the end of the year. Why? Well, my current housemates are going their separate ways and it was either find two new ones, or get a place by myself. Ballarat has cheap rent (not much more for a full house than it currently costs me for a room in a share house), fast internet, is only an Continue reading → I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I just discovered they have an affiliate program and, well, that’s an excuse to mention it again. I’ve been using Clicky for web analytics for Growstuff, and I’m delighted with them. They are basically a drop-in replacement for Google analytics, but run by a company who care more about, you know, analytics than selling ads. Clicky gives me all I need in terms of pretty charts and reports, and I can see where Growstuff’s visitors are coming from Continue reading → There was some discussion on the Growstuff IRC channel last night, while I was asleep, about the term “spike”. I use it a bit on the Growstuff project but I don’t think everyone knows what I’m getting at, possibly because I picked it up by osmosis from the Extreme Programming community over a decade ago, and the term’s fallen out of favour since then. So here’s a quick definition as I use it: A spike is experimental. It’s for writing something you’ve never written before, Continue reading → I’ve recently been interviewed by a couple of different blogs, and thought I should link them here: The Ada Initiative blog interviewed me about Growstuff, pair programming, and social justice. They’re having a fundraising campaign to support their work with women in open technology and culture, by the way, and if you care about those things you should definitely donate. Maciej from Pinboard interviewed me for the Pinboard blog, also about Growstuff, which (as you may recall) he funded to the tune of $37 back Continue reading → I’ve been pair programming with a lot of different people, with a variety of skill levels, on Growstuff over the last year. One thing I’ve noticed is that some people freeze up when it comes to writing a commit message. They type “git commit” and then sit there for a minute going “uhhhh”. I understand this. It’s hard to convert maybe an hour’s hard work in code into a short sentence of English. How do you compress such complex ideas? How do you even make Continue reading → This is one of those posts I’m making for the benefit of anyone who googles, wondering whether there’s a Mediawiki extension to integrate Clicky Analytics. As of right now, there’s not, but there is a good explanation of how you can put some custom code in your LocalSettings.php to integrate any analytics stuff that you like. Here’s a generic version that will work for any analytics system, hopefully cut-and-pasteable. It works fine on my Mediawiki install right now (version 1.20.x) but is not guaranteed for Continue reading → You’ve probably heard the tech startup aphorism “do one thing well”, or a variant on it. “Don’t try to do too many things”. “Focus.” Whatever. I’m not very good at following it, as is pretty apparent from what I’m working on. Growstuff has several things it’s trying to do (crops database, garden journal, seed sharing, community building), all interlinked. Every so often someone points me at a website that does just one thing of the set of things we’re trying to do. For instance, the Continue reading → One of the best things about leading my own project has been not having to pretend I’m some sort of shit hot programmer. It’s nice to be able to to say “argh, that’s too hard, fuck it” or “I have no idea how this works” without worrying about my performance review. Of course, I also like to claim that I’m providing a visible example that it’s okay not to be perfect or know everything, to help make it less scary for our newer contributors. But Continue reading → Hey, I am massively disorganised this week, but I figured I should probably mention that I’m going to be travelling and would like to catch up with people. Saturday 15th to Monday 17th June, I will be in San Francisco, mostly in the Castro/Mission/ish area. Social activities planned so far include: Saturday afternoon: hanging out on Liz Henry’s patio in Bernal Heights, with laptops and snacks and generally socialising. Likely to be a hackerish/feminist crowd. If you know Liz and where she lives, just show Continue reading → Not many people will be as excited about this as I am, but I just found out that the local Unitarian Universalist Church has a lecture about “Muscular Christianity and the English boarding school system” on Sunday July 14th. I am so there.