In 2017 I spent some time working with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA). While I developed a number of software tools in that role, what made me truly effective was the fact that I could develop everything open source. The amount of advice, pull requests, and feedback that I enthusiastically received from public experts was tremendous, and I’m sure that this was helped in no small part by the fact that I was working for a high-profile humanitarian organisation.

Ever since then, I’ve been thinking. What if I could do humanitarian open source outreach as a job?

DUCK YES! SpaceX landed their first Falcon 9 today after it successfully deployed its payload to orbit. This is big news, and to quote Andy Weir:

Imagine if you took a flight from New York to London. And then, when you were done, they threw the plane away. Want to go back? Well, they’ll have to make a new plane. Imagine what air travel tickets would cost if the airline industry worked that way. Well, that’s exactly how the space industry works.

Or at least, that’s how it used to work. Until today. :)

I’ve just come back from BuzzConf, and I’m so excited by it that I’ve started writing about it even before my first coffee in the morning.

As a unique blend of conference and festival, BuzzConf was good. Really good.

Watch on YouTube

Online services like “If This Then That” (IFTTT) are great for automating your life. However they provide few ways for the end-user to add their own services, and not everyone is comfortable with sharing their credentials. I’ll be discussing the ‘Exobrain’ project, which allows for service integration and extension on a machine you control. We’ll discuss philosophy, installation, and writing your own extensions and classifiers.

This was originally made as a response to a Facebook post discussing diversity issues in tech.

Anna: I am a feminist who has attended and spoken at your events. I’m not familiar with the experiences which you’ve had in the past; I’ve not been involved with them, and so I am in no position to comment. I have absolutely no desire to ruin your reputation or spread rumours.

However I am perfectly happy to comment on things that I’ve personally observed, and to call you out when I feel that you’re being actively harmful to diversity, especially diversity in open source.