Dr Laura James's writings

TLDR; I'm very excited to be starting a new job on 1st May, where I'll be actively building tech products again, and which is a great fit for me. I'm joining lowRISC , an open source hardware non-profit, using collaborative engineering to create high quality, secure and flexible silicon designs. This is a really exciting opportunity on many levels - a chance to be part of a new wave of fundamental computing innovation enabling specialised silicon chips, to learn about the practicalities of shared engineering resource and IP at the hardware layer, and to actually ship some useful products (hopefully at reasonable scale). This may seem an unlikely step for me, on top of a possibly disparate-seeming work history , but fits nicely into  responsible delivery of practical systems using emerging technologies,  which is how I think of my work. I've been lucky enough to do this in a variety of contexts and with different technologies too. I'm starting at 4 days a week at

This week's most exciting update is that I've been awarded a  Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship , to help me continue to connect emerging communities interested in different forms of maintenance (digital, physical, infrastructure, commons/public goods), and across regions. I'll be using the Fellowship to support the 2019 Festival of Maintenance , and to build links between the emerging UK cross-sector maintenance community and new American communities around TheMaintainers.org . Excitingly this means I'll be able to attend  Maintainers III , and I'm interested in talking to anyone who would like to put in a collaborative proposal, either about maintenance issues across sectors or international perspectives. (We've got some great speakers signed up for the Festival in Liverpool later this year and will be announcing them soon. You can buy tickets online now , or support the Festival with a donation .) The Fellowship also gives me a reason to keep e

Technical debt came up a couple of weeks ago , with an interesting article about how Wikimedia was addressing it. We also had a good chat about it on a Festival of Maintenance planning call, starting from a question of how big software systems maintenance issues might differ from open source software maintenance issues. John Grant contrasted 'traditional' software technical debt, and questions where, say, legacy IT systems are still in place where competitors have moved equivalent services to the cloud - "toxic IT."  Inspired by questions from other Festival volunteers (many of whom are not into software) I wondered whether other engineering fields had a concept of technical debt. https://twitter.com/tenderlove/status/1111664818140794880 It's a term I'd only ever encountered in software, and to some extent seemed to be linked to a sense of how code is special and different to other forms of engineering, because you can "always change it later,"