Weeknotes: software sustainability in various forms
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 exploring these questions and blogging about them, as I make adjustments to what I'm working on in 2019 and beyond.
Nadia Eghbal writes about how online 'patronage' platforms insist upon reward tiers that may not work well for either patrons or those supported. Her framing of "Kickstarter as original sin" made me smile.
Via Jeni Tennison, the sad closure of Arkive, a collection of multimedia about wildlife, running since 2003 and used by half a million people every month from around the world. The small charity behind this public resource were unable to raise funds to keep it running, or to find an alternative home.
Even when content is still online, is it possible to find it? A couple of people have been looking at the way Google search seems to forget pages which are perhaps not heavily linked or used.
Via Duncan Reynolds, a Wired piece by Gretchen McCulloch about coding being heavily based around English. It's a fascinating article - especially the four languages she finds widely available in multilingual versions.
Via Patrick Tanguay - the half life of knowledge. (Possibly relevant to thoughts from earlier this year about what happens to older software developers.)
Specialisation follows, and I think we are very aware of the limitations and indeed problems of this in tech, unless a team has diverse specialisations present and respected:
(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 exploring these questions and blogging about them, as I make adjustments to what I'm working on in 2019 and beyond.
Nadia Eghbal writes about how online 'patronage' platforms insist upon reward tiers that may not work well for either patrons or those supported. Her framing of "Kickstarter as original sin" made me smile.
Via Jeni Tennison, the sad closure of Arkive, a collection of multimedia about wildlife, running since 2003 and used by half a million people every month from around the world. The small charity behind this public resource were unable to raise funds to keep it running, or to find an alternative home.
Even when content is still online, is it possible to find it? A couple of people have been looking at the way Google search seems to forget pages which are perhaps not heavily linked or used.
Via Duncan Reynolds, a Wired piece by Gretchen McCulloch about coding being heavily based around English. It's a fascinating article - especially the four languages she finds widely available in multilingual versions.
Two of these four languages are specially designed to teach children how to code: Scratch and Blockly. Scratch has even done a study showing that children who learn to code in a programming language based on their native language learn faster than those who are stuck learning in another language. What happens when these children grow up? Adults, who are not exactly famous for how much they enjoy learning languages, have two other well-localized programming languages to choose from: Excel formulas and Wiki markup.Gizmodo's study of what smart devices in your home are really doing doesn't cover any new ground for people paying attention to the world of connected systems, but may surprise others. (Many people have shared this, but I came across it first via Ian Brown.)
Via Patrick Tanguay - the half life of knowledge. (Possibly relevant to thoughts from earlier this year about what happens to older software developers.)
A century ago, it would take 35 years for half of what an engineer learned when earning their degree to be disproved or replaced. By the 1960s, that time span shrank to a mere decade. Today that figure is probably even lower.
The result is an ever-shrinking length of a typical engineer’s career and a bias towards hiring recent graduates. A partial escape from this time-consuming treadmill that offers little progress is to recognize the continuous need for learning. If you agree with that, it becomes easier to place time and emphasis on developing heuristics and systems to foster learning. The faster the pace of knowledge change, the more valuable the skill of learning becomes.What does this mean for tech companies?
A study by PayScale found that the median age of workers in most successful technology companies is substantially lower than that of other industries. Of 32 companies, just six had a median worker age above 35, despite the average across all workers being just over 42. Eight of the top companies had a median worker age of 30 or below — 28 for Facebook, 29 for Google, and 26 for Epic Games.I am not sure I agree with the conclusion following this - The upshot is that salaries are high for those who can stay current while gaining years of experience. Some evidence for this would be good; and if it's true, where does everyone else go? What are the trained coders with outdated skills doing, if they are not in tech? Not all tech roles provide the time and opportunity to stay current, so even those with the capabilities to learn may not manage to do so (especially as some of those will presumably be working a 'second shift' at home in some capacity).
Specialisation follows, and I think we are very aware of the limitations and indeed problems of this in tech, unless a team has diverse specialisations present and respected:
...The corollary is that because there is so much to know, we specialize in very niche areas. This makes it easier to grasp the existing body of facts, keep up to date on changes, and rise to the level of expert. The problem is that specializing also makes it easier to see the world through the narrow focus of your specialty, makes it harder to work with other people (as niches are often dominated by jargon), and makes you prone to overvalue the new and novel.I feel I ought to be writing something about AI ethics as it's been a busy week (again) for principles and panels. But what is there to say? "AI ethics" encompasses so many things from deep philosophy to practical day to day processes for systems barely more intelligent than a flow chart. When we can talk about things more specifically we'll be in a better place.