Rick Scott

• Who Our Users Actually Are (2 Aug 2012): We often have an unrealistic mental image of our users, even though we are technology users ourselves. Society's norms of what a "technology user" looks like are flat-out wrong, and we need to get past them.
• Hero Culture or Crisis Culture? (6 Aug 2012): We often talk about avoiding a "hero culture", but I think this is a misnomer. The real problem is a culture that encourages a steady stream of crises, each of which requires heroic intervention to solve.
• Upgrade Your Wetware for Better Testing (9 Aug 2012): Testing is a thinking activity. I'm fascinated by how we can try to make our minds "think better" in order to become better testers.
• Learning by Osmosis (13 Aug 2012): Few of us get as many formal learning opportunities as we might like -- conferences, seminars, and so forth. If we pay attention to how we spend our time, we can try to take in a little learning and some new ideas every day.
• When Unencrypted USB Keys Go Missing (28 Aug 2012): Elections Ontario recently lost two unencrypted USB keys containing personal information on as many as four million electors. Good security policies alone won't prevent losses like this -- you also have to ensure they're actually followed.

The predominant metaphor we use to describe software creation is an engineering or construction one -- writing a program is like building a bridge, or a house. I've long been unsatisfied by this view; to me, writing software has always seemed more similar to writing prose, or at least carving bespoke items out of wood. Chris McMahon, Marlena Compton, Zeger Van Hese, and many other folks have written up their own takes on what software creation has in common with art.

My latest article on StickyMinds wraps up the Philosophy & Testing series by exhorting individual testers to look to the arts, humanities, and social sciences and see what insights they can draw into their testing.

I think it's a common misconception that only applications that are targetted at an international audience have to deal with the topics we usually think of as internationalization, such as non-ASCII character sets, handling time zones and international addresses correctly, and so forth.

But in this day and age, you can get most of these "international" data variations even from dealing with a strictly domestic audience. Most common word processors emit non-ASCII characters like directional quotes, and users are increasingly aware of how to make use of characters with dïacritics, symbols like ©, and so forth. Besides, if you're working on a web app that'll be going on the public internet, trust me when I say that you'll get all kinds of different data thrown at it from all over the world, whether you like it or not.

StickyMinds just posted my take on the subject as this week's weekly column: Bare Minimum i18n.

Audrey Tang is far and away the most awesome hacker I've ever had the privilege to have worked with. She's best known for creating Pugs, a perl6 implementation in Haskell. Though it's now semi-retired in favour of the newer implementations that it had a role in inspiring, it represented a huge leap forward and a quantum shift in Perl6 development at a time when enthusiasm around Perl6 was sorely flagging. She was the first CPAN contributor to have uploaded 100 modules. She's the key figure behind Perl 5's internationalization, as well as the i18n of many, many other individual pieces of software. She was part of the committee that designed the Haskell 2010 standard, and has made innumerable other contributions to the open source community.

I never got seriously involved with Pugs, but many of the things Audrey did with it shaped my thinking around open source, community, and how we should collaborate. First was the idea that a project should be optimized for fun (-Ofun¹), not for control, or strict adherence to the founder's vision, or anything else. Second, whereas many open source projects keep a very tight rein on who has commit access and make getting a commit bit an arduous process, Audrey aggressively gave out commit bits to anybody who happened to wander by in the general vicinity of Pugs. Got a great idea? Here's a commit bit, go implement it. Notice something missing in the docs? Here's a commit bit; go add it. Ranting in IRC that something's not working? Here's a commit bit; go fix it. Extending this trust makes people feel welcome and want to contribute. It fosters an air of community instead of making prospective new participants feel as though they are looking at climbing (or worse, building) a pyramid.

Audrey would likely demur at my calling her brilliant, but it's a fitting descriptor for her. She has a unique and penetrating insight into code and an uncanny knack for encouraging the people who write it. I count myself as fortunate to have been able to work with her and to be part of a few of the communities she's had such a profound impact on.

¹ -Ofun: -O is the compiler option that tells it how you want your code optimized. Audrey's presentation on -Ofun [pdf] talks more about how to maximize the amount of fun in your software project.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging about women in science and technology. You can find more information at the Finding Ada website.

I'm happy to note that my latest article has gone up on StickyMinds. This one's on Epistemology & Software Testing.

This one was actually a bit arduous to write, because it went off in a very different direction from where I initially thought it'd go. The pieces that do that can end up being the most illuminating ones, though.