Greg Wilson / is on Nostr

I program, write, and teach. Co-founder of Software Carpentry and It Will Never Work in Theory; co-editor of The Architecture of Open Source Applications.

Personal site: https://third-bit.com/
Software Design by Example in Python: https://third-bit.com/sdxpy/
Teaching Tech Together: https://teachtogether.tech/
The Architecture of Open Source Applications: https://aosabook.org/

Last Notes

2024-09-14 17:26:24

I now have several applications that use Python's Markdown module to convert Markdown to HTML, then immediately parse that HTML with Beautiful Soup so that I have a DOM I can manipulate before generating the final HTML. Is there an option I'm missing somewhere to convert Markdown directly to DOM?

2024-07-05 20:03:30

If you are releasing a tool to (for example) help data scientists track their experiments and results, the first thing I want to read isn't your feature list: it's your analysis of why previous tools didn't catch on and what you're doing differently to get people to actually adopt yours.

2024-07-05 11:18:37

iNaturalist is looking for a Head of Engineering https://app.beapplied.com/apply/gotyyjtuxa must be US-based, and the "technical expertise" section reads like "please know everything", but if you care about conservation and open science, this is a chance to make the world a slightly better place.

2024-06-28 12:10:42

I am standing for election to the board of the Python Software Foundation - you can read my pitch and those of the other candidates at https://www.python.org/nominations/elections/2024-python-software-foundation-board/nominees/ . Cc @npub1vv8…6fhk

2024-06-24 18:21:51

what should I teach people to use instead of cron? must be open source, stable, available on all three major OSes, and - actually, that's about it.

2024-06-14 19:22:51

- reply

apologies if I'm mis-remembering a long-ago lecture, but I believe the ability to report semantically meaningful changes was one of the motivations for development of GML (the predecessor of SGML). I have seen people pull up contract changes in Lexis Nexis, which I believe uses some derivative of SGML as a storage format (?).

2024-06-14 10:38:29

Meanwhile, two regions in Ontario are about to roll out Idemia's facial recognition system "despite" its apparent tendency to think all Black people look alike: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/facial-recognition-technology-police-1.7228253

2024-06-11 16:58:16

Pioneering computer scientist, electrical engineer, and transgender activist Lynn Ann Conway has died at the age of 86. Every modern silicon chip incorporates her ideas, and her courage was an inspiration to many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway Long may she run...

2024-06-04 10:53:25

So... alpine.js or htmx?

2024-05-12 17:19:30

The two hardest problems in computer science are compassion and organizational change. [thanks SL for the correction]

2024-04-22 21:31:01

Nobody on the Voyager team should have to pay for their own drink ever again.