Over a week into blogging every day on this new blog I’ve started to get a little braver about mentioning it to people. Twice today I felt compelled to explain that I’m blogging with vi. Here’s my process:

• ssh into my server
• run my “create post” script to stub out a file
• think about what to write
• rename the stub to match my topic, a bit
• find an SVG file for the topic
• write, make, write, repeat
• make sure post is a “5 minute read” or shorter
• make sure it looks fine on mobile
• commit, push
• pull on some other computer so I have a backup.

Here’s my “create post” script right now:

Today I was working away when Craig Willis from Whole Tale pinged me and asked me look over an email he plans to send about a new integration between Whole Tale and Dataverse.

In the email he plans to link to two videos, both of which do an incredible job of demonstrating the integration:

• Starting from Dataverse
• Starting from Whole Tale

Unless you’re into science and reproducibility there’s no need to watch the videos but they are so effective at getting the point across that I went ahead and linked to them in a related issue I opened for another potential integration.

Late last week a package arrived at work. My office mate and I decided we should wait until more people were around before I opened it.

I knew Oliver Bertuch had sent it because he told me it’s not a bomb. I met Oliver in Berlin in February at an event called Open Science Days where I gave a talk about Dataverse. He had been contributing to Dataverse for months and it was great to finally meet him. I put a couple pictures of the two of us hanging out on Twitter back then.

Yesterday I was putting together a dresser from IKEA and had my laptop near me to glace at various chat rooms from time to time to see what’s cooking.

As luck would have it, I checked Inkscape’s #team_vectors channel and noticed an announcement that a meeting was coming up in a couple hours. From the teams page,

“The Vectors are the marketing, outreach, and promotion team for Inkscape. Designers, artists, marketers, writers, and anyone enthusiastic about bringing Inkscape to more people in more places is welcome to join.”

I’m excited about going to FOSDEM 2020 for many reasons.

I’ll be giving a talk on Dataverse.

I’ve also been keeping any eye on a thread on the Open Source Diversity forum about who to look for at FOSDEM.

Open source has a pretty terrible track record when it comes to diversity. A 2017 survey by GitHub indicates how male-dominated open source is by saying,

“The gender imbalance in open source remains profound: 95% of respondents are men; just 3% are women and 1% are non-binary.”

For years I’ve been meaning to learn Inkscape.

Recently, I found a nice tutorial where Jurgen Gaeremyn explains very clearly how to draw a kitten in a “vector” layer over top of a “bitmap” layer in Inkscape.

My daughter Erika and I were absolutely enthralled.

Here’s the kitten we drew:

The really cool thing is that I emailed Jurgen to say thank you and he wrote back right away saying,

The talk I submitted to FOSDEM, “Advancing science with Dataverse: Publication, discovery, citation, and exploration of research data,” has been accepted! I also have a speaker page. I’m waiting until I finish coordinating a “fringe” event before I follow up on the FOSDEM 2020 in Brussels Feb 1-2 to announce both (and tweet about it) but I’m very excited. This will be my first trip to Belgium and my first time attending FOSDEM.

It would be nice to write more.

Here are some ideas of what to write about in 2020:

• Podcasts about software development.
• Books worth reading.
• Talks worth watching.
• Trip reports from conferences

More ideas:

• SLOPI
• Druthers
• SMACKI
• Web Components
• Open Source Health (or contribute to blog)
• Open source heroes