Kosta Harlan

I wrote about Google's Technical Writing course before, tl;dr, if you're a software engineer, and you haven't yet read through Google's Technical Writing course: I recommend it.

I spend a lot of time in meetings.

Antique mosaic of Mnemosyne.

Happy new (nonprofit fiscal) year!

I recently had the experience of working out how to import a daily feed of tens of millions lines of JSONL data into OpenSearch.

What is this guy talking about?

If that demo is intriguing to you, read on!

It's been a strange month.

Reading On a bit of a whim, I picked up and read through Slow Productivity.

Time sheet from 1909; Halbert Powers Gillette, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons I spent nine years working for digital agencies, where one lives and dies by the sword 15 minute billable unit of time.

Organizing I'm testing some adjustments to my organizational system: Keeping all 1:1 notes in a single file per person / recurring meetings in a single file per meeting, rather than one note per meeting.

I started reading Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month and am enjoying the La Brea Tar Pits metaphors & writing (though I wish someone had thought to update usages of "man" everywhere to neutral terms).

A dazzling city rose up from the marches, adorned with glorious churches and beautiful palazzi, built on the lucrative proceeds of prolific trading with the east.

The main thing is that, you can hear the birds in the morning now, and green is returning to the forest.

The tens digit has moved a notch forward–I'm not sure what to make of that, really.

I've been thinking about what it takes to learn a system, prompted by some discussions about the ease (or lack of) of being a proficient developer with MediaWiki as deployed in Wikimedia sites.

German winter rolls on.

Wieder zurück.

This is going to be a short one, because while it's not the last week of the year, it's the last one where I plan to be at a computer and thus time is short.

My wrist is better, though still hurting, and I'm back typing away on the Model 100 which is a superior experience to the Atreus in nearly every way.

I sprained my wrist on Thursday night, probably worse than I ever have before, while goalkeeping in a football match with friends.

Winter's here.

tl;dr: Make sure you switch off verbose logging for MariaDB once you've finished debugging.

Like last week, I'm thinking a lot about Gaza.

I try to avoid the word “and” in git commit subject messages.

(What is this?

I’m experimenting with a few replacements for my existing workflows: Todoist, in place of org-mode for task organization Obsidian, in place of org-mode for notes Zotero, in place of trying to locate things I read by typing characters into Firefox’s address

One Sunday afternoon this month, I set my phone on “Do Not Disturb” mode, then decided to leave it that way for a week, as an experiment.

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to speak with computer science high school students about career advice & a what’s-a-day-in-the-life-like type of thing.

In June, I reached the five year mark at Wikimedia Foundation.1 Wow, that feels like a long time!

I recently made my way through Getting Things Done (GTD).

Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Earlier this month I had the pleasure and privilege of attending the Wikimedia 2023 Hackathon in Athens, Greece 🇬🇷.

Much of my day-to-day work as a software engineer involves multi-tasking, more multi-tasking, and then multi-tasking while multi-tasking.1 Transitioning from that to sustained focus in online, multi-person meetings is hard (relevant Calvin and Hobbes comi…

A while back, a colleague wrote two brilliant posts time zone trickery, and practicing inconvenience for a more equitable workplace.

If you’re in Leipzig, DE and interested to play Turkish makam / classical Ottoman music / traditional Greek music, please contact me!

It snowed, I remember that, the wheelchair ramp covered by a thin sheen of ice.

I have, once again, deleted Slack from my phone.

The current configuration of my writing club at work has lasted for more than a year.

File this in the maybe-it’s-obvious-to-others-but-not-to-me category: here’s a quick post about how you can craft your own d3.js build with just the d3 packages that you need.

I admit I had not paid much attention to Mastodon.

In a previous post I wrote about how we built the image suggestions feature for Special:Homepage on Wikipedia.

[reading] Wikimedia is adding new tools to make Wikipedia more fun to edit - The Verge [reading] Clean Architecture by Robert C.

“knock on effects”, thinking about how one patch then breaks downstream tools, and how we could avoid this as it’s so time-consuming https://gerrit.

TIL: Divje Babe flute: The Neanderthal musical instrument from Divje babe I meets all the requirements to be called the oldest known musical instrument.

Fixing an unbreak now issue affecting authentication in CI and beta cluster.

[engineering] Publishing notes from an org-mode file (one section per day) with ox-hugo, let’s see how it goes.

Earlier this week I facilitated an impromptu “unconference” session at my team’s offsite: Shipping to production faster: can we?

I’ve recently been re-reading A Philosopy of Software Design by John Ousterhout.

My team at Wikimedia Foundation (the Growth team) recently completed an iteration of work on Wikipedia’s image suggestion feature.

Last month I celebrated four years of working at Wikimedia Foundation. 🎂🥳✨ That’s eons in tech, so to commemorate this milestone, here’s a post with four notes about these years–plus a bonus, fifth announcement at the end!