Year: 2017
Making stuff
Teachable Moments with Soap: Ingenuity, Stubbornness and the Wrong Tool for the Job
If you’re an oh-so-clever person who is set on making some soap on a rainy Sunday, and you’re between immersion blenders but your corded power drill and paint mixing attachment are right there in the kitchen because…reasons, you might think, “Eh, let’s try it! It worked on that canola-coconut liquid soap and traced in like 20 minutes. How bad could it be?”
The problem is, as a person with enough experience to be cocky but not enough to spot a problem on the horizon, you might also think, “Ooh, I’m going to whip up a 72% olive oil blend, just like Savon de Marseille!” Thank goodness you won’t have the hubris to think you’re actually making the real thing, and no way you’re going to triple mill ANYTHING the way they do in Marseille. But still, you’ll think that with your improvised tools you’ll get something soapy in, like, … Read the rest
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Tech Juice Cleanse
Git(hub) in 3D with Craft Supplies
I’ve come up with an innovative disruption to the paradigm we use to imagine version control, leveraging tactile user experiences and a lexicon of familiar materials.
Psych! I made a model of Git and Github with pipe cleaners and K’Nex.
Git is an open source program used for version control. That means it’s used to track changes you make in individual files, and even rewind or fast forward to a particular change. It can be useful for writers and artists, but computer programmers are its main users. Github is a website where Git users can share projects, offer changes in improvements to other users, and let those changes be adopted, rejected or modified with a full history of the changes themselves and comments about them.
Git has a relatively low learning curve for simple tasks, but it’s notoriously easy to get deep in the weeds and mess things up … Read the rest
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Tech Juice Cleanse
A Tech Explainer’s Pledge
I like helping people learn things that they weren’t sure they could understand. In tech culture, there sure is a lot of bluster, buzzwords and hand-waving. This is a pledge that I am making to myself and you to keep myself honest.
- I will always define terms using nouns, not verbs.
- It’s helpful to say “Blob.ly is a for-pay website that lets people store and retrieve big files.” It’s not helpful to say “Legu.me is a better way to find lentil soup recipes.”
- I will never define something as a “solution“, “platform“, or “framework“.
- Defining a thing as a “solution” is the same as defining it with a verb. When you say “Legu.me is an enterprise recipe solution”, it’s the same as saying “Legu.me solves a recipe problem for enterprises, but I’m going to be coquettish about what recipe problem it solves, on
Making stuff
Tech Juice Cleanse
Tech Juice Cleanse warm-up: WordPress weeding and identity iteration
I have some free time coming up and I’ll use some of it to work on a little garden plot of personal tech-adjacent projects. I’m calling it a Tech Juice Cleanse. The intent is to:
- Exercise my values and motivations through novel–even quirky–teaching perspectives
- Learn tools to bring to life some ideas that have been waiting patiently for me to get around to them
- Generally re-connect with the fun parts of being a tech worker. NB: There will be sewing.
Step 0 was to update my WordPress theme. The old one was perfectly functional and had banner photos harvested from treasured travel memories, but it was visually clunky.
So out with the old, in with Rikke. It’s nice, right? I’ve done precisely zero CSS wrangling, just some tweaks from the WP dashboard. I increased the number of preview lines, changed the body font and re-arranged the widgets in … Read the rest
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