What are your favourite books / resources on software maintenance?
I give it a fairly broad remit, e.g. I think Working Effectively with Legacy Code is a good one.
Month: September 2019
Smart contracts for more equitable returns on investment in public infrastructure.
‘redesigning our regulatory systems so they don’t favour speculative financing and land trading’
‘give communities a way of investing and owning the things that make neighbourhoods work, without the fear of being priced out by their desire to improve their community.’
I need to give it a thorough read, but sounds interesting and I immediately like anything that has a plan rather than just a diagnosis…
https://provocations.darkmatterlabs.org/a-smart-commons-528f4e53cec2
Is there a way to RSS/Atom feeds for Lists or Notifications in Mastodon? I know I can get them for individual users, but dunno about these special lists.
Apparently Facebook and Instagram are currently doing ‘trials’ of removing like counts from posts. That’d be good if they did actually roll it out. I can’t see them doing it though, I thought all of that psyops stuff was good for business.
Nice article about indymedia. I was vaguely aware of indymedia when I was a teenager, but didn’t know much about it.
Talks about how techno-libertarianism and individualism won out over federated communities.
This line makes me sad: ‘Today, social movements depend on Facebook, Google, and Twitter.’ But strikes me that we’re in a pretty good position right now to start federated, tactical media platforms again, no?
Trying to start to rearrange my channels in Aperture to move towards Ton’s style of information strategy (https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2018/07/my-ideal-rss-reader/). In short, making me more likely to read things from people I know (for some value of ‘know’), and less likely to get overwhelmed by a big feed of information that I could never really get through.
Yesterday was the Festival of Maintenance in Liverpool. I went along and thoroughly enjoyed it. Lots of interesting talks and nice people. The theme was basically the maintenance of things, sometimes purely engineering-focused (e.g. bridges and potholes and data), and sometimes with a pretty lefty alternative economics, post-growth, social care focused thread running through it too.
It was at The Fashion Hub, a really awesome space in the old fashion district of Liverpool, with the excellent DoES makerspace just upstairs.
It was chock full of interesting things. I have loads of notes that I hope to digest and probably microblog about over the coming days, but a quick note of a few themes that formed for me:
education
Students need to learn more about maintenance and repair, not just how to make new things. Tom of Holland mentioned how textile repair used to be in most textbooks, but no more. Civil engineer Mujib Rahman mentioned how students come into university wanting to know how to build things, and with less interest on how to maintain things.
maintenance as care
I’ve thought before how social care can be kind of be seen as a form of maintenance in a fairly abstract sense. But I liked the point made by Juliet Davis about how maintaining something for someone can be seen as an act of care for the person, too.
patterns of maintenance
Common themes seemed to arise throughout the day – e.g. the importance of monitoring in maintenance. Chris Adams mentioned during the panel discussion that a pattern language of maintenance could be a useful resource – I agree. The ODI have just released their pattern catalogue of collaborative data maintenance, but there could be scope for a general pattern catalogue of maintenance techniques and considerations.
The Open Data Institute has just launched a guidebook on collaborative data maintenance. They’ve built a patterns catalogue from looking at various collaborative data projects, looks pretty handy.
https://theodi.org/article/launching-the-collaborative-data-maintenance-guidebook/