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Sponsoring Open Source Projects

Published on 30 November 2023

A couple of days ago, I wanted a way to open my daily note in Obsidian for tomorrow, the day before. I couldn’t figure out how to do this easily, so I googled a bit and found this plugin. It was easy to install, and did exactly what I wanted, and saved me an hour of figuring out how to do it myself.

Looking at the README, I saw that the owner had a Donating section, where you could buy him a coffee. I thought about the time I saved, thought about the money I would spend on it, and decided - yeah, if I knew this person in real life, I would totally say “My treat” on a daily walk and buy them a coffee for their pains. So I did.

Yesterday, I had the same thing happened. I was using osx-learn, and thinking about how useful it was for teaching my OSX machine to learn new words. I use it all of the time. I know the maintainer - Titus, aka @wooorm - and I wondered how he was doing. I noticed another donate button on his page, using GitHub Sponsors. If I was in Amsterdam with him right now, I would also totally buy him a coffee as a way of thanking him.

So I did. I’m out $8, but I feel better about myself, and I feel like I’ve contributed back a bit more. I don’t do this every day, but it’s one way of giving back to maintainers while also practicing gratefulness, a gift that really gives back to the person who gives it (this is not news).

Who would you buy coffee for, today?

P.S. I’ve since pointed to this blog on fossfunders.com. My company, Burnt Fen Creative LLC (and its subprojects, like Maintainer Mountaineer) has a simple strategy for supporting open source: support maintainers who go out of their way to be nice by donating back to them when you can, what you can. At worst, this is too little and ad hoc; at best, this is more than most.

French toast recipe

Published on 29 November 2023

This sourdough pancake recipe is actually quite good. All you need is a well-fed sourdough starter, honey, salt, baking soda, and butter. Feed the sourdough starter the day before with King Arthur All-Purpose Flour, if you have that option. Flip them two-to-three minutes in.

And then freeze the pancakes. When you’re ready, defrost them the day before. Scramble an egg with some water - no need for milk. Add some cinnamon, but not too much. Dip the pancakes in the egg, and then fry it in the same cast-iron you used to cook bacon. Add maple syrup, again.

I find that the tangier of the sourdough starter, the better the french toast.

New publications

Published on 09 September 2023

I have added a few items to my publications list recently, and I wanted to add them here, too. None of them are peer-reviewed publications, but I thought each merited note there as they represent current work.

Book Contributions

I have contributed to these publications, and am listed as a contributor:

The NAS is a congressionally chartered organization that serves as the collective scientific national academy of the United States, according to Wikipedia. I am thrilled that I was able to collaborate on one of their publications, as it may have an influence on future policy regarding open source software.

Facilitation

Recently, I also facilitated a panel at an ACM conference on open source.

This panel was on reproducibility at CROSS, the Center for Research in Open Source Software at UC Santa Cruz, who have been long-time collaborators with me in OSPO++ and elsewhere. The ACM is the world’s largest scientific and educational computing society - and to have even a small role in it was excellent.

Poster

Last August I presented a poster at AFO, the Association of Field Ornithologists. This is a different field entirely than open source, but birds are something I care passionately about, and I was excited to dip my toes into the water of ornithological research. While working on a list of subspecies of birds in the Northeast for a book I am slowly working on, I found a term in the literature that I thought could be updated, as our language has changed since the 60s and it is now considered racist. Short of making a full paper, I figured a poster was also citable by others and can be used to update the term in the wider literature.

You can check out the poster about Bewick’s Swans by clicking on the link above.

I have some more publications in the works, of course, but these are just three things that I have done recently that I thought were of note.

Socials

Published on 30 May 2023

I don’t use social media very much at the moment, or, in the least, not in any structured, coordinated way. But, when I do, I use these accounts:

I use various Slack, Discord, Element, and other chat programs, but I don’t think it makes sense to share them here. I no longer use Twitter for anything, and I would encourage you to leave, too.

I also use various other platforms to record activities, often with others:

The best place to reach me is undoubtedly Signal or email.

You can reach this page easily at richard.social.

VBRC checker

Published on 27 January 2022

The majority of my coding these days appears to be based around birds. Much of what I’ve been working on has been fun little side projects for birdinginvermont.com, my little site for playing around with eBird data and for finding new ways to gamify or help understand birding and birds.

One tool that I’ve built recently is a VBRC checker: https://birdinginvermont.com/vbrc-checker.

The VBRC - Vermont Bird Records Committee - is a committee of experts in Vermont who spend time keeping records of what birds are seen in Vermont. They do this not only for birders keen on knowing what’s around, but also to track long-term changes to bird populations in the state, and to understand when birds breed, migrate, and irrupt here. This spreadsheet can tell you when you should report a bird to the VBRC - but it is also hard to figure out. You have to spend some time looking at the dates, and maybe know more about birding that the average person would. That’s OK! It’s a specialized use-case. In practice, birders who see birds that are rare tell someone who knows how to check for them - someone like a VBRC member, or an eBird reviewer (who are often basically the same thing).

My tool uses the VBRC rare birds spreadsheet to automatically tell you whether a bird in any given town should or should not be submitted to the VBRC checklist. This way, anyone who knows the species for a bird sighting should be able to easily know whether or not they need to let someone at the VBRC know about it. I like that.

Technically, making it was a bit difficult. I used React for the site, and that’s been a pain to get working at times, especially when mixed with D3 for mapping. I would like to take a lot of the computation and put it in the cloud to speed up the site, but I’m not sure how to do that without making a headless browser for D3.js and generally just making the whole thing a horrible monolith. So, instead, I’ve just tacked on another page to the site. Let the browser beware the cost of downloading the site on low-data phones, I guess. Besides that, making it was straightforward, and took a few hours - load in data using a drop-down, make these autocomplete to make it easier to avoid spelling issues, and then just use a JSON file which was converted from the old, rather dirty .xls file. Fun work.

Hopefully this site will be useful. Let me know if you hear of anyone using it!

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