Category: Getting Stuff Done

The Hallowed Glow of Digital Distraction

The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.

Endless access to new information also easily overloads our working memory. When we reach cognitive overload, our ability to transfer learning to long-term memory significantly deteriorates. It’s as if our brain has become a full cup of water and anything more poured into it starts to spill out.

I’ve known all of this for a long time. I started writing about it 20 years ago. I teach it to clients every day. I just never really believed it could become so true of me.

The first step in progress is acceptance. From Addicted to Distraction from the NY Times. 1

A New Adventure

I’m taking a position with the Wikimedia Foundation as a Community Liaison starting in late January. This is a big opportunity that will be both challenging and exciting.

I’m leaving Mercy after 4.5 years and have enjoyed my time working as an Enterprise Architect, Solution Architect, Business Architect, and Business Analyst.2 The people there have been nothing short of supportive and wonderful and I hope to stay in contact with many people who I call friends.

I’ve been involved in a tiny corner of the Wikimedia movement for a few years now and I’m excited to be able to spend more time on wiki stuff – especially when it comes to empowering people to share their experience and knowledge with nothing short of the whole world.

I also hope to work (on my own time) with the local community here in St. Louis and bring awareness to Wikimedia and the various projects we support. 3

As a liaison I’m assigned to a product team within the foundation. For me it’s the Discovery team – search, maps, and all the things that help contributors find things!

A big thanks to the folks in the MediaWiki Stakeholders’ Group for proving opportunities to learn more about the community. Thanks to the WMF for trusting and hiring me and for the individuals I interviewed with. They were honest in the details of the position and challenges in the work before us.

Thanks to those who offered to be a reference, you must have said something nice. 🙂

Most importantly, thank you to my wife Jackie and my family for making this decision with me. I’m glad we’re in this adventure together – wherever it may lead.

Unsolicited Travel Tips

While waiting for my return flight from Barcelona (via Zürich) I jumped on Twitter to dump a few things I’ve learned in the last year of travel. Instead of leaving my thoughts there to disappear into the ether I thought I’d collect them here. 4 While by no means a travel expert these are a few things I picked up that serve as both a reminder to future me and might be helpful for you as well. YMMV and all that.

  1. If you bring something to entertain you while hanging out in your hotel room (like a tablet) leave it behind. You’ll never have time to play with it.
  2. If asked to go out into the city by instead of staying in the hotel – even if you’re tired – do it. Regret makes for a terrible story.
  3. Don’t use your local phone service overseas. If possible, unlock your phone & get local SIM. On this last trip I paid $15 (Euro) for gb from Orange. AT&T, my home provider, wanted to charge me $120 (US) for 800mb.
  4. Pack extra socks. Lots of socks. Change them midday. Your feet will thank you (and your nose too).
  5. Travel light. Roll clothes. Don’t check a bag. Don’t take lots of toiletries. Unless traveling to the Sahara, just find a store. Being able to just get on/off a plane without checking/picking up a bag is amazing.
  6. Go away from the city center. Use public transit. Ask locals for dining suggestions. None of this is that scary. It will make your trip even more unique and interesting.
  7. iPhone users: Turn on Low Power Mode and keep it on. You don’t need push email/notifications when you’re on a trip! This means longer times between charges (more time to look up at the place you’re in and less time looking down at your screen) and no need to scramble for a charger.

This Must be the Imposter Convention

It’s hard to look at my impostor syndrome as the worst thing in the world — it has spurned me on to do better, work harder, and aim higher.  On an emotional and mental level, however, it has been debilitating and difficult to get past.  I’ve gone entire days without writing a meaningful line of code due to my lack of confidence.  Other times I take that feeling and crush it by overcoming development obstacles.

If a person like David can be as successful and well-known as he is and still feel the haunt of the imposter syndrome, then I’m in good company.

 

SMWCon Spring 2015 in Review

In early May I helped to organize the Spring Semantic MediaWiki Conference or SMWCon. We had 25 people from around the world come together for three days to learn and share about Semantic MediaWiki and it’s use in various industries. It was an honor to host such an event here in my hometown of St. Louis. I wanted to take a few minutes to share my experiences as an amateur event organizer and reflect on one of my personal accomplishments for 2015.

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When planning an event my mind always goes to the worst possible scenarios. What if people don’t come? What if they can’t find the event location? What if the food is terrible? What if the presentations are off-target?

For the most part, if you worry about these things and do something to address them, you’ll be fine. Don’t be overly anxious. Writing things down and keeping “To-Do” lists really helped keep things organized. Remembering to follow-up with people (venue folks, caterers, etc.) will prevent miscommunication and last-minute dashes to fix things.

Another tip? Make sure you have coffee and snacks around. Nothing fancy is needed. We made a trip to Costco the day before the event and grabbed some mixed nuts, granola bars, chips and soda.

I’m glad to say that everyone appeared to have a good time and everything 5 generally went off without a hitch.

I was an attendee at the last Spring SMWCon. Since that was also my only SMWCon experience, I based a lot of my work off of the great organizers that hosted us in Montreal. One thing I didn’t go a good enough job on was encouraging diversity in the audience and in speakers. What we had wasn’t bad, but man I would have like to have more unique voices present.

That said, we did have one of the most diverse group of industries represented. eSport statisticians, geneticists, geophysicists, independent developers, Tibetan Buddhist philosophers, MITRE, NASA, NATO, SNPedia, and more represented the diverse use of Semantic MediaWiki. We actually remarked during one of our sessions that this SMWCon had a much more ‘enterprise’ vibe than past conferences. It’s remarkable how many wikis exist behind firewalls that the public never know about and what amazing things people are doing with the software.

This lead into an interesting discussion around future of SMW and SMWCons. The discussion is ongoing, but the consensus is that there should be more events around enterprise 6 MediaWiki usage.
All of the presentations were interesting and chatting with some of the attendees opened my eyes to new uses and interests I never knew existed.

Some of my favorite sessions are listed below. We recorded the presentations and they should be up online soon.

smartMediaWiki

Wolfgang Fahl presented on an idea he has called smartMediaWiki. His tutorial was in-depth and allowed for all attendees to participate. While some of his concepts are beyond my meager understanding, the amount of effort he put into his presentation is commendable upon itself.

 

Cargo and the future of SMW

Yaron talked about his new extension, Cargo. It’s an alternative to SMW, which is interesting as it’s a much smaller code base, but nearly just as powerful. His approach to semantic data is different (standard database schema instead of triples) and the history of his involvement with SMW made for an interesting talk. Where Cargo (and SMW) go in the future is still very much unknown, but Yaron brings forth the idea that both can live in harmony.

 

The Why and How of Wiki Farms

Cindy’s presentation on the interworking of MITRE’s Gestalt framework was eye-opening. I manage two independent wikis and have never though much about the complexities of running dozens – or hundreds – of wikis. Her talk covered how one might manage multiple wikis without going insane – and still leaving plenty of room for customization and uniqueness.

 

SMW Grammars & Variables

John McClure is not a man to shy away from big challenges. His presentation tackled the promise of a semantic web – multiple independent sites interconnected among one another with a common ontology. His passion was present and his goals noble. The conundrum is who is willing to do the work? So many wiki folk – yes even those within the Wikimedia movement – are rather ‘heads down’ on what they’re working on. John’s vision is of a standard grammar we can all leverage to systematically interconnect the various repositories of information we all maintain.

 

Quantifying Accountability

James and Daren gave a great ad-lib presentation 7 on how they use MediaWiki to help document information around the training of astronauts for their EVAs. Their presentation was a great example (among many) of folks who are not ‘wiki people’ leveraging the software as part of their jobs. Both are engineers and training astronauts is their primary career. Even with that full-time gig they find time to develop their own extensions and adapt the SMW platform to fit their needs – all while releasing their code to the public.

 

How to get your bug fixed in MediaWiki

Mark gave a great overview on how to take a PITA bug and get it fixed. His introduction to the MediaWiki bug ecosystem was really helpful. I now feel more confident in submitting bug reports and improving the software.

 

We had a panel on the third day around the topic of “The Future of the Semantic Web, SMW and MediaWiki”. The three panel members 8 did a great job discussing the changes yet to come that will impact us all.

I love the SMW and larger MediaWiki community. There are a lot of good people involved. Each working hard in their respective industries trying to not only accomplish the work before them, but giving back to the community as well. If you have an inkling of interest in attending (or organizing!) a SMWCon I can’t recommend it highly enough.