The Particular Finest

How to Make a Book of Photography

So after my recent(-ish)((6 months is recent, right?)) “publication of Fly, A Collection”, I wanted to talk about the process of making a book of photography.

Fly is my third work, following Linear A and Distinctly Coromandel. All three went through different publication routes, but contain a lot of similarities that are worth discussing.

There Is No Meritocracy

Tech culture idolises the idea of the meritocracy, the mythical organisational strategy where those of skill and capability rise to the top, and lead ”naturally”. Of course, being tech this means that those of great technical knowledge and coding skill are the most meritorious, deserving of our recognition and adulation.

But, meritocracy is just an unacknowledged bias. When you say “good at coding”, what you mean is that they have your background, value your values, prioritise like you prioritise. They have your ability to share on GitHub, your spare time to contribute, and make decisions that look like your decisions.

Secondary Effects

So, we all know about contempt culture nowadays, the effect that we’re building status on top of displays of contempt and showing that we’re holders of the ”right” knowledge.

But this has some unfortunate side effects that result, that I’ve been starting to notice.

Human Driven Development at LCA

Hey!

So, in case you missed it last time, I was honoured to be invited to keynote WOOTConf at Linux.conf.au on Monday, and was able to give an updated version of my talk “Human Driven Development”

That PHP Graph

So by now you’ve probably seen this graph bouncing around the tech conversation in the last couple of days. It’s interesting data science! It’s a great way to see the sorts of trends around how people program and how people are learning to program.

You may have also encountered this idea of contempt culture that I’ve spoken about earlier, where tech communities use on demonstrating contempt towards tools outside what’s “acceptable” in their group as a proxy for belonging to that group.

Watching me Talk

Hey cool people!

Back in late July, I was honoured to get to speak at WDCNZ here in Wellington, and my talk was on the culture of technology and how contempt culture damages our communities and creates hostile and unpleasant environments.

A Collected Set of Data

Need

As a business aurynn, I keep finding out about conferences far too late to either submit to them or even attend.

Case in point: NDC in Sydney next week (Aug 1-5) that I found out about on Jul 28.

Your Team In Four Dimensions

So I had a meeting the other day, where a really interesting term came up, that of “temporal teams”.

In the context of the conversation, we were discussing teams that come together to achieve some goal, but disband after the project is completed. It’s a model that’s used extensively in the film industry, where contractors are brought together for the project and part ways at the end.

Linear A

Oh hey

So you saw my post about Fly not that long ago, with the announced ebook that you can go look at right now! It’s pretty awesome stuff.

Stellaris, an Update

So the “Clarke” update for Stellaris came and went, and I gave it another go after my initial enjoyment of playing Space Kitties Bastards Edition, wherein I was a domineering warlike species that was busy subjugating half the galaxy.

It was fun. 😀

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