Sumana

I'll be performing stand-up comedy about technology and the open source industry at two virtual conferences in November: SeaGL and !!Con. I'm developing and rehearsing new material now for these performances. The content will overlap some but won't be the same in the two sets.

More info is at my Cogito, Ergo Sumana blog.

Now's a good time to save the dates!

An acquaintance of mine is doing code review for PullRequest.com for USD$100/hr. "PullRequest provides on demand code review as a service from exceptional engineers to teams of any size." If you're looking for a part-time work-from-home-whenever opportunity and you have some programming skills, might be worth checking them out.

My local Python programming conference is going online this year. October 2nd and 3rd, PyGotham will be "PyGotham TV". The call for proposals says: "we also encourage fun and creative talks playing with the TV theme" -- so I was thinking: a little session reminiscent of MTV, or Pop-Up Video, might be interesting.

The sessions "should be 10 or 25 minutes long" which is enough time for a few vids. And, given how well-received "The Programming Saga" by echan and my vid "Pipeline" have been at tech conferences, and given how receptive PyGotham has been in the past to my odd experimental sessions, I think it's plausible that I could get a vidshow accepted. A playlist themed around engineering and the tech industry and our heritage and our successes -- stuff like "The Programming Saga" and "Pipeline", and "Landsailor" by raven, and "Speeding Rover" by seekingferret.

But! The call for proposals says: "Because it is an online-only event featuring pre-recorded talks, you must accept the recording release in order to be considered for PyGotham TV." The recording release itself* says you have to certify "that you are the author of your presentation (or otherwise allowed to present it at PyGotham TV)" with language including "certify that I am either the copyright owner of the User Submission or an authorized licensee of the copyright owner". Partly, I'm guessing, because this stuff is going to get streamed on YouTube. This year's WisCon vid party ended up happening on Zoom rather than YouTube and I would not be surprised if DMCA takedown concerns were one of the reasons.

So.... I think this could still work. Vids using public domain or openly licensed music, maybe?

The call for proposals is open through July 5th. If 3 people want to make some vids that are about engineering/technology in some way, using music that won't trigger a Content-ID takedown, I could put together that proposal. Heck, I don't need premieres -- if you've already made some that fit this constraint, I want to know about them!

* There is "you can opt out" language on that release; I followed up on this and that paragraph is an artifact of prior, in-person conferences. They're fixing the release to remove that now.

I wrote a blog post -- "Tropes, and Missing Stories, in Art about Programming" -- about the stories we tell & don't, and what I'd love to see and hear at The Art of Python and at !!Con.

You have 5 more days to propose to The Art of Python & till March 3rd for !!Con!

[I keep remembering stuff I didn't add in that writeup (I wanted to just hit Post instead of dawdling endlessly), like Vienna Teng's "Aims" album, the bit in "Amends, or, Truth and Reconciliation" about the magical war crimes database, Vernor Vinge and Neal Stephenson and and and. Feel free to add a comment to this issue asking for prior art you've loved!]

Completely separately, I wish to signal-boost an excellent idea for a card game, from the dreams of alias_sqbr!

On May 3rd, 2019, two friends and I are hosting "The Art of Python", a miniature arts festival at PyCon North America 2019 (Cleveland, Ohio), focusing on narrative, performance, and visual art. We intend to encourage and showcase novel art that helps us share our emotionally charged experiences of programming, particularly in Python. We hope that by attending, our audience will discover new aspects of empathy and rapport, and find a different kind of delight and perspective than might otherwise be expected at a large conference.

There's more about this at my co-organizer Erty Seidohl's blog post, including an invitation to also propose your "not-talks" to !!Con.

In short, we are interested in how fictional narrative, visual and performance art, and different presentation formats can make different kinds of teaching and representation possible.

"The Art of Python" is seeking your proposals now and the deadline for submissions is 28 February. And if you've never written a play and want guidance so you can write your first, we'll have a guide up on 1 February to help you!

Thanks to Erty and to Brendan Adkins for co-organizing "The Art of Python" with me! Thanks to PyCon's Hatchery program for new PyCon events, which makes this festival possible! Thanks to Jackie Kazil for the festival name! (My codename was "Spectacle!" which is probably misleading and less accessible.)

My friend asks:

Anyone here who has left tech or similar profession & gone into ministry / pastoral care? Or know someone who has?