Forem: marcia

Linuxfest Northwest presentations 2020

marcia — Fri, 08 May 2020 03:53:22 +0000

Here's a bunch of presentations from linuxfest Northwest. My talk was about the dev experience. Not sdks or apis... Focus on documentation development lifecycle and tools for developer experience testing for documentation.

https://www.linuxfestnorthwest.org/conferences/2020

Repo:
https://gitlab.com/remastersys/dx-os

Moving proprietary processes to Free and Open source processes

marcia — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 13:08:53 +0000

Working as a consultant mainly focused in Linux over the past couple decades, I have found there is a significant use of proprietary software in corporations.
After I left the FSF internship, I sought work where I could use Linux, preferably using only free software.
Realizing that this was not an easy task in the early 2000s, I still made the effort.

I was hired to write Linux essentials basically because after reviewing the chapters from Cisco, yes for some reason they were having Cisco write chapters, I found so many errors and so much plagiarism, they asked me to write it. For this job I dragged in my own Debian machine.
This was before Ubuntu. Porting software to Debian was easy but nobody really cared. Porting and cross compiling really wasn't a big issue.

However it wasn't until this past week that I realized how easy it was to convert a process, that been in place for years, with an open source process.

For the purposes of this particular process, we used a wysiwyg that was proprietary and cost a lot of money, windows, Excel for manually entering metadata, a few scripts ... Perl.

Yes I realize it's 2020!
We also were required to install strawberry Perl.

So basically it was all unnecessary and proprietary. Licenses for the wysiwyg from Adobe were in expense. I'm pretty sure they pay for Windows too one way or another.

In the end it took less than a day to figure out how to convert this process into:

Linux
An editor of your choice
A bash script to generate the manifest XML and zip the directory

If you work in a company that uses a proprietary software or incorporates proprietary processes, think about how you can simply convert this to an open source process.

Not only will this possibly make your life less frustrating, but also can save time and money.

Maybe you will encounter some resistance in some organizations. However, there's always virtual machines!

The Developer Experience - With GNU Linux

marcia — Sat, 28 Sep 2019 10:15:17 +0000

| UX v DX |

There is a lot of discussion around UX which is nice but my focus is the Developer Experience. In the past, there was a segment of the population that would debate that a Developer is a User, just a different kind of user.

That was fine.

In the meantime, while they were ignoring devs, I focused my work toward developers. This is the audience I wrote to. The instructions for how to use the API or how to parse a json files - were for developers.

The instructions to run the AI applications in python or C/C++ were most definitely written for developers.

| Levels |

There was something else these marketers and product sales people would never understand - the different levels for dev. You have your hackers, your professional devs, your script kiddies and everything in between or on the way to a new level.

| exit_success |

Writing instructions so all would succeed with a final exit_success result is the goal of writing to the "dev" audience.
I know some integrators who will read a 800 page manual, and some like "manual, we don't need no stinkin' manual!".

Personally, I like Ikea's manuals. No words. Total internationalization.

|| F.T.W ||

Keep engaged - eye on the prize
Keep informed - offer accurate instructions with info
Keep on task - offer relevant information
Keep it simple, stupid - KISS still rocks!