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Public Interest Technology

A few weeks ago, I chatted with someone interested in using their technology skills in government. The term “public interest technology” has been coined, as a phrase to capture this type of public service, analogous to “public interest law” from decades ago.

After the conversation I shared a few resources I thought would be helpful and it occurred to me that sharing them here could be useful as well:

- User Research Is Not Illegal, Uncle Sam - It’s Time To Dump 'Delight' - When Tech Makes Food Insecurity Worse - Policy Entrepreneurship - Government Digital Service (UK agency the U.S. Digital Service is modeled after) Measuring Success - A catalogue of things that are stopping change: Part I, Part II (ministerial change), Part III (governance) - Open Government - One particularly helpful chapter: Government as a Platform

More to follow!

#public interest technology #digital service #civic tech

Hello world! Again...

Ok, so I’m back to Tumblr since they may have gotten a bad wrap intially, and especially since they’re part of the Automattic family. All my Blogger posts are still up at mkdolor.blogspot.com and I’ll be blogging here going forward at blog.mkdolor.com || mkdolor.tumblr.com

New phone, who dis?

Tumblr’s been in the news lately for some pretty egregious behavior.

As of today, I’ll be moving my daily blogging experiment to mkdolor.blogpost.com. You should see at least one post waiting for you there and the daily cadence will continue.

Thanks for sticking with me!

#keep the streak going

My new favorite bar on the roof at Eaton Hotel.

#keep the streak going #photography

Being smug

You might remember a relatively smug article I wrote a few weeks ago about living in the moment.

Well...I just wanted to let you know that now that I’ve decided that my weekend posts will be photos I’ve taken, I’m really wishing I had stopped that morning after all.

#lesson learned

Testing JavaScript Code

A week or so ago, I mentioned how hard it is to debug JavaScript as I work through freeCodeCamp’s coding challenges. Unlike Python, JavaScript doesn’t come with a built-in Integrated Development and Learning Environment (IDLE). This makes learning and applying new concepts unnecessarily difficult.

I think I’ve figured out a path forward so I can test and debug code, using these steps.

1. Create an html file, e.g. test.html in your text editor. I love Atom, personally.

2. Use the following code in the test.html file:

<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title> </title> </head> <body> <script> console.log("test"); </script> </body> </html>

3. Open this file in Chrome, and open up the JavaScript console (View/Developer/JavaScript Console).

4. From here you can pepper your code with console.log statements, or work with JavaScript’s built-in debugger.

Code snippet via hlite.com.

#coding #javascript #code newbie #debugging

Happy Thanksgiving

Grateful that I get to work with the smartest, most dedicated, and also fun-loving group of people I’ve ever met. I’m humbled to serve alongside you and honored to help improve the way our government serves the people.

#public service #thanksgiving

Blogging Idea

I’m really enjoying this experiment of blogging everyday. I’m about a month in and I’d like to make a couple of tweaks:

I’d like to post cool photos I took that week every Saturday and Sunday. I’ve always had an interest in photography and this would be a great way to get the habit going again. That’ll also help me to feel a lot less pressure as the weeks/months progress re: posting daily.

I’ve already started doing this, but I want to make my Monday posts a Learning to Code update post. I’ll still have other posts related to coding but I want to get into this particular rhythm. I’ll likely also cross-post these entries to Medium, and possibly even LinkedIn.

Alright, that’s it. That’s my idea. And yes, I realize the irony of blogging about blogging :-)

#blog post ideas #keep the streak going

Face to face

I spent half of last week at an in person meeting with folks I interact with (via email/phone) every couple of weeks, but only see a few times a year. It was a reminder of how much more effective communication can be when you can look someone in the eye, see their reactions, gauge their level of interest. These things are only partially conveyed via video calls, in my opinion.

Remote work is desirable, I agree, but that doesn’t change the fact that humans have evolved over millennia to be social creatures. This can cause anxiety in the modern world, where we interact with lots of strangers every day, but we can delve into that in a future blogpost.

For now, this was just a reminder for me that face time is important, and almost always worth the effort.

#organizational behavior #blog post ideas #lesson learned

Learning to Code - weekly update 11/19/2018

I’m really feeling the frustration of my learning to code journey this week. I’m working through Intermediate Algorithm Scripting in JavaScript and I’m finding myself spending at least an hour on each and every challenge so far, and there are 22 challenges.

I have yet to solve a challenge without using the hints/solutions and that’s not going to help me learn as deeply as I need to. I’ve learned a bit by “cheating” in the past, but I also realize that to move from Novice to Advanced Beginner to Competent I have to learn how to tackle these problems myself. That’s the only way new neural patterns will form.

Ok my game plan will be to give each challenge a solid 1 hour of effort before even glancing at the hints. If I’m stuck after putting in that time, I will look at the hints one at a time. I’ll use each one to do another 30 mins of effort, before looking at the next hint. I’m guessing there’ll be times when I end up spending 2+ hours on a challenge and still end up needing to look at the solution. Either way, for any challenge that I use hints for, I’ll make a note and plan to go back to tackle it once I’ve completed all the challenges. My goal will be to solve the challenge without any hints this time around aim to make sure I’ve absorbed the concepts.

I’ll be back next weekend to let you know how I fare. Right now, I’ve completed 3 of 22 challenges.

#lifelong learning #code newbie #coding #javascript #blog post ideas

Lady Luck

#photography #travel

In my clearer moments I'm able to remember that people want to do good work and be good teammates, but they sometimes lose sight of that unless explicit conversations are had.

from a slack convo with a colleague this week

#coworkers #organizational behavior

Why moving from novice programmer to advanced beginner is so tough

I’m not sure who deserves the original credit for this, but a lot of folks use this image to illustrate what most coding tutorials are like:

It starts off reasonable easy enough asking you to draw two circles (and yup, the larger one isn’t technically a circle) and then all hell breaks loose with what can barely be called instructions “draw the rest of the owl.”

A lot of coding tutorials feel like this. Here’s a hello world statement now go code a tic-tac-toe game. Wait...what?

A big part of the issue is that computer language syntax is hard to parse. Tiny bugs, like putting a single character in the wrong place can lead to an entire program, many lines long, just not returning any output. In written human languages - one misplaced character doesn’t impact a reader’s ability to comprehend the entire document. For example if I typed “ezample”, you’d probably know what I meant.

Learning to debug is itself a skill involving tools (called debuggers) and can be very intimidating. Lots of beginners, myself included, resort to print statement to try to uncover what our programs are doing. Right now I’m finding that to be tough with JavaScript. I’m not sure how I could use a debugger even if I wanted to. Browser consoles don’t seem adequate for the problems I’m working on. I’ll figure it out one day soon though, I’ll write up what I find and link it here.

If you’re reading this in the future (2019+) and there’s no link above, please ping me on Twitter @marvokdolor. If Twitter no longer exists...well I’m guessing my solution will be so outdated, it’d be useless.

#lifelong learning #coding #code newbie #blog post ideas

“What it takes to be great

Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work.”

What makes Tiger Woods great? What made Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett the world's premier investor? We think we know: Each was

There’s a lot to unpack in this article. I highly recommend giving it a read. It’ll only take about 5-7 minutes, and could shift your entire mindset related to work, “finding your purpose”, and what it takes to truly fulfill your potential.

It’s particularly interesting in light of my recent post about the future. If any of us put our minds to deliberately practicing a hard and sought after skill starting today, by the year 2030, we could be one of the best in the world at it. Combine that with the idea of combining two skill sets into a combined unique one and we have a chance at being the best in our particular niche.

This is hard work, mind you. And uncomfortable. But worth it.

#blog post ideas #link #talent #growth mindset #deep work #personal mastery

Meeting proliferation

Meetings are an easy target for disdain. But I think it’s well-deserved.

Some work places have done a fairly decent job of trying to minimize recurring meetings that would be better as an email or Slack post. Bravo to those teams.

Sometimes, a decision needs to be made, and we want to include the right people in order to get their input. We feel that time is ticking, so we send a meeting invite out post haste. I’m as guilty of this as the next person.

But what about all those people who’s day will be interrupted? Have we done enough homework to make sure a meeting is actually the best mechanism? Would we better off grabbing 5 mins with each of these folks to hear their perspective? Then spending even just 20 minutes synthesizing our understanding and articulating options for next steps?

And this time pressure we feel - is it real? Or is it just our own anxiety causing us to project pressure onto a situation that would actually benefit from more thoroughness and less rushing?

These aren’t rhetorical questions.

Sometimes we do need to make a decision quickly and we do need to sit in a room to hash it all out.

My hypothesis is that those times are much less frequent than we acknowledge.

So, the next time any of us feel compelled to call a meeting - I’d like us to talk to at least some of the proposed participants ahead of time, clearly articulate the problem we’re trying to solve, and prepare an agenda/meeting structure that will help us develop a solution or at least concrete next steps.

Deal?

#meetings #planning #team #leadership #management

Learning to Code - weekly update 11/12/2018

Another solid week of coding every day. I reviewed Object Oriented Programming and worked my way through an introduction to Functional Programming on freeCodeCamp. Object Oriented principles make sense when thinking of code that represents concepts in the real world. (I’ll unpack that statement in a future post).

Functional Programming was new to me and I’m kind of digging it. I really like the idea of modular, reusable functions that don’t alter the state of the variables passed into them. Code written in this way should be much easier to read and maintain. And code is read many more times than it’s written, so this readability is a great thing.

This week and possibly next, I’ll be working my way through the Intermediate Algorithm Scripting challenges. My goal is to earn the Algorithms and Data Structures Certificate by the end of November.

#lifelong learning #coding #code newbie #javascript #blog post ideas

Another Lesson learned

I’ve had an experience this week where it occurred to me that my forthrightness with our stakeholders about a tool being a temporary stopgap was not helpful.

Details aren’t really important here, the key takeaway for me is that my forthrightness comes at a cost to the team. And there’s no real way for me to pay that cost without negatively impact the team. I’m not advocating a lack of honesty with people. But diplomacy in the face of tough circumstances is really the only viable path forward.

#diplomacy #lesson learned

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