Open paren

How (and why) to write better documentation, distinguishing Australian outback hats from fedoras, why tech management is a great path for masochists, easy ways to lose your best staff, why middle management is the most subversive position, differences in technology planning in public vs. academic libraries, emotional labor, building communities.

Project management, open source and social justice as tools of empowerment, self-image as a coder, how Sumana got into open source and why, learning programming (and its culture and tools) as an adult, computer science vs software engineering, managers as sysadmins of social infrastructure, media preservation and digitally archiving a literary estate, fixed vs. growth mindsets, debugging as a hero's journey, the Recurse Center, Hamilton.

Hyperlocal Chicago digital collections, a Wordpress/Drupal/Omeka smackdown, multisite Wordpress as a library service, Agile(ish) project management making lives better, why we love staging servers, the woes of front-end testing (with a rant about our frenemy Selenium), and Lars von Trier.

We talk about the awesomely DIY Read/Write Library of Chicago (which is eager for your volunteer involvement, Chicagolanders); building a culture of UX testing; useful web analytics tools (and their privacy implications); and the pros and cons of open source library tech stacks.

We talk about ending up in programming without a CS degree, informal learning and hidden prerequisites, using programming in your life, Code Club, teaching yourself and others to code, and Whitni's unbelievably freaking cool app that uses echolocation to help you evaluate whether your library spaces are acoustically well-suited to their functions.