Back from the Debian Conference

New blogger in XRDS!

I should introduce myself before jumping in with my first post here in the XRDS blog. I am a long time Free Software enthusiast and developer, and that might be the single item that has most influenced my professional life. I am 41 years old, and have been a systems and network administrator for over half of my life.

As a consequence of my job, I have always been interested in information security. Particularly I’ve interested in the question “how the end user perceives security?” This fragments into more detailed questions such as: How can I implement services securely without it being a major inconvenience for my users? How can I help my users adopt reasonable practices security-wise? How can we as computing professionals influence our societies so that their expectations on security, privacy and reliability are met?

That prompted me into starting a Masters degree on Information Security at ESIME Culhuacán, Instituto Politécnico Nacional. And, in turn, being a graduate student led me to XRDS. So it’s all connected in the end.

Having said that, lets get this blog started!

DebConf: A community-run free software conference

Group photo for the 2017 Debian Conference, held at Montreal, Canada, August 6-13

Fig. 1: Group photo for the 2017 Debian Conference, held at Montreal, Canada, August 6-13

I have recently arrived back home after attending DebConf17 — The Debian Conference, which was held this year in Montreal, Canada. For many of the regulars to DebConf, this is the high point of the year, the two weeks of high bandwidth communications with our online colleagues we eagerly look forward to, and its nearness is easily felt in the different communication channels the project uses for its day-to-day development.

Continue reading

An Introduction From an Interaction Designer

Hello all, my name is Andrew J Hunsucker and I’m a PhD student at Indiana University, focusing on Human Computer Interaction in the Informatics department. You might remember me from my post on Virtual Reality a couple of months ago on this blog.

I’ll be blogging here on various topics, namely: virtual and augmented reality but also about design pedagogy. My main research interests for my PhD are how designers learn how to be designers. But I’m not just interested in what information they gather, I’m also interested in how they change as people over the course of this journey. I’ve been through a design Master’s program myself, and what I saw in myself and classmates was a complicated metamorphosis process by which they transformed into a designer. Continue reading

First Things First

       It’s been an autumn of firsts.

       I went to my first User Experience symposium a few weeks ago.  It was a good conference, two full days, and I learned a lot and met a number of smart and interesting people.  For me, the first speaker, Scott Berkun, set a positive tone for the weekend with his very first point:

       “Whoever uses the most jargon has the least confidence in their ideas.”

       In short, words matter. Amen.

       My name is David Byrd, a doctoral student in the Information and Interaction Design Program at the University of Baltimore in the United States.  I’ve got two classes and a dissertation to go until graduation. I am not a traditional student.  First, at 54, I’m a bit (read: a lot) older than my classmates, and probably most of you reading this.  Also, I work full-time as a researcher and writer, with some project management on the side—but not in the tech industry. My academic background is in journalism, history, political science, and international studies; math gives me a headache, and I did little to nothing in computer science, or even interaction design or information architecture, before I came to Baltimore. Even my avocation, photography, is a “soft” skill. So, essentially, I am a Liberal Arts guy by disposition and training, in a world—especially here at ACM—populated by techies and STEM types.

       So, of course, that’s why I agreed to write this, my first blog.  No matter the realm, words—plain, straightforward, concise—matter.  More broadly, the skills and perspectives of the liberal arts matter. At some point in this blog I might suggest taking a literature or creative writing class—both of which teach you how effective stories are told, or better enable you to empathize with the stories of others: for example, your customers or users. Knowing their stories is the first step to finding out what they want; being able to convey them the first step to selling your solution. Maybe I will say something about poetry—what else is poetry except finding the exact right word, delivered with the right rhythm and force? All of these attributes are important to information architecture, important to web design.

       It’s not just writing. The best photographs aren’t just images, they suggest or tell a story. Philosophy teaches us, among other things, different ways to look at the same problem.  Sociology provides a perspective on other cultures, and lets us know what’s important to them. History tells where people came from, and from this, perhaps, we can learn where they want to go.

       So I’ll jot down my experiences with these and other topics here, and try to show where it applies to the world of technology development. I think the perspective you receive will be a little different than most.

       I hope to hear from you, whether on Twitter or email, or drop us a comment at the blog.  Let me know what you think, whether I make sense, whether I’m off in left field somewhere, whether I shouldn’t write after that second glass of Pinot.  I can always use a little SOS in my endeavors, so just give me a shout.  Hopefully we can start a conversation that helps you as well as me.

Welcome Theory Student Bloggers

Several new bloggers will be joining the XRDS student blog over the next few weeks, expanding its scope to theory related stuff and beyond! Welcome, and looking forward to your posts (posts tagged “Theory” will appear on the theory of computing blog aggregator).

The XRDS blog has been up and running for six months now, with posts written by and for CS students on a range of topics (security, HCI, being a post-doc in Paris to name a few…). The motivation behind the blog is similar to the one described here – to help carry the conversation for the student community, a place to share thoughts and get up to date. If you like the idea and would like to support this initiative, please add us to your blogroll.

Tomorrow – internships!