Author: Whitni Watkins

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Technical Debt: that escalated quickly

| Whitni Watkins

If you’re not familiar with the term “technical debt”, it’s an analogy coined by Ward Cunningham[1], used to relay what happens when rather than following best practices and standards we take shortcuts on technical projects to have a quick fix. Debt occurs when we take on a long-term burden in order to gain something in the short term. I want to note that inevitably we will always take on some sort of debt, often unknowingly and usually while learning; the phrase “hindsight is 20/20” comes to mind, we see where we went wrong after the fact. There is also inherited technical debt, the bit that you can’t control. In all of my jobs, current and past, I’ve inherited technical debt, this is out of my control, it happens and I still need to learn how to deal with it. This piece aims to give some guidelines and bits I’ve learned…

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Designing & Building for Ourselves

| Whitni Watkins|1 Comment
looking at a red car through a camera lens shown upside down and focused surrounded by a blurred view.

I’m in the throes of designing a new help desk for our department that will serve to triage help tickets for approximately 15,000 employees. This has been a major undertaking, and retaining the confidence that I can get it done has been a major challenge. However, it’s also been a really great exercise in forcing me to be introspective about how I design my own ethics and culture into the system. When we design and build systems for ourselves, we design for what we need, and if you’re like me, you also aim to design for simplicity and the least work possible that still accomplishes your end goal. When I’m designing for myself, I find that I am more willing to let go of a feature I thought I needed because another one will do the job okay, and okay was enough, especially if it means less work for me….

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Imagineering

Getting your color on: maybe there’s some truth to the trend

| Whitni Watkins

Coloring was never my thing, even as a young child, the amount of decision required in coloring was actually stressful to me. Hence my skepticism of this zen adult coloring trend. I purchased a book and selected coloring tools about a year ago, coloring bits and pieces here and there but not really getting it. Until now. While reading an article about the psychology behind adult coloring, I found this quote to be exceptionally interesting: The action involves both logic, by which we color forms, and creativity, when mixing and matching colors. This incorporates the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in vision and fine motor skills [coordination necessary to make small, precise movements]. The relaxation that it provides lowers the activity of the amygdala, a basic part of our brain involved in controlling emotion that is affected by stress. -Gloria Martinez Ayala [quoted in Coloring Isn’t Just For Kids. It…

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I’m a Librarian. Of tech, not books.

| Whitni Watkins|5 Comments

When someone finds out I’m a librarian, they automatically think I know everything there is to know about, well, books. The thing is, I don’t. I got into libraries because of the technology. My career in libraries started with the take off, a supposed library replacement, of ebooks. Factor in the Google “scare” and librar*s  were going to be done forever. Librar*s were frantic to debunk that they were no longer going to be useful, insert perfect time and opportunity to join libraries and technology. I am a Systems Librarian and the most common and loaded question I get from non-librarians is (in 2 parts), “What does that mean? and What do you do?” Usually this resorts to a very simple response: I maintain the system the library sits on, the one that gives you access to the collection from your computer in the comfort of your home. This tool,…

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Hack Your Calendars? Using Them for More Than Just Appointments

| Whitni Watkins

As librari*s one thing we know, and usually know well, is how to do more with less, or at least without any increase. With this mindset, even the most mundane tools can take on multiple roles. For example, our Calendars I had a boss near the beginning of my professional career who leveraged their calendar in ways I’d never thought to: as a log for tracking projects, personal ticketing system, and the usual meeting/appointment scheduling. It stuck with me; a handful of years later and I still use that same process. When I interviewed for my now current job, I was asked how I prioritize and manage what I have to do. My response: with my calendar. I don’t have meetings every hour of every day but I do have a lot of tasks to do and things I’m working on, and having a running log of this is useful,…

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Understanding Creative Commons Licensing

| Whitni Watkins|3 Comments

Creative Commons (CC) is a public copyright license. What does this mean? It means it allows for free distribution of work that would otherwise be under copyright, providing open access to users. Creative Commons licensing provides both gratis OA licensing and libre OA  licensing (terms coined by Peter Suber). Gratis OA is free to use, libre OA is free to use and free to modify. How does CC licensing benefit the artist? Well, it allows more flexibility with what they can allow others to do with their work. How does it benefit the user? As a user, you are protected from copyright infringement, as long as you follow the CC license conditions. CC licenses: in a nutshell with examples BY – attribution | SA – share alike | NC – non-commercial | ND – no derivs CC0 – creative commons zero license means this work is in the public domain and you can do…

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Original Content

A Couple of Not Totally Useless Things You Can Do on the Command Line [written for beginners]

| Whitni Watkins

As a librarian who has been very engaged in the movement to demystify programming, I’ve really focused on teaching and sharing tools that users can use in daily life, as that has been the most common question I get when teaching, “When will I use this?” This post has been heavily influenced by my work in teaching programming to the non-programmer and teaching something that can be applied beyond the classroom. With the start of school on the cusp (and for some already come and gone) I wanted to throw something not totally useless out there for you to tuck away to use on a rainy day or now if you’d like. These have been written in mind that you may have some, experience with the command line but very little. I apologize for those more experience users if this is a bit dense in explanation. I’ve ran these successfully…

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