Day 21 — Timezones are weird

For the past month, I've been working in Eastern Time, while being physically located in Indian Standard Time. Which means I wake up around 12-2pm IST and go to sleep around 5-6am IST. Timezones are weird.

Over the weekend I attended PyConline AU in Australian Central Standard Time (Curlyboi Standard Time). So I was awake till 9-10am IST to watch the keynotes and some talks, and then went to sleep later than my usual time. Timezones are weird.

On the second day, I dropped by the sprints at 11am ACST and messaged everyone that I'll get back after catching up on some sleep. No one was there when I got back. I guess I was just being over-optimistic about the fact that I'd be able to get the best of both worlds (get sleep and contribute to a new project). Timezones are weird.

On the present issue tracker, someone said "you don't know how to make pip packages" because they weren't able to use the tool after installing it with sudo pip install. They were getting a syntax error because present runs on Python>=3.7, and (most probably) their global Python (where sudo pip install put present) was <3.6. Another person pointed out how GitHub is becoming more like Instagram because people (including me) have a selfie as their profile picture.

I'd watched Russell Keith-Magee's PyCon 2019 keynote again just yesterday in which he talks about maintainer burnout (amongst a lot of other things), and how some people come to open-source projects with a very strong sense of entitlement for a product they're receiving at 0 cost. So the above comments really hit home.

If you come to an open-source project to contribute bug reports or pull requests, then before adding comments like "you don't know how to do this" or commenting about someone's profile picture, think if such comments are going to help anyone. Instead of "you don't know how to do this", a better way to put it could be "this did not work for me, here's how you can improve it" so that everyone reading the comment learns something new! Or better yet, submit a PR to fix the issue!

The day wasn't all that bad as someone did just that for excalibur by adding a CI workflow, which is really awesome!

I continued my talk research by opening multiple URLs I've accumulated in the past one week.

  $ cat urls | while read x; do python -c "import webbrowser; webbrowser.open('$x')"; done

Time to finish reading/watching each tab one by one.