Mastodawn

Allison Parrish Apr 11, 2017

I was doing a workshop last weekend and while I was showing my work I discovered that two of the pieces in my portfolio are just... dead links. both pieces were made on commission for organizations that no longer exist, and I was reminded of the fact that if you want something on the internet to last you have to host it yourself.

(this is why I'm a mastodon fan. not that I'm hosting my own account right now, but it's good to know that I could!)

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Allison Parrish Apr 11, 2017

I teach tech and I'm often asked why I don't teach some allegedly time-saving proprietary tool/environment/whatever. the answer is that the risk of that proprietary tool just ceasing to exist are really high, and when that happens, the time I spend developing curricula against the tool goes up in smoke. by contrast, notes I wrote for, e.g., python text processing are just as good today as they were ten years ago. over the long run, I think I save a lot of time by teaching only open source tools.

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Jonathan McDowell

@aparrish This is a big consideration for us - astronomers tend to use the same packages for decades as languages and fads come and go - we often re-analyse old data, too, so stable data standards help. There's a big cost to redeveloping your entire system every few years.