Hi! đź‘‹ I'm Anna e sĂł. I'm a tech consultant passionate about free and open source software and carer of a growing collection of plants and projects.

Tech reflections

  • Thinking about FOSS, systemically

    “The free software movement is not an isolated community—it exists within political, social, and economic systems. Its concepts, models, abstractions were and continue to be built through the cultural lenses of its founders and subsequent creators and maintainers; its structures were inherited from spaces inaccessible to many. To promote true transformation within the free software space, we need to avoid the traps of reductionism and dogmatism by adopting a new approach: systems thinking. We’ll examine the problems with conventional thinking in FOSS, discussing how it fails the most vulnerable, and work towards new strategies for change.”

    Working open 7 min read
  • How did Open Collective's docs change in three months?

    “This is my last week as a Google Season of Docs technical writer and let me tell you, working with Open Collective was a delightful experience! In the last three months, I got to know more about one of the most fascinating communities in open source, worked with dedicated contributors, and — most importantly — I had the chance to improve all of Open Collective’s help pages as much as I could.”

    Season of Docs 4 min read
  • Is GitBook the right tool for your organization?

    “My knowledge about GitBook comes from their (somewhat brief) documentation and weeks of trial and error. Worst of all, since I can’t be sure about how it treats my changes (and how they will interact with the current version of the documentation), a lot of those errors occurred in production (but were reverted as quickly as I created them, many of my modifications would break or remove a considerable amount of important pages).”

    Season of Docs 7 min read

Today I learned

  • How to make Linux properly dectect your ZSA keyboard

    “The Moonlander Mark I and other ZSA keyboards can receive a modified version of their firmware through a software called Wally. ZSA also offers a browser-based live training system on Oryx. However, neither work out-of-the-box on Linux – Wally needs a few dependencies related to GTK3 and libusb that may not be installed by default, and both Oryx and Wally a new udev rule to properly detect ZSA keyboards.”

    Linux 2 min read

Slice of life

  • A macOS survival guide

    “I switched from Linux to macOS 4 months ago at the time of writing. This is my first time using macOS, so I didn’t know a lot of things a more experience user may already know. A lot of my friends are making the same switch, so I decided to write a blog post compiling a couple of tips and tricks about macOS.”

    macOS 5 min read
  • Daily planning and stand-ups

    “We currently use Zulip for synchronous and asynchronous communication. We have a private stream for organizers with two main topics we use daily: Stand-ups and Watercooler. Our stand-up topic is where we post our stand-up messages every day (and nothing else). Sage and I have different post styles, but we came up with an emoji key that helps us understand at a glance levels of importance, urgency, statuses of tasks, and much more.”

    Working remotely 3 min read