the scapegoat dev

Learn software the weird way

If you were to write a book/build a curriculum for building more equitable, progressive, respectful, ecological, user-centered, inclusive software that actually speaks to young hackers that haven't been ingested by the system just yet, that's weird in just the right ways, that's not just one more bland MOOC / pretty PDF for $39.95 or O'Reilly weaksauce, what would you cover, what readings would you recommend?

So much of my approach to software has been shaped by books like weird 70ies druggie stuff, phrack/2600/datenschleuder, by philip k dick and robert anton wilson, heinz m forster and norbert wiener and ursula le guin, by utopian 80ies computer stuff (lisp machines, symbolic computers, even VMS handbooks).

This in no small part because there wasn't really too much quality "professional" resources at the time, where now we have decent oreilly books and decent conferences and all that palatable enterprise stuff and shiny vector icons and good onboarding that make it easy for people to miss that all of it is just a smooth pipeline right into the guts of big tech. It all tastes like empty calories sprinkled with the promises of a big salary and a successful career.

I'm asking partly because I tried rereading some of that stuff, and a lot of it didn't age well, in terms of inclusiveness. I'm glad I was active in feminist circles back then because that definitely balanced it out.

I'm open for any suggestions (find me on mastodon at @mnl@hachyderm.io or other channels you might know me on):

I will collect those in a "Learn software the weird way" (working title because I don't like that title at all).