In academia, we talk about success a whole lot: papers, grants, and promotions, and often as if there is a big plan. My experience is that most success is based on a lot of serendipity and failure.

Here are some of the many ways I have failed and where it brought me 👇 I promise there is a happy end to this story and this thread but let's talk about all the failing first.

I wrote 4 personal grants (for Dutch people: 2x veni and 2x vidi) and all four got rejected, for various reasons and in various stages of the process.

Ok technically my holiday has started, but I thought it'd be fun to do a @threadapalooza on programming and all the things I have thought about over the past year!

Let's see how close I can get to a hundred opinions and thoughts about programming & education! (1/100) Programmers in the workforce today are still largely self-taught in childhood. That still shapes our thinking on education. Implicitly or explicitly, many programmers believe that if you love programming, you will have found it as a child (2/100)

Cultural bias in PL design, a thread.

After the fantastic talk by @ra I got motivated to make @hedycode more inclusive by supporting non-Latin variables. I figured it would be not all that hard, given we already support strings in all character sets. But it was in fact quite tricky and the whole process was a big eye-opener for me into how English/Latin focus all of programming is.

So.... a thread of the things I needed to do to get this working.

My experience with writing grants the past year, a thread. Over the last year, I spent about 140 hours writing grants. So that time was not spent on doing research, it was spent on making plans for research, most of which I will never do. Part of writing a grant can be useful, because of course you are thinking about your research topic

Yeah sure RMS having to step down from MIT surely means his whole life is destroyed... My god this is such an embarrassing view into what FSF is now and always has been.

https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1174371580547223553

For as long as I can remember, I have disliked the open source movement. Yes, the existence of OS is important for the world to counteract capitalist software companies, and yes the OS movement has had some good effects on the world (do not @ me to tell me about those!)

Coming back from the wonderful RStudio conference where I spoke for the biggest audience ever, let's do a tiny thread of weird keynoting tips for large rooms (let's say >300) all stuff I wished I had known earlier but nobody talked about to me 😊 Here's the thing in a room with 300 people, they can see you. Above that, stuff gets strange! I have had people ask me after my talk: "were you the one doing the keynote?" and I was so confused! But you are tiny (me especially haha) on the stage! People cannot make out your face!

I refused to debate a right wing activist and you will not believe what happened next.... (Or actually you will probably believe it since bigots usually win, but how is a bit interesting. So here is the story). I was invited for a panel @tudelft about education. I accepted, since the topic is innovation in education, so yeah, that sounds great. After I accepted, they told me the other panelist is a known free speech activist that has, among other things, shared the podium with Jordan Peterson. So I retract...