puzzling.org

June 30, 2006October 26, 2025

A degree in computing?

This is a re-publication of an essay I originally posted on a now defunct website in September 2004.

I’m obsessed with understanding the minor failures in my own university education, probably unreasonably so considering that I have two undergraduate degrees, good mental health and a debt to the Australian government that will buy them only one new low range car.

Nevertheless, there are a few striking things about a degree in computer science that I’ve learnt through experience, and thankfully sometimes through the experience of others, that I think are worth noting for the record. This essay is a guide for people considering starting a undergraduate (bachelor-level) computer science degree or computer science major. I’m going to lead with the negatives: I think people should think more carefully before starting computing degrees, and degrees in general for that matter. But as I don’t actually regret the degree, I will conclude with some positives.

Why you may not want to do a computer science or computing degree

You aren’t suited to university

By this, I basically mean that you don’t want a degree. Degrees are what universities think their purpose is. Degrees are annoying things to get. In most universities there’s a complex set of rules governing which subjects you have to take in which combinations, which subjects you can’t take, how many subjects you can take, what marks you have to get, and what level of courses you need to do. They almost invariably involve at least one time-serving course which is totally uninteresting to you, and one boring but difficult course which you need to put a lot of work into.

Once you jump all those hurdles they let you wear a silly hat.

Further, universities are geared towards students getting degrees. If you show signs of not being such, like repeatedly failing courses, or simply doing too many low level courses and not enough final year courses, they have a distressing tendency to try and throw you out.

Further, at least in Australia, you can get by without degrees in computing fields. Their official function is to act as a stepping stone into academia, or as a heuristic for employers to demonstrate that you are capable of completing a long, and more than somewhat arbitrary, list of tasks in order to achieve a goal (employers are in the long and arbitrary tasks business too). They also indicate a certain skill set. But they aren’t the only way to show that you have that skill set.

Larger organisations get a bit hung up on them. It can be difficult, for example, to get work visas to certain countries without a four year degree in a relevant field. As businesses get bigger, it tends to get more likely that “degree in relevant discipline” appears in the ‘mandatory requirements’ section of job ads too.

While failing to get a degree you wanted can be miserable, hanging around at university without much intention of getting a degree can be fun, especially in countries that have low tuition fees. My experience of people who do this is that they eventually get sucked into the degree mania and have some regrets, especially once their friends start graduating, but if you really want university without the degree I don’t have much more advice to give.

There’s good things about university too (later!) but if this description is making you grit your teeth and long to flee into a job, or possibly to the Himalayas for a good long hike, follow your dreams there instead.

You don’t like programming

To people who know about the content of most university computing courses, it will seem extremely strange that you want to do computer science at all. The reason is that university computing courses focus on one of two things: in the vast majority of cases, that is programming theory and practise with dashes of software engineering and a smidgen of computing theory (discrete mathematics, in other words); in a small minority of cases they concentrate on computing theory.

In short, if you are certain that you do not like computer programming, you should not do a computer science degree, with a few rare exceptions for people who like the mathematics rather than the programming and want to do a theoretical computing degree. Even in that case, check the program you’re entering thoroughly because almost all of them will have you programming much of the time. You might well be better off in a mathematics major.

If your bent is systems administration or other techie non-programming skills, you will also want to avoid most undergraduate courses, because they teach programming to the exclusion of what you’re interested in. There are a few exceptions to this, and you might find some interesting Masters courses, but be sceptical and enter programs only when you’re sure that you aren’t doing “programming with a dash of systems” when you want systems. It’s likely you could find relevant courses outside the undergraduate system, and it is worth considering skipping the whole thing and learning on the job.

In the, alas, most common case, where you have some idea that you might like to “work with computers” (or often, you would like to manage people who do), have no particular existing skill set above using your computer for email or gaming, but are certain that coding is not your thing, you don’t want to touch a computing degree. In the best case you’ll struggle through a semester or two, realise that it’s all programming and you hate it, and spend another semester or two establishing prerequisites in a different field. In the worst case you’ll push through three or four years wondering when you’re going to learn ‘industry skills’ (meaning management). You aren’t. You’re in a programming course. Definitely skip the whole thing. Do a little research and find a faculty or major that teaches the skills you want or the things you’re interested in.

There are a number of non-programming computing majors, normally called ‘IT’ or something similar (although not always, some ‘IT’ courses are also programming courses). These generally have varying amounts of ‘basic computing’ (using office products), system design, project management, database design, and business skills. Computer science students tend to look down on these courses, but the few people I know who’ve done them say that the management skills they teach can be worth it. The only thing I’d warn about if you’re thinking of one of these courses is checking whether you like programmers themselves. If you find them insufferable or laughable, you’re going to have a hard time managing them and it might not be worth training to do it.

You have no idea if you like programming, because you’ve never done it

I know several people who started university in this category, two of whom graduated from computer science with highest honours. Unlike loathing programming, it’s not a death-knell for your enjoyment of the course. In addition, at least in Australia, all computing degrees assume that you cannot program when you begin them (the University of Sydney claims that, except for a few very experienced students who earn excellent marks easily, the difference between the experienced and inexperienced in terms of marks is negligible after three months).

Nevertheless, before committing three or four years and a fair bit of money to a programming degree, you may want to get a basic idea of what it is you’re going to be doing with your time. There’s a few options: there are a lot of online programming tutorials these days and many free toolkits — a lot of your programming is going to be self-taught anyway, so you could start out that way. You could also take a summer course at a technical or community college. Which one you want to do may depend on your personality: as a beginner I spent a lot of time trying and failing to think of interesting practise projects, so I guess I was a course-type person.

Programming is difficult and frustrating initially, but allowing for that, having a little programming experience will help you decide whether you like it enough to spend years listening to people talk about nothing else.

You love programming and are very experienced

By this I don’t mean that you got high marks in high school computing courses (or at least, not that alone). People who can program to the extent that they get high marks in your average high school, but not a great deal more, will probably find computing degrees really useful: you will meet people more skilled than you; you will find many of the assignments at least somewhat challenging; and while you will probably begin to find the lecture courses dull, they won’t cause you to attempt to pound your lecturer’s head through the wall.

Even in this case, you will find the early stages, which are aimed at the non-programmers allowed into the course, quite frustrating. But it’s quite likely that you will learn a great deal in the later years of the course, from courses and especially from classmates. You might well emerge ready to program professionally. In case you can’t tell, this is the category I entered university in.

But if you’re experienced to the extent that you’ve written working 10 000 line (or much more) projects for fun, have programmed professionally, or have done extensive work with others, you are likely to find at least the first two years so insufferably tedious that you may well be tempted to turn violent. Anyone who is a major code contributor to a medium sized Open Source project almost certainly falls into this category.

In addition, you may not do very well. There’s a couple of reasons for this. First, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be doing programming exclusively. In most computing degrees, your first year will include mathematics courses, and depending on the institution, it will probably also include at least one business, engineering, or science course. Your programming experience will probably not help you pass these other courses — which is not to say that other abilities, such as good mathematics skills, writing skills, or a good memory won’t get you through them — and the mind-numbing simplicity of introductory programming risks convincing you that you can pass them as easily as you will programming.

Or will you? Mostly, yes, with blindingly good marks. But alas, programming courses will often involve just enough theory to trip you up if you aren’t interested in some of the theory, or neglect to flick through the textbook: you’ll code up a storm but be unable to remember precisely how pushdown automata work when it comes to the exam (unless you ever coded one of course!) This is sometimes more the case as the degree goes on.

Some people who are experienced programmers might prefer to do a related degree with new skills (like mechanical or electrical engineering); a theoretical degree with a lot of maths, since they’re less likely to have taught it to themselves already; or a completely new field, if they want an extended break from their programming. Others might skip the degree. Otherwise reconcile yourself to the tedium a bit and try and seek challenge in your fellow students and your teachers, not your courses themselves.

You have no academic interests aside from programming

As above, most university degrees require some semblance of balance in your courses for a few years until they finally let you geek out on an all computing extravaganza. Annoyingly, some of these courses will also stand in your way — in particular, failing maths may stop you proceeding in computing.

If you really cannot stand any of the other subjects that are likely to comprise your program (make sure you investigate what these are) or aren’t going to be able to pass them, you’re going to have a hell of a time getting to the interesting bits of computer science inside the university system.

I did a science degree with maths and computing, and an arts degree with linguistics and philosophy: the first is a fairly typical computing degree. Other common ones are engineering based courses, which will have a lot of maths and physics with the programming; and business based courses, which will have accounting and management, and sometimes a touch of maths, with the programming. Some universities are very flexible and will let you do, say, metaphysics and computing, others stick to traditional patterns. But at least in Australia, computing degrees without non-computing course components are rare.

Why you may, after all this, want to dance to the university tune

I think I was actually a fairly good candidate for undergraduate computer science. I have reasonable mathematical ability, I’m a better writer than the majority of my fellow students (this became relevant during the last year of my degree when I did a research project), and at the time I entered I had some programming ability but very little experience of projects that took more than three hours to complete.

I ended up getting a lot out of my computing degree, and in this section I’ll discuss some of the things you could get out of it.

You will meet other students

I actually think this is the single major reason you should consider undergraduate studies at all. University is an easy way to make friends. You will be exposed to a wide group of people who like you are confined to the campus much of the time. Making friends after university is harder because the range of people you meet daily falls and it’s hard to see a lot of them, especially in cities where you may live two hours drive from your colleagues and friends.

I have a typical geeky high school sob story, although it’s on the mild side because it didn’t involve being assaulted or attempting suicide, it just involved loneliness. I arrived at university more or less convinced that I was terminally unattractive to my peers.

After considerable time (I spent five years at university) I left with quite a large group of friends and acquaintances, an immeasurably improved set of social skills, and a much better self-image.

In computing, in particular, your peers will have a lot to teach you, assuming you find a good group of people. Computing students tend towards the obsessive and will spend a lot of time teaching themselves and each other all about their findings. It’s probably more the rule than the exception that you will learn more programming skills from your peers than from your teachers. (This doesn’t seem to be true in other science disciplines, and is only true in the humanities when your peers are exceptional.)

‘Networking’ deliberately is a bit yucky, but the natural process of meeting people with common interests and hanging out with them will introduce you to people who have a lot to teach you. If you end up getting a job through these people eventually, you’re in good company.

The course discipline can be useful

Computing courses will tend to set relatively fixed assignments that force you to practise programming skills, although some teachers are far better at this than others. At the university I went to, these assignments were also very open-ended, in that you spent about three days getting 80% of the marks and then for every mark after that the time you spent would increase. While this was both good and bad (some students deliberately chose part time studies in order to improve their marks at the cost of an extra year’s study) it did force me to practice.

If you don’t, early on, get sucked into an intense group of hardworking programmers (and talented programmers can be among the world’s best procrastinators) the discipline of the coursework will improve your programming skills. In my case, and I only really did hobbyist programming in the final two years, the early improvement was huge.

You have the chance to study other things

A lot of people hate the elective requirements of some degrees, particularly if essay writing and mathematics don’t come easily to them (you’ll likely need one or the other), but undergraduate studies are one of the very few opportunities you’ll have to learn about a lot of subjects from experts in the field, some of whom will be marvellous teachers. In some cases — mathematics and science particularly — it’s very hard to learn about the field later without course discipline to push you along, in other cases it might just expose you to something you can follow up at leisure.

I gained two major interests from non-computing study at university: language and modern history. One is likely to be part of my career path, the other is filling my bookshelves. I wouldn’t be without them.

You’ll get the piece of paper

In most ways it’s an arbitrary measure of ability to finish a regimented program, but for some career paths you need it, and it might well make you happy to have it. I quite like having mine, I even gamed the system for a fifth major. In hindsight I wouldn’t do a five-year pre-honours program again (and I wouldn’t do high level maths after second year because I wasn’t committed enough to it) but I’m pretty happy about it overall.

A degree in computing? by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

July 23, 2005April 8, 2026

Broken windows

There’s been some fun and games in LinuxChix lately with a particularly violent sounding poster calling himself MikeeUSA posting variations on the phrase “Death to women’s rights” interspersed with some obscenity laden mails.

He’s been posting to Debian Women for a while longer and a bit more extensively. From what I gather from them and from Google his purported beef with women’s rights is that either:

increasing rights for women reduces the pool of submissive women suitable to be his mate; or
horrible controlling women not suitable to be his mate are invading every aspect of his life including his Free Software hobby and are actively attempting to steal all the credit for them, eg by claiming that women built Debian or something.

Some random places to look include the bug he filed against Daniel Stone for being a “a woman disrespectful of men” (Daniel claims to be neither a woman nor the Debian xorg maintainer, but has not yet to my knowledge stated in public that he respects men, so I consider this case open) and the by now rather well linked post to debian-women. With some small ingenuity with Google you can find him getting banned from games forums and Wikipedia for similar activities. It all gets a bit nastier later on with him posting fantasies about the violent deaths of the women reading, and harassing people’s teenage daughters off-list and stuff. Suffice to say that I disagree with his purported premises really quite a lot (if nothing else, he doesn’t strike me as being that attractive pre-feminism either: just because women earned less doesn’t mean that they didn’t know stark raving madness when they saw it) and with his methods so strongly that I can’t think of a good way to express it.

What I have been considering is the correct response to this.

Conventional wisdom about trolls says “don’t feed them.” Ignore them and deny them the precious coin of attention, and take especial care to avoid actually engaging with their arguments even as an antagonist. This has some merits, although it’s actually quite difficult to accomplish: the work of 499 people in ignoring the troll is more or less undone by the one person who responds. It’s pretty rare that I’ve seen all 500 people respond with silence.

The initial Debian Women post got a response that I (and Anarchogeek) considered quite bizarre: someone attempted to engage with whatever sanity lurks beneath the madness and honoured MikeeUSA’s need for recognition as a software developer. The only reasoning for this I’ve seen was in the Anarchogeek thread, in which commenter Jeevan argued that it was an appropriate decision because “Don’t you think the reason one person on the mailing list thanked him for the software is because it’s a Debian mailing list and not a human rights (or something equivalent) mailing list.” I appreciate that some members of the Debian community have different social norms to me, but I don’t quite understand how the mere mention of doing FOSS development entitles you to a free ride on such matters as making death threats against a group of Debian community members. However, Jeevan seems to think so, and therefore the option of “giving them the respect that they so manifestly deny you” is placed before me. Let’s move on from that one without further comment.

I may be missing a thread, but as the mails from this nut job continued I believe the next response from Debian Women was a month later, and here it is. It’s much closer to what I did on LinuxChix.

My decision on LinuxChix was to do the following: wherever this guy appeared, I would respond with a post directed at the list saying that this blatant violation of the “be polite, be helpful” list rules was being responded to by banning. After a few more episodes I posted a warning to people about avoiding direct interaction with him where possible. (Given the reported incident of harassing someone’s family together with the hysterically violent emails, I think it’s possible that he may pose a danger to people, if only by upsetting their family. I’m shocked not to have gotten a direct contact from him yet.)

My reasoning for doing so was as follows:

it’s not acceptable behaviour on our lists, and we generally call people on considerably less outrageous nonsense than this;
LinuxChix is a community which is always partly composed of people new to online forums and new to the related forms of bad behaviour; and
some of these newcomers, in addition to possibly finding the nastiness frightening, would interpret silence as implying that that behaviour was either unremarkable or acceptable (as might readers of the archives).

Hence I wanted to show clearly that that behaviour was not acceptable.

I later thought of a further point, which is the Broken Windows theory.

In its standard formulation, this theory goes that minor signs of urban decay such as broken windows that are not quickly repaired lead very quickly to other decay and then to a failing of any kind of civic feeling.

My particular variant of this for this case is that by not clearly having someone with some notional authority about to state clearly that violent harassment is unacceptable has two negative consequences:

it encourages a feeling that violent harassment may in fact be acceptable; and
it encourages a feeling that whatever we might say is unacceptable doesn’t matter, because we’re not around to stomp on unacceptable crap when it happens.

In other words, nastiness that’s not publicly identified by someone with authority (in this case, I chose to use the authority conferred by my list admin status) who asserts community norms, is like a broken window in a community.

In many ways I imagine this matters more on LinuxChix, where blatant trolls are now rare, than on Debian Women which is still waging the odd flamefest with some Debian developers who have only slightly more moderate opinions than MikeeUSA’s, and which probably has a different position on trolls. (LinuxChix is not as ban happy as this post might imply, but people who the list admins consider purely disruptive will be booted: this happens once a year or so). I think following the standard prescription on trolls, while useful when individually targeted or when you realise that you’ve got into a discussion with one, is a potential broken windows disaster from a community’s point of view. The troll doesn’t care, but the rest of the community is likely to be pleased and reassured to see agreed standards fairly enforced.

October 27, 2004April 22, 2017

Planet Free Software

Article originally posted at the IT Kitchen, a now defunct project founded by Shelley Powers.

Free Software developers, who had strong mailing list and IRC based online communities before the advent of weblogging, have nevertheless found their way into it. This post is a summary of how the Free Software world is using blogs for collaboration; largely preferring aggregation of community members’ blogs over setting up single access group blogs, and using them as a community building tool rather than a software development collaboration tool.

One of the big developments was Advogato, which started in late 1999. The creator of Advogato, Raph Levien, appears to have been trying to start up a kind of a semi-formal guild system for Free Software developers, allowing them to rank each other as Master, Journeyer or Apprentice. As a small feature, he added the ability for users to make “diary entries”, the most recent of which were listed at the side of the front page.

While the other features of advogato proved only an intermittant success — the quality of the articles on the front page is widely lamented, and the certification system has been subject to a lot of debate and has not resulted in the development of formal mentoring — the diary feature was a smash hit. Waves of Free Software developers hit advogato in 2000 and 2001 as they started reading their co-developers’ diaries. The buzz even generated a Salon article in mid 2000.

The initial buzz surrounding Advogato occasionally caused users to publicly renounce their former bad opinions of “online journals”: rather than being ‘useless’ things full of stories about children and cats, they were a new space to talk about your code and find out more about your fellow developers. Advogato was known as a friendly place, in contrast sometimes with the development mailing lists themselves.

Eventually the worlds of Advogato and of blogs began to meet. In mid-2002 Levien was discovering the wider blogosphere and started exploring using his Advogato diary as a primary means of communication with other interesting people. By that time RSS feeds of individual entries and of the entire recent diary entries page were probably the single most requested feature: people no longer wanted to drop in on the site to skim through the new entries, they wanted to poll them like they were beginning to do with other websites. (RSS feeds of individuals’ diaries were added in April 2003.)

At around about this time also, some people started to express serious dissatisfaction with the Advogato community as political debates became more common and the community attracted a few diary trolls. Levien added a diary rating feature as requests to be able to keep some users off the recent entries page grew. Others used the Advogato article feature to deplore the decline in the community.

As various blogging tools became more popular around this time, it became increasingly common to see diary entries from an Advogato regular announcing that their diary was moving elsewhere.

As RSS feeds became fairly ubiquitous, the Free Software community started to revert to a more typical blogging community model: you read blogs of people whose names you knew, and you found other people you knew or knew of through sidebars and comments.

However, in mid-2003 Jeff Waugh of the GNOME desktop project decided to create his own version of the Advogato front page, a HTML page with recent blog entries from GNOME developers all over the web (including several on Advogato). He used the Spycroll aggregator software to pull in RSS feeds, and he made them all available on a single webpage, with the cute addition of disembodied "hackergotchi heads" personalising each name.

He was stunned with the popularity of the page he linked from his own sidebar as Planet GNOME and started to field all kinds of questions about it: the three most popular were “why isn’t this at planet.gnome.org?”, “why aren’t I on it?” and (to his surprise) “why isn’t there an RSS feed?”

The Planet idea took off rapidly over the next six months. Scott James Remnant was the next off the mark, creating Planet Debian. Remnant and Waugh forked spycroll soon after that to create the Planet aggregator script. In fairly short order, a lot of large Free Software projects needed to have their own planet: the Planet homepage now lists nearly 40 separate planets.

The planets have evolved a loose set of customs based on the ones in place at Planets GNOME and Debian. They do not require that syndicated blogs talk about Free Software or software development all the time: they encourage getting to know your fellow developers as people as well as techs. (John Fleck, a GNOME documentor who is not only a frequent poster, but is a frequent non-tech blogger, has been a kind of an acid test for this editorial policy: see the John Malkovich post and a later complaint.) The larger planets are starting to have to deal with line-ball calls about who should and should not be on the planet pages: Waugh apparently finds requiring that contributors use a real photo of themself somewhat helpful on Planet GNOME.

The planets have proved to be amazingly good at spreading blogging among Free Software communities. The two planets I host, LinuxChix Live and Planet Twisted are close to being my most popular hosted sites. They also fill an important gap in the usual Free Software communication tools: they don’t need to be as on-topic as mailing list posts, and they are more expressive than IRC. They’ve also had some influence on corporate group blogging: Richard Giles reported that the creation of Planet Sun was part of the explorations that led Sun employees to promote blogging internally, eventually leading to the creation of blogs.sun.com.

Introduction

This article gives a list of questions that your conference website should answer, if it is to attract speakers and participants who are unfamiliar with the jargon. Most conference websites do a good job of answering some of these questions, but many go unanswered.

This article is inspired by discussion on the LinuxChix mailing lists over the past couple of years about speaking at conferences; specifically, discussion about how to encourage people to make their first ever talk proposal.

One problem with almost all Free Software conference web sites is that they aren’t very helpful to a novice speaker. One participant in the discussion recollected reading that she would need to send in a "paper" if her talk was accepted and asked what would be required of the paper. Was it an article? How long did it have to be? How did it have to relate to her talk? The only response from the organisers pointed her to mbp‘s (excellent) article on getting a conference abstract accepted, which, alas, helped her not one bit in finding out what it meant to send a paper if her abstract was accepted.

Many Free Software conference websites assume a lot of background knowledge of the conference process. This assumption is a strange one: many Free Software developers work outside academia, and if they were ever inside it, never got to the stage where conferences become part of academic life. And the Free Software conference procedures are subtly different from academic conferences in ways that aren’t obvious, mostly because Free Software conferences are generally more informal events than academic conferences. People used to the peer review process may not be sending in abstracts because they’re used to a very high workload of writing and revision for each conference.

In other words, your conference might a first conference for a lot of people — some of whom are qualified to speak. You need to write parts of your website assuming that potential speakers and attendees know very little of the conference process. This is doubly important since conferences vary in lots of respects: do they pay for travel? are they for users or developers?

Simple general questions about your conference.

Almost all conferences websites answer these simple questions already.

Where is your conference?
When is your conference?

Give times as well as dates when answering this question, so that people know to book an extra night’s accommodation if your last event finishes at 8pm.
What is the target audience of your conference?

Are you focused on a particular project, are you a general Free Software conference or a tech conference accepting talks related to Free Software?
Would a user of Free Software benefit from your conference?
Would a developer of Free Software benefit from your conference?
Would a Free Software advocate or someone involved in community projects (like LUGs) benefit from your conference?

Questions everyone wants answered

Many conference websites are doing a good job of answering these questions somewhere, but not all are.

How can I get to your conference?

It’s worth listing the airport, train station, and bus station nearest your venue and giving some idea of the carriers that travel to that station. If you’re not in a city with a major international airport or transit hub, it’s also worth suggesting a hub for people to travel to, and then a route to your location.
Any visa tricks or traps in your part of the world?

Will international attendees need a visa? Will it need to be a tourist or business visa? Will they need a letter from the conference organisers to get their visa (this is not unheard of)? Will they need to have anything to present to border officials?

Something conference organisers in the US in particular are apparently still neglecting is this fact: if you are not a citizen of a country whose citizens the US will admit without a visa, it can take months to get a visa to enter the US and it requires considerable time spent gathering documents and visiting consular officials. Accepting speakers closer to the conference will result in your international speakers being unable to come. If your conference is elsewhere in the Americas, it is important to warn attendees that even transiting through a US airport now requires a visa.

Similarly, visitors to Australia are frequently shocked to find out that the Australian government has no visa waiver program, except for citizens of New Zealand. Nor are the US and Australia the only two countries that trip visitors up with their entry regime.

In most cases, being denied entry to a country will require your attendees to immediately return home at their own expense. If your conference website addresses the basics of getting permission to visit your country and points to the relevant authorities, you can avoid a lot of pain for them.

What sort of accommodation is available nearby and what is the approximate cost?

Some conferences are doing excellent work organising conference accommodation. Even if your conference isn’t doing this, you could provide pointers to a few types of accommodation nearby: budget hostels and mid range hotels will be the most useful for your attendees.
What kind of social events are you holding during the conference?
If I bring partners, family members or friends who won’t be attending the conference, is there anything they can do or see while I’m at the conference?

Free Software conferences tend to be slightly bigger events in the lives of their participants than academics ones. Frequently, attendees combine a big conference with a holiday, and might want to bring their family. Kudos to linux.conf.au 2004 for providing activities for partners and family members who didn’t attend the conference.

A few more questions: Is the conference providing any kind of childcare? (I’ve never heard of that happening.) Is there short term childcare in the area? Can family members too old for daycare attend the conference social events?
What’s there to do in your area?

A not insignificant number of attendees will want to combine your conference with a holiday, or at least with some sight-seeing, or a visit to the pub. Give them some information about your area. Link to tourist web sites and nightlife guides.

Something I’ve very rarely seen done which would be extremely useful is a list of restaurants that are likely to be able to serve large groups of people at short notice late in the evening. Everyone who’s been at a few conferences knows the experience of trying to take fifteen people out to dinner in a strange city.

Questions attendees want answered

There’s going to be even more neophytes amongst your potential attendees than there are among your potential speakers. Try and put yourself in the position of your greenest attendee: has an interest, heard your conference would give him or her an opportunity to meet some hackers working on interesting stuff, but has never ever been to a conference. Aim your attendees section at them: a little extra info won’t hurt anyone else.

What kind of talks can I expect to see? What will their topics be? How long will they be?

It’s a good idea to get your program up as early as possible. If nothing else, attendees have the same or even more difficulties organising transport, accommodation and visas as speakers do, so you should make it possible for them to decide whether or not to attend as early as you can.
How much will your conference cost for attendees?
Can I get any kind of discount for being a student, unemployed, young, old etc?
Can I volunteer to help out in return for cheap or free admission?
Are there any sources of funding for attendees?

Questions potential speakers want answered

Now to the problem of neophyte speakers. For this section, imagine someone who has some experience speaking to groups, but nothing of abstracts, or proceedings or anything like that. There’s no reason this person can’t speak at your conference, so don’t make it hard for them to submit a talk proposal. In particular, don’t make your talk proposals or the talk process sound any more mysterious or difficult than they actually are.

What do all these words mean?

Explaining what is expected from an ‘abstract’, a ‘paper’, a ‘presentation’, a ‘tutorial’, a ‘workshop’ and a ‘BOF’ are is crucial if you use those terms. Not only do some people not know them, but they vary reasonably widely by conference anyway.

Providing links to abstracts and papers from previous years is invaluable if any are available. You might wish to draft a sample abstract or paper if you cannot link to previous papers. If not, you should certainly describe requirements in detail. Place the links prominently with the call for papers.
What kind of talks or presentations can I give? How can I tell which one I should give?

The answer to this question should provide detail. For each type of talk, specify the length, the size of the audience, and the expected depth of the content if you can. Is it going to be a lecture, or interactive discussion, or something in between? Will most speakers be using slides, giving demonstrations, or running a Q&A session? Are speakers going to be showing the code? What kind of knowledge level can the presenter expect from the attendees? Are the attendees going to be peers or are they going to be people new to the topic? Are there any different "tracks" devoted to different topics?
How do I get a talk/paper accepted?

When answering this question, be detailed. Provide approximate word lengths for abstracts (or papers if you require full papers at this stage). Specify what kind of information needs to go in the proposal. And then tell people about the process: when do they submit? how (roughly) is their abstract going to be judged? when will they hear back from you?

Ideally, you would give examples of a few accepted abstracts here, with a short discussion from the selection panel of what made those abstracts appealing to them.
If my talk is accepted, will I still need to pay the admission fee for attendees?

Norms on this vary: conferences where most attendees are also speaking will often not waive the admission fee for anyone. Be very clear about which way you’re going with this.
If my talk is accepted, will you cover travel and/or accommodation expenses? Will you cover international travel?

Be very clear about the limits of what you can cover. It’s very disappointing to have a talk accepted and then find out that the organisers can only pay for local attendees, but not for international flights.
If my talk is accepted, will I receive any payment above expenses?

I’ve never heard of a Free Software conference doing this, but as there are other conferences which may do so, and some of your speakers might come from that kind of world, best to disappoint them early.
What do I need to do once my talk is accepted?

If you’re asking speakers to provide papers, describe whether you need slides, recordings, or written articles from accepted speakers, together with any administrative extras like due dates for the final paper. Describe any editing processes that will take place.

Your answer to this question should be detailed. It should explain what you require from a full paper (if you require one) including length and format. How should the paper relate to the talk? How formal should the paper be? If it doesn’t matter, say so. If its optional, say so. If all that is required is a talk, say so. All this talk of ‘papers’ is scaring people. To many first time speakers, especially ones with a passing acquaintance with the academy, a "paper" sounds like something bristling with citations and withstanding the full force or peer review. If what you’re actually doing is getting people to send you their slides tell your speakers this.

On the other hand, if you are a fairly formal conference hoping to attract Free Software developers outside the academy, you will probably want to link extensively to style guides and citation guides for your potential speakers to use. You will need to assume that they are not familiar with the peer review process also (and it varies enough within academia anyway), so give a detailed guide to it.

Conclusion

If you’ve tried to answer these questions as you went along, you probably answered "well, it depends… small conferences can’t pay travel… Free Software conferences don’t focus on citation so much…"

This is precisely the reason your conference website and publicity needs to answer simple questions like "what do you mean ‘paper’ anyway?" The answer varies. Some potential speakers will submit anyway, and assume they’ll hear from you if they don’t do something. Judging from the discussion that inspired this article, others will not.

Credits

Thanks to Jenn Vesperman, Telsa Gwynne and Terri Oda for input into this article.

Questions your conference website should answer by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

September 20, 2003April 8, 2026

Writing a good online diary

Assuming that you have good reasons for keeping an online diary, there are a few things you can do to improve your chances of making your diary readable. I’ll begin by stating the general principles, and then by reviewing a few breakable rules of thumb that, in my experience, are good indicators of an interesting diary.

The general principle of good writing is to determine your audience, and write for them. An online diarist will normally encounter some tension here — the diarists are often writing partly for themselves or their future selves, and the desire to record events that were important to them may conflict with the desire to record events in an interesting way. You will need to decide to what extent you are intending to resolve this tension in the audience’s favour.

It is the case, if I am part of your audience, that your choice of material is generally meaningless to me, and the use to which you put your material is everything, which is why most of these tips tend towards the stylistic.

Tell a story

Of the beginning, middle and end structure, online diarists struggle most with the ending, often because they don’t know it yet. The most successful stories are often trivial anecdotes. However, there may be an ongoing story that you don’t want to record only in hindsight. In this case, you will want to return to it periodically.

It is very very hard to make a story out of emotions you are still experiencing, unless you’re a brutally honest and particularly insightful person, so if you want to write a powerful emotional entry, you may be better off writing an entry that looks back a year or more.

Write long entries

A long diary entry gives you the chance to tell a story, rather than writing an instant message to your readership, and most good online diaries contain at least the odd long entry scattered in their archives.

Very few online diarists seem to be poets, and so generally very few short entries will not become the highlights of your diary.

Drama is the biggest online diary cliche

If your entry is an allusion to misery that only your three best friends in the world can comprehend, your entry will be boring. The high points of an online diary are very seldom the most dramatic entries, save in the case of diaries that resemble an emotional car crash. For the rest, you will need to hone your ability to make the prosaic interesting, because it is actually much easier to do that than to make secretive drama interesting.

Make your entries complete within themselves

Again, if your entry is full of allusions to events you cannot describe in full, and people you cannot say anything about, and feelings that you are unwilling to share, your entry will be boring. If you need to censor something that is crucial to understanding a story, you may as well censor the entire story. In other cases, tell the story in such a way that it is a complete anecdote, even if it is not totally uncensored. If your reader can tell that you’ve left part of the story out, your entry is not as good as it could be.

A subtle style will serve you well

A diary with a unique voice is often an interesting read. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is to let your spoken style influence your written style. It should be relatively sparing, but a touch of spoken mannerisms in a diary makes it more readable.

Writing a good online diary by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

July 22, 2003April 8, 2026

Why keep an online diary?

I think there are several bad reasons to keep an online diary, including using it as a poor substitute for a paper diary, using it to experiment with hyperlinking writing, or using it as a forum for your opinions. Each of these needs is better served by alternative forms. On the other hand, online diaries are maligned as being necessarily uninteresting due to their trivial nature. Trivial and uninteresting do not always go hand in hand, as diarists and letter writers have appreciated for hundreds of years.

The online diary is a format held in peculiar contempt, for several reasons. Most of those reasons are due to the usual meaning of ‘diary’ — that is, a more-or-less secret record of one’s life, written, presumably, for your satisfaction alone, and deriving much of its power from the fact that it has no readers, freeing the author both from the stylistic constraints of writing for an audience, and from the judgements of that audience.

The online diary format naturally loses much of that power. The disadvantages of the online diary format compared to the paper diary format include less honesty (or less sweeping honesty anyway), and much less privacy. It also leaves the author wide open to charges of narcissism, since they are writing about themself for an audience of other people.

So, let’s free the online diary from those constraints. You do not keep an online diary for the same reasons you keep a paper diary. The disadvantages include a lack of complete honesty and privacy. If you want to write with complete honesty and privacy you should keep a paper diary or correspond in private with trusted friends who will destroy your missives rather than hand them to anyone else.

I also suggest that you do not keep an online diary in order to experiment with stylised writing, because you’re likely to attract the wrong audience. Audiences seeking experimental writing styles don’t expect to find it in online diaries, and audiences reading online diaries don’t expect highly stylised writing, or content that deviates radically from the normally online diary content (that is, a person’s record of their life).

Most of the good stylised writing I’ve seen on the Web has been noticably free from the constraints of chronology. Online diaries are tied to a date based format, and people who are interested in telling stories or linking ideas together would be better off with a more integrated site, all of which is an ongoing work. I consider gruntle, raze, and the Jargon File to be excellent examples of the power that loosely organised, heavily hyperlinked sites offer to writers interested in experimenting with style and content that doesn’t fit in a chronological format. If you want to tell stories, I highly recommend this form over the online diary format.

If you’re interested in writing opinion pieces, rather than snippets of your daily life, I suggest you consider blogging, rather than keeping an online diary. Blogging and online diaries are both presently primarily chronological formats, and there is a gray area between them, since people use the same tools for both. The primary distinction between the stereotypical blog and the stereotypical online diary is the amount of linking in the former. Blogs link to websites, link to each other, comment on each other, discuss each other, discuss links, and discuss ideas. If you’re interested in taking part in intellectual crossfire, the blogging tools and communities will be much more satisfying than the online diary format.

Where experimental sites link internally, and blogs link externally, online diaries are largely hyperlink-free. The form requires authors to relate chosen aspects of their life on a loosely chronological basis. They attract readers who like to follow simple story lines, who like to feel involved in the lives of others. As often as not, the readership is made up of people who know the author and people who would like to.

So, what are good reasons to keep an online diary? If you need pre-digital examples of online diary-like writing, consider letter writing one hundred years or more ago. Letters of this time were often gossipy, personal, entertaining, bitchy and informative. In retrospect, some of the writing in informal letters is not only historically interesting, but very very good. So, if you think that one hundred years ago you would have liked to sit in your drawing room and write to your sister in the next town about your housekeeping, giving interest to the mundanities of your life, then online diary writing is probably a format you would enjoy.

Why keep an online diary? by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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