Author Archives: Mark Eaton

Code4Lib 2023

Code4Lib 2023 wrapped up today. I attended in person this year, as it was nearby, in Princeton, New Jersey. As always, it was really great. One of my favorite things about this conference is that I always go home feeling a lot more optimistic about my profession. I was happy about the large number of […]

Posted in code4lib, conference, imposter syndrome | Leave a comment

Modern JavaScript on campus

JavaScript has changed a lot over the years. Old browsers are not equipped to handle new syntax. ES6 (in 2015) was a major change. That was a long time ago. But unfortunately, on our campus, we still have browsers deployed in labs that predate ES6. Why is this? My guess is that old system images […]

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Vue 3

I had been meaning to upgrade our library website to Vue 3 for a while now. We had been on Vue 2 for some time. But there was a hard deadline for switching over, because Vue 2 reaches end-of-life at the end of 2023. Out of prudence I didn’t want to push up too close […]

Posted in vue | Leave a comment

The last days(?) of the Kingsborough Twitter archive

It looks like it might be the end of the road for our bot that archives tweets about Kingsborough Community College. Recently, the official @twitterdev account announced the impending end to the free tier of the Twitter API. On top of that, Mr. Musk himself suggested that the new replacement basic paid tier should cost […]

Posted in api, archives, bots, twitter | Leave a comment

Guest blogging

For the next little while, I’m going to be guest blogging over at Choice’s new LibTech Insights blog. My first post is up already! It’s about Mastodon. My intention is to keep Library Technology at Kingsborough going as well. Wish me luck!

Posted in meta | Leave a comment

The ghost of Code4Lib future

I was complaining about the Computers in Libraries magazine website recently, for pretty obvious reasons. I wanted to link to an article I wrote for the magazine from my faculty bio page, but I can’t in good faith send people to that website. I mean, it’s fine that the site is old; it’s actually kind […]

Posted in code4lib, old | Leave a comment

Become illegible

One thing I appreciate about Mastodon (and the Fediverse) is the desire among some users to not be legible. Some users don’t want to be seen, understood, or to have any “reach”. There’s a desire to not be visible, to not be widely understood, and to basically be baffling to outsiders. I’m taking this idea […]

Posted in mastodon | Leave a comment

BBS

As a high school student, I spent quite a bit of time on my local BBSes. For those who are too young to remember them, or were not paying attention, BBSes were proto-internet social networks of a sort. You would use your modem to dial a local telephone number, where you would then log in […]

Posted in old | Leave a comment

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one that was not machine learning

I started making a Mastodon bot over the weekend, although I’m not super excited about it. Mostly this is because, from a technical perspective, it’s not new ground for me. The bot is text-based, and uses Python and SpaCy to work with text drawn from the Wikipedia API. I’ve done this before, so I’m not […]

Posted in python | Leave a comment

Abstraction

Abstraction is largely the story of computing. Software developers have been building abstraction upon abstraction for decades now. Lev Manovich (of the CUNY Graduate Center) captured this clearly in his book Software Takes Command, and my thinking about this topic is influenced by his book. Abstraction makes life easier by simplifying tasks and making complex […]

Posted in software | Comments closed
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