Donia (Lasagna)

I’ve been thinking more about the difference between “changing the world” and “making the world better.” (thread)https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1082453821933027328 …

I am motivated by the impact of my work - as opposed to enjoyment of programming (it’s fine, but it’s fiddly) or interest in trying new things (oh boy, ANOTHER undocumented mess). I’m good at the latter two things, but I only do them because I want to have impact.

I’m not a learned-programming-as-a-kid type. I got into software by accident, in college, when I waited too long to look for a summer job & ended up at an on-campus research lab tasked with making something nobody quite new anything about - a “page” on the new “world wide web.”

The project was taking thousands of photos that NASA had been keeping on physical slides in a dusty closet in Houston, digitizing them, and making them available on the web. They were all photos of the earth that astronauts had been taking, since the Apollo program.

They were “unofficial” photos, meaning that an astronaut had looked out a window & happened to see something cool, & had taken a photo. Each slide had lat/long coordinates & the date it was taken written in pencil on the edge.

To be totally honest, the project itself was tedious. Digitizing slides and attaching their metadata, especially in the days before good open source relational databases existed, was a sloooow process.