Nadia.xyz – GoDaddy customer – (United States)
The .xyz community is home to many accomplished individuals using .xyz to highlight their creative work, passions, and career experiences. Successful entrepreneur Matt Gray uses MattGray.xyz to promote his coaching and training services. Political satirist Bassem Youssef uses BassemYoussef.xyz to share his media appearances, upcoming shows, and press clippings. Australia-based artist Serwah Attafuah uses Serwah.xyz to showcase her digital art and NFT creations. In this week’s #WebsiteWednesday, we’ll introduce you to an accomplished open source software writer and researcher who shares her work on a personal website with a memorable “first name” .xyz domain: Nadia.xyz.
Nadia.xyz is the online home of writer and researcher Nadia Asparouhova (previously Nadia Eghbal). Her work and research center around open source software and its impact on the social and political aspects of the tech industry, bringing attention to the hidden labor behind our digital infrastructure. Nadia’s book, titled “Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software,”1 provides an exploration of the evolution of open source software development. Open source software development is the collaborative process of creating computer programs where the source code is openly accessible to everyone. The book features interviews with developers and a study of popular online platforms. In May 2023, Nadia wrote a piece for Wired titled “Remembering GitHub’s Office, a Monument to Tech Culture.”2 The article shares her firsthand perspective of GitHub’s former San Francisco office, and its representation of tech culture. Nadia spent two years working for GitHub in Developer Experience. As she details on her LinkedIn profile, she “built programs, product and partnerships to better support open source developers on the platform.”
Nadia’s involvement in improving the open source developer experience, both independently and while working for GitHub, led her to publish the book “Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure” in 2016.3 Nadia’s book explores the challenges facing digital infrastructure, and how they can be addressed. As she shares on her Projects page in reference to the book, “my early work argued that open source code is a form of public infrastructure that requires maintenance.”
Nadia uses Nadia.xyz to showcase her multifaceted contributions to the tech industry and beyond. You can visit her Projects page to read about some of her latest projects. Check out “Microgrants,” where Nadia details how she created Helium Grants, a “no-strings-attached” microgrants program providing awards of $1K to $5K to individuals. Nadia documented her process and insights about this two-year experiment, and compiled resources designed to inspire others to start their own microgrant programs. Nadia shares a link to a dedicated website about the Helium Grant for more information.4
Over on the Notes page, Nadia shares various ideas, reactions, and useful insights. These notes cover a wide range of topics, including governance, research culture, ethics, and social dynamics online. While some of these notes have evolved into longer blog posts or projects, most remain unpublished in her personal notes app. Although she stopped updating the page in 2021, visitors can still explore previous years’ notes. She shares that she may consider resuming the practice in the future. In an earlier interview shared on the Kicks Condor blog5, Nadia shares some thoughts pertaining to how she makes use of her website for notes and thoughts, as opposed to other platforms such as Twitter. She states “I like being able to publish my messier, half-formed thoughts, but I get turned off by putting those next to a like count. It feels like the more likes you get, the more you start writing things to get likes, whereas the REALLY weird, unpopular stuff probably won’t get many likes at all.” You can glean more of Nadia’s insights by subscribing to her Monomythical newsletter on publishing platform Substack, where approximately every couple of months she shares thoughts and essays about living life online.
The Nadia.xyz domain is branded with Nadia’s short and memorable first name. On her homepage, Nadia provides her branded email address [email protected] for inquiries. When you have an email address directly associated with your domain name, visitors can use that email address to find your website and have confidence that they’re reaching out to the appropriate contact.
We are excited to have Nadia and her insights on open source software in the .xyz community. You can learn more by following Nadia on Twitter and LinkedIn, and by visiting Nadia.xyz.
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54140556-working-in-public
2. https://www.wired.com/story/github-tech-values/
3. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/32317627
4. https://www.heliumgrant.org/
5. https://www.kickscondor.com/nadia-eghbal/
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