The course tutor — a practising developer who maintains two open-source projects they inherited from strangers who had moved on.
- Role
- Tutor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- kai.nakamura@slop.university
- Contact
- Ask during digs, or email when a question cannot wait until the next one.
Kai took over maintenance of two mid-sized Node.js libraries in 2024 after their original authors stepped away — one by announcement, one by silence. The experience of inheriting a codebase with no handover, no architecture document, and twelve months of unanswered issues is what they bring to the course.
They run the weekly digs, supervise dig-site selection, and handle the ethics
review for oral-history interviews. Their office hours are Thursdays, or by
appointment after a particularly confusing git blame.
Kai maintains that the silence in an issue tracker is more informative than the noise, and that most students spend week one reading code when they should be reading dates.