Author: Ross Wintle

Follow up on my community/social stuff for today…

I went and signed in to a bunch of Slack workspaces I had signed out of and found one is fairly active and has some good people and good discussions going on.

I'm finding out more about the setup (can I invite people? can I create new channels?). But this may be where I land. Let's see.

While I credit @cstross for the link, I believe this is worth more than the original “WHAT” that he quoted it with.

It worth saying:

“WHAT ON EARTH?!!!!"

(Also, this is very programmer-nerdy and involves a program with 4.2bn if statements and a 40GB even/odd number function)

https://andreasjhkarlsson.github.io//jekyll/update/2023/12/27/4-billion-if-statements.html

I think 2024 is the year I finally realise I’m a nerd. And that’s fine. It’s my best way of being. I like words and numbers and code and games. They are my things. And they are good things.

I will embrace it. And enjoy it.

In my own ways.

I suppose what I really want from a chat/community is to very selfishly round up all MY favourite people and talk about all MY favourite things on MY preferred platform and with MY rules.

That doesn’t sound like a positive thing for everyone else though.

*sigh*

I love you all, people!!! 💚

Follow up…

I remembered that, thanks to two awesome people who may see this, I am in two brilliant chat groups. (Hopefully you know who you are and I'm very grateful 💚🙏).

But I find myself wanting something bigger, with channels/separate topics, and more diverse in terms of tech and location.

Trying out @changelog’s Slack to see how that goes.

I re-posted earlier about isitchristmas.com having chat in the console.

This is a good write up: https://konklone.com/post/how-to-hack-the-developer-console-to-be-needlessly-interactive

But I want to know how the back-end of this works. Presumably just a light-weight process for connecting people together in "rooms”.

Some useful bash aliases…

If nothing else, this will inspire me to create more of my own!

https://chuck.is/alias/

I also (in addition to dev mid-life crisis podcast) really want, like, some chat or telegram or Discord group that's polite, friendly, supportive, no-shitposting, dad- (and mom-) jokes allowed/encouraged, creative, fun, geeky-but-tech-agnostic, worldly-wise.

Curmudgeonly-grumping allowed. But where even I get told off if it gets personal or unwelcoming.

I kinda have this, but it never quite works out as I'd hoped. I think my standards are too high.

I'm starting to wonder why my podcast feed isn't now full of podcasts about surviving the mid-life developer crisis. With topics like:

– What am I going to do for the next 15 years before I retire?
– How do I work with all these young people who know more than me (but lack the wisdom of years)
– How do I stop feeling bad that I have no spare time for hacking/side-projects/gaming because I have kids who need to be taken to their swimming class and stuff.

Seriously?

And no, I won’t.

Yes! At last! The firehose of brands emailing me a happy Christmas has been turned off!! The silence in my inbox is, frankly, deafening. Can it be like this all the time?

(I know…unsubscribe)

First time queuing to charge the EV! Was at services at lunchtime yesterday on the big Christmas travel day. So unusual.

Nice self-organisation by everyone (apart from the posh Jag/Porsche owners – entitled guys who just drove right in to the broken charger bay! 😂)

But an interesting thing to experience. And a thing that I guess will become more and more common. 🤔