Just a quick note to say that since I’ve deleted my Twitter account, I’ve set up a static archive of all my tweets. Yes, even those embarrassing first ones.
This was made possible by Darius Kazemi: https://tinysubversions.com/twitter-archive/make-your-own/
You can still find me on Mastodon as @petrichor:digipres.club or via any of the other links at the bottom of the page.
Last week I received an email from a friend inviting me to submit a video to a panel 'Missing narratives around diversity and inclusion in Research Software Engineering' hosted as part of SeptembRSE 2021, the goals of which are:
Obviously I'm always flattered to be asked my opinion, but I wasn't sure what a straight, cisgender, middle-class white man could offer to an event on diversity, so I had a chat with one of the organisers. We agreed that issues of race, gender, sexuality, disability and many more would be well covered by other speakers, and that I would focus on another narrative also frequently missing in discussions of Research Software Engineering (RSE): librarians.
I’ve enjoyed learning Rust (the programming language) recently, but having only really used it for solving programming puzzles I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it for something more practical.
At the same time, I’ve been using and learning about Matrix (the chat/messaging platform), and running some small rooms there I’ve been a bit frustrated that some pretty common admin things don’t have a good user interface in any of the available clients.
I forgot to mention it at the time, but I’ve added “normal” comments back to the site, as you’ll see below and on most other pages. In place of the Disqus comments I had before I’m now using Cactus Comments, which is open source and self-hostable (though I’m currently not doing that). If you’ve read my previous post about Matrix self-hosting, you might be interested to know that Cactus uses Matrix rooms for data storage and synchronisation and I can moderate and reply to comments directly from my Matrix client.
Wow, it turns out to be 10 years since I wrote this beginners guide to Twitter. Things have moved on a loooooong way since then.
Far from being the interesting, disruptive technology it was back then, Twitter has become part of the mainstream, the establishment. Almost everyone and everything is on Twitter now, which has both pros and cons.
It’s now possible to follow all sorts of useful information feeds, from live updates on transport delays to your favourite sports team’s play-by-play performance to an almost infinite number of cat pictures. In my professional life it’s almost guaranteed that anyone I meet will be on Twitter, meaning that I can contact them to follow up at a later date without having to exchange contact details (and they have options to block me if they don’t like that).
My last post covered the more “traditional” lectures-and-panel-sessions approach of the first half of the SSI Collaborations Workshop. The rest of the workshop was much more interactive, consisting of a discussion session, a Collaborative Ideas session, and a whole-day hackathon!
The discussion session on day one had us choose a topic (from a list of topics proposed leading up to the workshop) and join a breakout room for that topic with the aim of producing a “speed blog” by then end of 90 minutes. Those speed blogs will be published on the SSI blog over the coming weeks, so I won’t go into that in more detail.
I’ve just finished attending (online) the three days of this year’s SSI Collaborations Workshop (CW for short), and once again it’s been a brilliant experience, as well as mentally exhausting, so I thought I’d better get a summary down while it’s still fresh it my mind.
Collaborations Workshop is, as the name suggests, much more focused on facilitating collaborations than a typical conference, and has settled into a structure that starts off with with longer keynotes and lectures, and progressively gets more interactive culminating with a hack day on the third day.
I’ve decided to try switching this website back to using Hugo to manage the content and generate the static HTML pages. I’ve been on the Python-based Nikola for a few years now, but recently I’ve been finding it quite slow, and very confusing to understand how to do certain things. I used Hugo recently for the GLAM Data Science Network website and found it had come on a lot since the last time I was using it, so I thought I’d give it another go, and redesign this site to be a bit more minimal at the same time.
The theme is still a work in progress so it’ll probably look a bit rough around the edges for a while, but I think I’m happy enough to publish it now. When I get round to it I might publish some more detailed thoughts on the design.
The Disability Support Network at work recently ran a survey on “accessible communications”, to develop guidance on how to make communications (especially internal staff comms) more accessible to everyone. I grabbed a copy of my submission because I thought it would be useful to share more widely, so here it is. Please note that these are based on my own experiences only. I am in no way suggesting that these are the only things you would need to do to ensure your communications are fully accessible. They’re just some things to keep in mind.
I started running my own Matrix server a little while ago. Matrix is something rather cool, a chat system similar to IRC or Slack, but open and federated. Open in that the standard is available for anyone to view, but also the reference implementations of server and client are open source, along with many other clients and a couple of nascent alternative servers. Federated in that, like email, it doesn’t matter what server you sign up with, you can talk to users on your own or any other server.