The Hang of Thursdays #1

Hello! Welcome! So, this is a completely new thing and I really don’t know yet what kind of shape it’s going to take, but as yung pueblo said:1

main goal for july: no more waiting.

don’t get stuck in the planning stage.

you know what you need to do.

be bold and start making moves, even if the plan is not clear.

That hit a nerve. I’ve been saying for years that I need to write more. Folks who know me, or follow me online, know I do all kinds of stuff — tech, computers, music, travel. Lots of what I do is quite good fun, and even the bits that aren’t normally throw up the odd funny story along the way. I do a lot of stuff, and I like to write about what I’m doing, but recently a lot of the stuff I write ends up on platforms like Facebook.

…but hang on, don’t you already have a blog?

Yeah, I do! I got a whole website over at dylanbeattie.net. It’s mine, I own it, I built it myself using Jekyll, it’s currently hosted for free using GitHub Pages.

But… after five years, I’ve decided that blogging with Jekyll doesn’t work for me. Jekyll and GitHub Pages are brilliant for hosting static web content, but I want to be able to pull out my phone at the airport, connect my Bluetooth keyboard, write some words, paste a couple of photos, push a button, and boom, it’s live. That’s why so much of what I write ends up on Facebook instead of my own site, but I’ve been following a few folks who publish on Substack, and I like what I hear, I decided to give it a shot.2

So here it is: a weekly update on where I’m going, what I’m doing, and anything I thought was interesting. Like it? Want more? Here’s a button!

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What’s Happening?

July is delightfully quiet, and that’s just fine. May and June were back-to-back conferences and tech events - Bucharest, Essen, Hamburg, Berlin, Oslo, Stockhom, Athens, Odense, Rotterdam, Utrecht and Amsterdam, bouncing home in between for just long enough to do the laundry, host a London.NET meetup and run a guitar karaoke night. Being on the road is fun, but it’s nice to be home for a while.

Berlin, Hamburg, Bucharest, Stockholm, Oslo, Athens, Rotterdam… I need a vacation.

Email vs Capitalism, or Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

At NDC Oslo last month, I presented a completely new talk about email, spam, and the challenges of running a free, open, decentralised communication network in a world that’s increasingly controlled by billion-dollar multinationals.

I’m pretty happy with how it came out, but watching the recording back, I’m seriously thinking this one might warrant splitting into two separate talks - a fun, accessible talk with all the weird history, the RFC edge cases, the story of junk mail, and then a second one aimed at developers that gets into the gritty detail of things like DMARC records and how to mash up Mailjet and Razor to build a .NET mail templating engine. Or maybe keep the live presentation as the fun talk, and move all the gritty detail into some sort of video course folks can find online.

And yes, as several commenters have already pointed out, I screwed up one of the “let’s break email!” experiments you see in the video.

Oops.

I’ll fix it for next time.

London .NET Meetup at Codat on July 12th

After a long hiatus during the pandemic, the London .NET User Group is very much back up and running. We’re going to be meeting at Codat’s offices in Farringdon on Wednesday 12th July; Angeliki Patsiavou is going to be talking about what “The Avengers” taught her about working with developers, and then Nick Chapsas will be talking about logging in .NET and why we’re all doing it wrong. Nick’s basically an internet superstar with about a bazillion followers on YouTube — and as of right now, we’ve got 100 people RSVP’d for next week and 40 of them are first-timers who’ve never been to a London .NET meetup before, which is fantastic.

There’s a few places still available if you want to come along:

https://www.meetup.com/london-net-user-group/events/294304925/

And, note to myself: I am absolutely going to remember to print name badges this time, because the number of folks I recognise but can’t remember their names is getting embarrassing.

This week I’ve been…

Reading: “Season of Skulls” by Charles Stross. It’s the latest novel set in the world of the “Laundry Files”, which started life as a wonderfully macabre mashup of HP Lovecraft and the Jargon File, and now gleefully bounces from trope to trope trashing genre conventions as it goes. Daft, delightfully written, and enormous fun.

Listening: “Rosalie Cunningham” by Rosalie Cunningham. I saw Rosalie and her band at Prognosis Festival at the O2 back in April, and have had the album on constant repeat ever since. It’s — for me, anyway — a rare example of music that sounds genuinely progressive without just being “complicated heavy metal with lots of time signatures”, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

Watching: “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” popped up unexpectedly on Apple TV, and it’s excellent. It’s the story of Michael J. Fox, his acting career — Family Ties, Back to the Future, Spin City — and how his diagnosis with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 29 affected his life and his work. It’s brilliantly put together, combining interview footage with Fox today with staccato clips cut together from his movies and TV shows — watch out for the montage showing how he’d always find something to do with his left hand so viewers wouldn’t notice the tremors; it’s quite amazing.

And that’s a wrap. Drop a comment below, let me know what you think?

Until next time: rock on, have fun, and be excellent to each other.

Dylan

1 or maybe didn’t say, but somebody shared it on Facebook with his name on it and that’s basically the same thing, right?

2 I figure any publishing platform that’s hosting writing by Tom Cox, Cat Valente and my mum is probably doing something right.