On The Road Again...

I’ve spent most of the summer so far writing a new course; if you follow me over on BlueSky - and you should - then you’ll have noticed I’ve been posting - skeeting? bleeting? I still don’t know what to call posting on BlueSky. Let’s go with bleeting. I’ve been bleeting about CSS a lot, because my new course is CSS for Software Engineers. The video course is going to be available on Dometrain later this year, I’ll be running it as a workshop at various conferences, and I have a funny feeling there might even be a book at the end of it… but that’s taking up pretty much all my time, not to mention brain capacity, and hasn’t left a whole lot of time for YouTube videos and stuff.

But, it’s nearly September (yeah, really), which means it’s nearly conference season again, and I’m going to be bouncing around Europe for the next few months talking about all kinds of things - machine learning, text encoding, Rockstar, open source, and, yep, CSS.

Now, here’s the thing. When folks like me get invited to speak at these kinds of events, the organisers really appreciate it when we make a bit of noise about it, post it on social media, blog about it, make videos… and I get it; marketing is tough, every bit of coverage might help shift a few more tickets, and the algorithms that drive social media apparently love short form portrait videos… but, y’know, I’m forty seven years old, I listen to Bon Jovi and I still don’t really understand what TikTok is for; somebody like me making a video on my phone about a .NET developer conference and hoping it’ll go viral is… I believe they call it “cringe”.

But then I remember a few years ago I was in Tartu, in Estonia, where I was giving the keynote at digit.dev, and somebody recognised me in the street from my YouTube videos and we got chatting… turns out they’re a developer, they love code, they really liked my conference talks, and they had no idea that I was the keynote speaker at a multitrack international conference taking place right in the city where they live. And Tartu’s not a big place; it’s got about 100,000 people.

So here’s the deal. I’m going to tell you where I’m going, on the off-chance that you’re local, and you have some training budget left, because it would really suck if there was an awesome event happening right there in your home town and you didn’t know about it.

If you want a whole “ten reasons you can’t afford to miss OpenTechDevConDays 2025”… well, nah. Not really my jam. They have marketing people for that.

For what it’s worth, I do try to make sure that every event I’m involved with is excellent; I put a huge amount of work into preparing talks and workshops, I bring stickers to give away, and I try to make sure I have as much time as I can to meet people, hang out and chat about what you’re all working on.

So here’s where I’m going to be. I’m obviously not expecting any of you to come along to all of these - although I’ll be very impressed if you do - but if I’m going to be in your neighbourhood, and if you can persuade your company to buy a ticket, then come along and say hi.

I did mention I’ll be giving away Rockstar stickers, right?

September 8-12th I’ll be at NDC Copenhagen, where I’m running a brand new workshop about all the amazing things modern CSS can do. I’ll be giving a talk about algorithms and why they’re not as scary as they look, and probably eating quite a lot of barbecue at Warpigs.

September 25th I’ll be Edinburgh at ScotSoft 2025 talking about plain text: weird and wonderful stories about teletype machines, Hungarian Scrabble, how emojis actually work, and what “PIKE MATCHBOX” has to do with driving in the Soviet Union.

October 3rd I’ll be in Dordrecht in the Netherlands with Fronteers; that one’s a one-track evening conference, so should be a lot of fun; we haven’t finalised all the details for that one yet, but keep an eye on https://www.fronteers.nl/ for more news.

October 9th + 10th, I’ll be in Riga for Zabbix Summit. Zabbix is an open source observability and monitoring platform, so the event’s all about infrastructure, automation and devops; I’m going to be talking about the history and future of free software and how we might be able to create a truly sustainable model for open source development.

Then I’m in Portugal for two weeks; October 13-16 is the Azure Developer Summit in Lisbon, a brand new event organised by Microsoft in partnership with NDC and Techorama, all about Azure, AI, .NET, C# - and then 20-24 October it’s NDC Porto, which has a different format this year; instead of one-hour conference sessions it’s all hands-on workshops. I’m doing two days about modern CSS, plus a session about building a ray tracer in JavaScript, and another one about how to build your own programming language using C# and .NET and parsing expression grammars.

Then I’m home for two days, then a Eurostar to Rotterdam and on to Utrecht, where by a happy coincidence Techorama is in town the same week as Tweakers Summit. ***Monday 27th October*** I’ll be at Techorama with a one-day Introduction to Distributed Systems with .NET workshop, Tuesday 27th I’ll at Techorama in the morning and then heading to DeFabrique to close the Tweakers Summit, then I’m back at Techorama on Wednesday.

And then November 5-7 I’m at Øredev in Malmö, where I’ll be telling the story of how I built a Rockstar interpreter in web assembly using C#, and rocking the party stage with The Linebreakers.

Oh, and if you’re thinking “wow, that’s not nearly enough travelling, this guy isn’t even trying any more”, I’m also going to the Euroblast festival in Cologne at the end of September, and heading to Yorkshire for the Whitby Goth Weekend at the end of October. Not performing or anything, just going along to watch bands and have fun. You know. Like a normal person.

So that’s, what, nine tech events - and two music festivals - in seven countries in two months. It’s going to be . Come along and say hi.

Right now, though, I gotta get back to writing about how CSS flexbox actually works, which turns out to involve way more mathematics than you might think.