Softinio's Notes on Software Engineering - Issue 7
Welcome to issue 7 of my notes.
Moving back to Substack
I originally started my newsletter here on substack, but later moved it to Revue. It wasn’t the right decision and it lead to me writing less. I have now corrected this mistake and have moved back to substack as you can see. Thank you for your patience and apologize for the indecision.
I am organizing Meetups again
Sticking with the theme of reversing any decision I make 😂🤣 if you all recall back in April 2021 I stepped down from organizing meetups, however in December 2021 I took over as organizer of Bay Area Haskell & Functional Programming User Group and in March 2022 I took over as organizer for Swift Language User Group (San Francisco).
I am hopeful that in 2023 we can hopefully start arranging in person events again. So far, finding a venue to host the event has been a challenge especially as a lot of companies have not returned to office life yet.
All good though, I have continued arranging online events when possible. Online events are great too, they have given me the ability to arrange talks from some world class speakers that are not local to me and our meetup here in the Bay area.
Recordings of Meetups event in 2022 so far
Namespaced DeBruijn Indices By Gabriella Gonzalez
Supercharging Data with SQL and Haskell By Ozgun Ataman
Server-side Swift State Of The Union By Tim Condon
Upcoming Events
Swift Language User Group (San Francisco): A Tour through Swift Attributes By Marco Eidinger
Rise of Mastodon and the Fediverse
I have been a long standing advocate and user of free software and open source software. Few years back I joined a mastodon instance called Fosstodon.
What is Mastodon you ask?
You can think of it as a twitter alternative, that is not owned by a single company or person, but rather anyone can start their own service. These services can federate with each and communicate with one another using a standardized protocol called Activitypub.
The official Mastodon documentation probably explains all this better than me so have a read.
Why I joined Mastodon / Fosstodon
Fosstodon is an instance of Mastodon for anyone with an interest in free and open source software. I joined as I wanted to read content and make friends and network with other nerds with this interest.
I have really enjoyed being part of this community. The kind of content shared and the people I networked with I would never have been able to do in the same way on twitter.
One thing though, hardly any of my friends or people I follow on twitter have been on any mastodon instance/server and if they were they were not active.
The Rise
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter a lot of people have started using Mastodon. This has lead to some of the more famous instances getting slow and needing further investment in their infrastructure. Some have even closed registration.
On the positive side I can now interact with some of my twitter buddies on mastodon also.
It is always nice to see free software getting more adoption and more people using services not run by big corporations.
What are your options for joining Mastodon
One of the great things about mastodon is regardless of which instance you join, you can move to another instance easily in the future. So just join one that appeals to you and as you learn more about it and if you prefer somewhere else later you can move.
If I was joining today I would probably join one of these instances, and this is more based on what areas and topics interest me, that is functional programming or free and open source software:
fosstodon - this is where I am now. Focused on Free and Open source software
functional.cafe - Functional Programming focus
types.pl - Functional programming, programming language theorists and mathematicians
mathstodon - All things Maths
Linux Rocks - All things Linux
Of course you have the option to host it yourself under your own domain too. And if you want your own instance but want to have it managed by someone else you have that option too via https://masto.host and others.
My thoughts on Twitter and Mastodon
I really like Twitter and everyone on there I interact with. I have no plans to leave twitter or change how I use it. I see Mastodon as a complement to twitter not as a replacement.
I do think there is value in using both especially if you find an instance on Mastodon with conversations that are inline with your interests that may not be as focused available on twitter like I did.
Useful Resources on Mastodon
If you join, follow me: @softinio@fosstodon.org
Do you have any questions about Mastodon?
👇 Ask me anything about it using comments here 👇
Articles and Blogs I enjoyed Reading
Execute Shell Commands in Java/Scala/Kotlin By Alexandru Nedelcu
How to correctly cache build-time dependencies using Nix By Gabriella Gonzalez
Why functional programming should be the future of software development
Talks I enjoyed watching
Thank you!
Thank you for taking the time to read this issue of my notes. Hope some of the information you found was useful to you. Please share with your network.
I leave you with a picture of a new wine I tried couple of weeks ago that I really liked! Wine to try tips welcome in comments below 👇 too as well as any thing you all want to discuss related to this post.
