There and back again

There and back again

October 4, 2024

Hello!

I spent most of the week in the excitable states of America. Indeed, I'm writing this in a bar at Richmond "International" airport as I await my hop to Washington (IAD) on the way to London Heathrow. Not much creation or consumption has happened due to me sleeping, traveling, working, eating, drinking, and sleeping.

One "Boston style" incident (IYKYK) resulted in moving from the 4th floor of the hotel to the 8th, which afforded excellent views of the Virginia Capitol building. But the less said about that incident, the better. Aaaaanyway, moving on.

-[ Consume ]-
Science of Cambridge

Have you ever watched Micro Men? The 2009 one-off docu-drama set in the early 1980s dramatises the race to supply a MicroComputer to the BBC. It features Alexander Armstrong as Sir Clive Sinclair and Martin Freeman as Chris Curry.

I re-watch it every so often, and this was one of those weeks. There's a surprise "archive" copy on a random YouTube channel over here. If you haven't watched it, you should.

In May 2016, while flying back from Austin, Texas, I found myself sat next to Chris Turner, one of the original BBC MicroComputer designers, and ARM employee number one. We discussed the BBC Micro, his part in the design, and many other things. That was one of my favourite flights of all time. I wrote that encounter up more fully as "A short aside" in a blog post about a virus I wrote for the BBC Micro.

Hiccups

I've been a subscriber of Joel Haver for a few years since his hilarious Playing an RPG for the first time "animated" video.

However, I completely missed his switch to making full-length, live-action, improv rom-com. Last Saturday, I randomly clicked on Hiccups, his latest movie. I love it, and you might too.

-[ Create ]-
Section title

As a developer advocate, community manager, and open-source project maintainer, I often look for tools to measure the health of an open-source community in which I'm involved. I found an excellent tool that I can see myself using daily. If you run any kind of open-source project, you might want to take a look, too.

Savannah is a hosted "CoRM" (Community Relationship Manager) service. Sign up, connect it to your GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Discord, Discourse, and other tools, and let it run for a bit. Savannah will identify your active contributors, communicators, and enablers.

It helps you understand where activity is strong or weak and which projects could use help, for example, when people's contributions drop away. It's a really great tool for understanding your community. I absolutely love it, and I've only been using it for a week! It's not super expensive, either. Basically, it's $25/manager/community, with another tier if you want to connect to SalesForce, if that's your thing.

It has a friendly web UI and is very easy to set up. It was developed as a "side project" by my good friend and ex-Canonical (and ex-InfluxData) colleague, Michael Hall. He didn't ask me to talk about it and is probably mortified that I am because he knows he's terrible at marketing his creations.

Apologies if this whole section sounds like a giant advert. As with most mentions in the newsletter, I get nothing from this other than sharing a cool thing that I personally found helpful that others might, too. Share Savannah with your friendly neighbourhood community manager. They'll thank you. It's cheaper than CommonRoom and a ton easier to set up! Also, it has an API. What's not to love?

-[ Collateral ]-
A link or two

That is all. Thanks for reading.

-- popey

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