Tootfinder

Spending some time at #QConLondon this week, the schedule is stunning, the exhibitor lineup is relevant, and it’s sunny in London. Pretty sure I’m winning at life!

Law of physics: corporate entities are incapable of writing any text containing the phrase 'we are increasing the price'

I'm working with a few organisations with different meeting cultures at the moment, and I really enjoyed this post about levels of note taking #linkTuesday Which level do you use?

And this, people, is why Europe ABSOLUTELY NEEDS RIGHT FREAKING NOW its own human-graded space access system.
I'll never understand why nobody at #ESA thought of developping further the ATV in order to be also used to send people up instead of just cargo.
I know, the problem was mostly in bringing people down, as the ATV was designed to burn up in the atmosphere. But still. Now we…

rickf (@rickf@indieweb.social)
Attached: 1 image Dragon is what the US uses to resupply the ISS, for those that don't know...

At the risk of stating the obvious, please do state the obvious! In two separate meetings this week it seemed like someone was arguing against a proposed change and in both cases, they were actually very supportive of the idea, and had already moved on to talk about what else could be done. Stop. Express your support (you can thank the suggester if you like!) so that it's clear, and THEN you can build on the original suggestion.
In both cases, we nearly ended up not doing the original thing!

I added a link collection page to my website that's also subscribe-able via #RSS.
I thought that's a nice way to preserve them for myself (instead of hunting in the Mastodon search via in:library), while also surfacing them for others.
Let's see if I can build a habit to keep adding to it!
#indieweb
https://tzovar.as/links/

If I ever create a microblogging platform, I'd call it "The Void".
Posts would be "shouts". Comments would be permanently disabled. Likes would just add an ever increasing number of eyes around the edge, staring at what you wrote from every angle 👀

What a glorious morning! Still not sure how I feel being awake this early on a Saturday, but definitely happy to be heading in for #SotB2025 (and then #GoldfishLive later!)
Gonna be a fun day 😁

Intellectually, I know that ChatGPT is mostly reflecting my own tone and attitude back at me, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying some of the quips I get!
(today: a code snippet and an invitation to return with questions or "mysterious filepath errors (we've all been there)" - yes little robot, we have!)

Build your own learning tools: a small thought about how programming computers lets you take matters into your own hands.
https://www.rossng.eu/posts/2025-04-27-build-your-own-learning-tools/

Your open source needs docs - and to get you through this experience I have written a guide to creating minimal open source project documentation in a single afternoon. https://lornajane.net/posts/2025/just-enough-docs
Assemble the basics, immediately benefit your project, and also create a space for future documentation contributions to land!

If your users need an API that returns different fields for different use cases - do you need GraphQL? Read my post before you decide (spoiler: no, REST was literally designed for this) #rest #api

I hadn't planned on migrating several sites away from Netlify over the bank holiday weekend, but nevertheless, here we are. They didn't leave me much choice...
https://theadhocracy.co.uk/wrote/buh-bye-netlify

There's something immensely satisfying about putting the washing machine on at exactly the right time.

Tech workers: let's not be too polite/proud/whatever to talk about money and make the most of what we have. This post from Kris will help us to inform ourselves, please share widely #linkTuesday

Back when I was living in Bristol it was barely conceivable that one day through traffic might be removed from Park Street. And, on top of that, real segregated cycling facilities through the Triangle!
Drivers nearly killed or injured me many, many times on these sections of road. I'm happy that future users will not have to go through that.

Clowning around with ChatGPT to generate ideas for a blog post that was a bit boring and needed a good example to lighten it up a bit. This thing is hilarious and perhaps I'll just use these suggestions verbatim 😆 Best of all it can immediate reformat all this comedy into a valid OpenAPI description to illustrate my point.

Discovered this because sqlx converts stdlib datetimes to 'YY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS' but chrono datetimes to 'YY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS'.

Writing documentation for something, I have no idea why I'm surprised that I suddenly understand this thing so much better now! #opensource #docs

SQLite does TEXT COMPARISONS on my datetimes?!

The demise of Pocket is what started this thought process, so BIG shout out to @… and their hosted service at wallabag.it - I bookmark more things than I read so I'm creating new chaos there, but the experience is very good across all my devices. Again, you could self-host if you prefer that.

For RSS (because I really like only getting content I chose - just like happens here on Mastodon), I use @…. It's open source and theoretically self-hostable but I'm really happy with their hosted service.

First has to be @… which I have had for years as a hosted service from @…
Pretty sure I'm not using more than about 5% of the features of this one but my use case as a dropbox replacement and occasional file upload/download thing is brilliantly well served across my weird platform selection (iOS/Android/Linux).

This is your regular reminder that open source, self-hosting tools are great AND you don't actually have to host them yourself most of the time! Plenty of great companies offer these tools as a paid-for service - exactly like the subscriptions you have on those other platforms, except more ethical.
I'll share my favourites in the thread - please add yours!

New level of enshittification unlocked.
Now I get spam in my Gmail account from @google.com addresses, advertising conferences for a product that I don't use.

Looking at my calendar for today, I think the most difficult meeting is likely to be the meal planning meeting for the upcoming intergenerational family holiday.
On the plus side, I do feel that the eldest-daughter skillset was a good starting point for my leadership career 😆

In this post "Consent-Based Computing", I think Heidi Waterhouse is articulating some my own feelings, reflections and choices about the tools around us today and the tradeoffs I'm prepared to make. #linkTuesday

Shameful. I can't see how they can continue to be a party to the ECHR after this.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/14/hungary-poised-to-adopt-constitutional-amendment-to-ban-lgbtq-gatherings

Reminder that this time tomorrow (noon London time, Wednesday 21st May), it's the digital OpenUK meetup. Our topic is "digital sovereignty" which seems ... timely - and we have two great speakers. Open to everyone, hope you can make it!
Details and sign up here: https://www.meetup.com/openuk/events/306642326

I'm not sure it's legal to have such a well-reasoned discussion of AI and tech employment, but in case it is: #linkTuesday

If you work in an open knowledge project (basically an open source project that deals mostly with data), you might be interested in these diataxis workshops that are running for projects like yours.
Book here (apply if you're not sure if your project is eligible) https://vurt.org/events/workshops-april-2025/ - and please share widely to help reach this rather niche audience? Thanks!

This morning’s #QConLondon keynote is John O’Hara; he’s supposed to be talking about AMQP but he’s actually telling us why standards are vital to our industry and I think my heart might burst. So delighted to see this content on this stage (also a great speaker)

From engineer to manager, told from both sides - this thoughtful article is your #linkTuesday this week as I’m reflecting on my own professional next steps https://leaddev.com/career-development/from-engineer-manager-told-from-both-sides

If you use a read later or bookmarking tool, are you noticing an increasing number of sites that don’t work with them or intentionally don’t allow content to be fetched?
I use wallabag as both productivity and accessibility helper and I’m definitely finding more content that isn’t available… is it just me?

“These are hard times for anyone who cares about culture” truths from @clesleycode at #QConLondon this morning