Hi! I’m Judy. I met @cwebber in the statusnet days, when I barely knew what was going on. I continue to barely understand anything. lol. Christine, you have always been kind and welcoming and enthusiastic and lovely. Thank you.
Once I was at a party and started to mess around with bringing MediaGoblin to Sandstorm, which was then actually released as a Sandstorm package by other people who know a lot more things!
wall of text about what i did for the last 24 years
I didn’t get degrees in English literature and Applied Math with an emphasis in Computer Science in the early 2000s, though I sure took a lot of classes, and then in the later 2000s I ran events & installed games on many computers at a LAN cafe in Berkeley. Then I ran (I did not start!) Women Who Code for about a year in 2011-2012 long before it became an international nonprofit. It was just a local meetup group and I had no idea what I was doing and was too stupid to be afraid. I came up with and ran the first weekly language-focused study group because I was learning Ruby and had met other cool people at Railsbridge workshops and wanted to keep seeing them around. Other people asked me if they could start study nights for other languages and frameworks and I was like “yeah run with it!” and it grew. I was also a founding member of Double Union, a feminist hackerspace in sf. All this community stuff and accidentally winning some hackathons got me an official Firebase developer #22 hoodie and my first job as a software engineer at a consulting company started by one of the two Sarahs who founded Railsbridge. In the mid 2010s I did Javascript and Rails at Indiegogo, a crowdfunding startup, where once for a GirlGeekDinner we hosted, I sang about AngularJS and got invited by the Angular team to sing at a conference in Paris. It was quite silly. I became an engineering manager for a little while and was really very good at some parts of that and hilariously, egregiously terrible at other parts. I had like an actual career or whatever with a trajectory and everything and I hated that so I got myself fired. After 2016 I got radicalized I guess (I think I always was but I had way less vocabulary for it before 2016/2017), and organized with Tech Workers Coalition for a short while. I taught at two coding bootcamps, got sick for a long time, and ejected myself out of the tech industry entirely. It turns out I have CFIDS (chronic fatigue/immuno dysfunction syndrome) and have probably had it since 2000 and always being unreasonably more tired than I should be is not just all in my head lol. I’ve tried to adjust how I treat myself and what I take on since getting diagnosed in 2019 with varying degrees of success.
Now I’m a tech leaver who works retail at a retro video game shop in Alameda, CA. l want to use federated stuff instead of centralized stuff online for myself and for “business” lol, but I don’t really know where to start.
I think I want to do two things here:
Be a layperson Spritely user/implementer/cheerleader/schemer?
Ask if anyone is interested in learning more about Earthstar, a project begun by my friend cinnamon, who learned a lot from working on secure scuttlebutt and many other things. Before cinnamon passed away, they said they wanted to weave together connections across the hole they knew they were about to leave in the universe by introducing their friends to each other. So I kind of feel like I would like to maybe keep doing the weaving work haha. I feel like if cinnamon were still here, they would know all about your work here at Spritely already. Earthstar is being led by the extremely kind and capable gwil now, and I will try to poke my head back and forth and follow news at both projects. I must admit I don’t know what my goal is here besides making sure the projects know about each other haha.
Maybe I should look into how to work together or figure out how I can make use of these projects alongside each other and then hopefully show other people and make the communities grow. I just want more people to know about options other than fb and ig and google products and steam or something. What I learned from doing stuff like wwcode was anyone can make a big difference in their local community by doing stuff with whoever is around them and starting small. So I’ll try to do some small stuff I guess. haha.
Thank you all for doing big stuff so I can do small stuff! Looking forward to Spritely developments and the making of fresh new goblins =)
Hey friends! I’m winds0rhum. Staying anon for now because I’m thinking of some uses for Goblins that benefit from anonymity. (Will hopefully expand on that in other threads later.)
I have been involved in various OSS capacities for 20-ish years. Primarily have written in Python and JavaScript in that time, but have also dabbled in Clojure, Rust, Lua, and a few others. I also casually participated in the Secure Scuttlebutt community for a while.
I’m interested in building social things with decentralized and federated tools, in ways that make them accessible on devices of all sizes and speeds, as well as giving people more ownership and control over their social presence, and the moderation and cultural diversity benefits of federation and decentralization.
My hopes and ideas are probably much bigger than my availability and energy, but I figured being here and thinking through ideas in a collaborative space like this might help give me inspiration, and maybe find some collaborators!
I have been a software developer in various forms since the 1980s, mostly doing C/C++ in a regulated industry since 1991 (said regulations having exploded in scope and effect since about 1994…)
Looking back, I feel like I may have a terminal case of ADD, but since the 1980s I have had a lingering fascination with distributed networks of computer servers sharing… data of interest to people.
While the power/capacity/speed of computers has exploded and their size/cost/power requirements have plummeted over the decades, many things have stayed the same: the need for data integrity/security, users’ desires for privacy, anonymity, connectivity and global fame, businesses’ desire to profit, governmental agencies’ desire to snoop…
I have the nagging idea that, if the “infrastructure software” were simple enough to deploy and secure enough to use, thousands to millions of hobbyists around the world not only could, but would maintain the necessary hardware and connectivity to support an ecosystem of fediverse type applications. The problem is: I would estimate “several” developer-years of effort to build such a layer from scratch, and it would need to support a complex, still evolving application layer such as Spritely… and then there’s my ADD.
I’m jdr. I’m not keen on connecting my online identities to my real life ones or each other, but I’m not famous or anything, so you’re not missing out.
I was born too late to hack on really cool computers like the Connection Machine and amazing OSes like Genera so I settled for doing big astrophysics simulations on HPC clusters with Fortran/C and x86 and more recently doing something vague with neural nets through Python (wrapping Fortran and C) and heaps of GPUs. This pays the bills and puts bread on the table, but does not feed the soul.
In my efforts to find some satisfying use for computers I’ve spent time learning weird languages like Idris and Bruijn and whatever they use to configure Nix. I even enjoy tilting at windmills like trying to get modern languages to run the code from SICM.
My current goal is to escape Samsara through Guix and Guile Emacs. One day I hope to purge my life of dark patterns, work for Italian, and win the approval of vrms.
Thanks for reading, I’m looking forward to interacting with you guys.
(I had linked the terms in bold to their relevant English Wikipedia entries, but the when I hit Reply I was told “An error occurred: Sorry you cannot post a link to that host.” though I don’t understand why. I’m sure interested readers can look them up themselves anyway.)
I’m Glenn, a hobbyist and enthusiastic tinkerer with Guile Scheme. I recently discovered Guile-Hoot and Guile-Goblins, and I’m absolutely fascinated by the possibilities they bring to the table. Guile-Hoot has me dreaming of creating fun, interactive applications, while Guile-Goblins sparks all kinds of ideas about building robust, distributed systems with capabilities-based security. It’s like opening the door to a world of creative chaos—and I’m here for it!
Right now, I’m knee-deep in a few projects, including a document-management system. I’m also exploring how I might use Guile-Goblins to experiment with distributed components for knowledge and information sharing or even small personal tools. The idea of secure, decentralized systems powered by Scheme is just too intriguing to resist.
When I’m not tinkering with code, I am an electrical engineer working in Jordan. But Scheme is where I come to relax, learn, and dream up ideas—whether they’re practical, whimsical, or just plain fun.
I’m here to learn from you all, share what I can, and maybe collaborate on something cool. If you’ve got insights, resources, or just want to geek out about Guile-Hoot, Guile-Goblins, or Scheme in general, I’m all ears!
Looking forward to being part of this awesome community.
