For several reasons, I had considered not going to this year’s PTS. Going was a good idea, and I’m glad I did it, and I definitely got valuable things accomplished, but the main reason I decided wasn’t the morale boost I’d get from writing code. It was Marlow, the town where the event was hosted. Marlow is Neil Bowers’ home town, and I’ve heard about quite a bit over the years. PTS was an opportunity to see it in person, to have a bit of a visit with Neil, to see the oft-praised Marlow Bookshop, and as I learned fairly late into the planning, to eat at a two Michelin star restaurant. I knew that the price of doing this would be hard work at the summit and I accepted it. Fortunately, I got to do all those things, they were great, and then the hard work was rewarding on its own. Two thumbs up.

The last time I wrote in this journal was in January, and I felt committed, at the time, to make regular updates. Really, though, my first half 2018 has been pretty overwhelming, and journal posts are one of the many things I planned that didn’t really happen. I’m hoping I can get back on track for the second half, for reasons I’ll write about sometime soon. Maybe?

It has been almost a year since my last blog post, in which I complained that Slack silently drops some messages for people using the IRC gateway. That bug was about a year old then, and it’s about two years old now. I’m still annoyed… but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to summarize what I did this year, since I forgot to post anything about it during the year.

So, imagine the following exchange in private message with one of your team members:

Every once in a while I randomly think of some friend I haven’t talked to in a while and I drop them an email. Half the time (probably more), I never hear back, but sometimes I do, and that’s pretty great. This week, I read an article about Eagle Scouts and it made me realize I hadn’t talked to my high school friend Bill Campbell for a while, so I dropped him an email and he wrote right back, and I was happy to have sent the email.

According to Goodreads, which should be accurate, these are the books I read in 2016. I meant to read more, but I didn’t.

Another year, another thirty-one days of horror movies! I think our selections this year had fewer losers than some past years, but probably also fewer stand-out winners.

So, it turns out I never posted a summary of our Horror Movie Month for 2015! I tried to recreate our viewing list by looking up my tweets, but there are a bunch of days with no movie tweet. What happened? I’m not sure. Anyway, here’s a very late summary, missing days, and with a year’s clouding of my memory. How accurate will it be? Who knows!

Every once in a while I hear or see somebody using one of the two obsolete secure SMTP transports for Email::Sender, and I wanted to make one more attempt to get people to switch, or to get them to tell me why switching won’t work.

I’ve been meaning to learn Rust for a long time. I read the book a while ago, and did some trivial exercises, but I didn’t write any real programs. This is a pretty common problem for me: I learn the basics of a language, but don’t put it to any real use. Writing my stupid 24 game solver in Forth definitely helped me think about writing real Forth programs, even if it was just a goof.