Archive

Hello friend!

It's been a while again, but I did promise to keep the list low-volume! Unfortunately, once again, the low volume doesn't apply to this particular instance of the newsletter. 😅 Please remember that you can open this newsletter on the web ("view this email online" at the bottom of the newsletter) and add it to your reading list / keep it as an open tab forever!

Writing Post Ubiquitous Twitter

Firstly, let me thank you for subscribing and staying subscribed! As I wrote across the social sites: Twitter's demise as a universal hangout space has made it much harder for writers like myself to get our articles actually read. People have been complaining about algorithms a lot, and as a Twitter Completionist™ that never touched the algorithmic timeline with a ten-foot pole, I'm not innocent of that. But the now-obvious truth is that we've lost discoverability with nothing in return¹.

Greetings Friend!

Hope everyone made it into 2023 and that the overall trajectory will improve somewhat! I for one managed to get (non-COVID) sick twice this winter (including 5 days of fever in a hotel on a quick "vacation"), so I hope you made it through better.

It's been too long again, and this time I don't have that much to announce (famous first words; turns out I do), since I've spent most of my free time working on my FOSS projects and making popcorn in the bright fire that Twitter has become under its new management.

Speaking of: This is probably a good moment to mention that I'm https://mastodon.social/@hynek in the Fediverse – just in case Twitter doesn't make it until my next newsletter. 😅

Hello friend!

As with the last newsletter, I'm starting with "it's been a while", however in this case there's been a lot of things to announce!

Hope y'all in the northern hemisphere had a pleasant summer, I managed to see Dublin for EuroPython for the first time and now have opinions about draft Guinness that I'll rather not air in public, because I hope to come back to Ireland some day. At the risk to repeat myself: it was wonderful to see friends live in the flesh again.

Fruit Flies

Greetings friend,

it’s been a while! Although a lot happened, little productive has come out of it for me sadly. But I promised that this newsletter is going to be low-volume, so there you are! That said, I have finally some things to announce now, so let’s get started.

Back To Conferencing

I attended my first real conferences since 2019: PyCon US & PyCon Italia! Since I just went through a COVID-19 infection at the end of March (on my first non-lockdown birthday, no less), it felt safe enough and unlike my co-worker I didn’t spend most of the time stuck in my hotel room after staying too long at a sponsor’s party.

Happy belated New Year dear friend,

I hope 2022 is treating you better, than its nasty cousins 2020 and 2021! Last time I was wondering where Omicron will take us and so far, it looks promising! While almost everybody I know had it (or have it – get well soon George!), Berlin has already peaked and I'm fully-booked for PyCon US in Salt Lake City and PyCon Italia in my beloved Florence, and I'm writing this to you to procrastinate on packing for Cabo Verde – my first trip outside of the EU since 2019.

As for conferences, I won't write a regular talk this year (that's something I decided last year, given the uncertainties and the work I put into my talks), but my friend Christian has tricked me into agreeing to give a lightning talk about Don't mock what you don't own. after shitposting about it. Might get good!

I certainly hope that conference season 2023 will allow me to return to the stages in more profound ways. I have some interesting ideas lined up.

Greetings, friend!

This one is a bit unusual and direct result of my announcement of the TIL section on my homepage. A success story, if you will.

Since instituting the section at the end of August, I’ve posted a total of 9 posts. Not bad, given I was 3 weeks on a vacation. One of them – which being surprisingly non-standard – even making it on front page of the Orange Site and pulling in some sweet vitriol in the wholesome tradition of shooting the messenger. Overall, it’s great though, because it makes me write more and you never know where that leads.

Bonjour,

I’m interrupting my vacation to let y’all know that I’ll be giving a talk at a Python conference in the Zoo of Amersfoort (close to Utrecht) that Ordina is organizing to celebrate the release of Python 3.10:

Hello friend,

this is gonna be a quick one, because what I’m announcing already has a navel-gazing nature.

Over the years the bar that I perceive about posting on my blog has only gone up. My latest post on subclassing (that despite its length and topic was very well-received – thank you for sharing!) and this newsletter made the problem even more pronounced.

Therefore, to be able to share stuff with less friction, I’ve just announced a “Today I Learned” section on my blog:

Greetings friends!

I'm super excited that despite the fact that the last post was rather niche, y'all keep subscrib[ed|ing]!

Now if my SemVer post was flamebait, this one Death-Star-bait. And it's also very long. It started when I just wanted to properly type out a Twitter thread on subclassing in Python I've done some months ago and then is somewhat escalated.

The problem with writing any opinion-laden piece is that you have to write with the least-charitable reader in mind (although nothing will save you from stopped reading after X guys) and so my attempts at filling up holes led to more than 5,000 words. Obviously there are still holes and obviously they'll be found.

Greetings, friend!

Thank you so much for subscribing! Unless half of you unsubscribe the moment they realize that I don't only rant about versioning schemes, I think I consider this whole experiment a success and will keep it going for now. I have a huge backlog of topics I'd like to blog about and this is somewhat helping me to try to go for a ~monthly cadence (narrator: lol).

A Brief Look Back

Speaking of versioning schemes. Now that the dust and emotions have settled, it's interesting to look back at the reactions to my last post. To be clear, the overwhelming majority was positive. But as we humans do, one focuses mainly on the few negative ones.

Hello friend!

Welcome to the first issue of Hynek Did Something and thank you so much for participating in my little experiment! ❤️ The perspective of being able to send out the first issue may or may not have helped to motivate me to finish the draft. 😇

And this draft is both about a pet peeve of mine, and goes way back! Almost a year ago on April 25th 2020 (or how I like to call it: March 56th 2020) I let myself rope into giving a talk at Python Pizza Remote and I used it to explain why I think that Semantic Versioning is not a good fit for most projects. They haven’t published the videos yet, so there’s not talk page about it. But I’ve always considered to write it down as a blog post.

Fast forward February 2021. pyca/cryptography – a project I remain loosely involved with – switches to Rust to improve their long-term security. The loud demands both on the bug thread and in the comments all over the Internet reminded me of that draft in my drawer. It also reminded me that most of my arguments tend to be towards maintainers.