Back in May, Eugen announced that I’d joined the team at Mastodon gGmbH, to look after Developer Relations. I was helping out in different ways, and getting to know the community across different Fediverse projects, since the start of the year; it was great to be able to spend a small portion of my freelance time working on something that I personally believe in, that I’m excited about, and where I can bring relevant experience to bear in multiple areas.
The initial six month arrangement technically wrapped up at the end of November, and I thought it might be nice to reflect on what I was able to achieve over that period (I’m also excited to be able to continue this work going into 2024). Some of the work was very much “behind the scenes” / “under the radar”, so it is less straightforward to document here, but here are some of the larger and more visible outcomes.
I’d also like to use this space to again, say Thank You to the large number of developers that spend their time building libraries, tools, and full Mastodon apps, for the platform. We appreciate you!
I refreshed the GitHub organisation & project look-and-feel, setting up an organisation-level README, and links to our Code of Conduct across all of our projects.
I worked on cross-project and cross-instance collaboration channels. This is a little more difficult to document because there are a lot of channels (Mastodon, Discord, Signal, GitHub / other source control communities, face-to-face and 1:1 meetings), but I’m hopeful (and I believe) that I’ve been successful in bringing folks together in meaningful ways over the course of the year.
I attended a number of workshops on behalf of the team – the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace hosted a series on challenges to moderation and safety in distributed social networks, the Data Transfer Initiative ran an excellent conversation, and I’ve had several contacts with folks via Fediforum.
I talked about Mastodon and the Fediverse to Developer Relations-specific audiences at DevRelCon in London, and at the Dublin DevRel meetup (recording here).
I represented and spoke about Mastodon at All Things Open (alongside my personal attendance). Stickers!
An array of tech-related stickers on a tabletop, featuring Mastodon logos
I worked with the triage team that Renaud established to significantly burn down the backlog of documentation and website issues. There was a particularly large burst of activity around this during November and December, and this was also part of my 24 Pull Requests contribution this month.
there is a lot more still to do here, and contributions are welcomed. We want to rebuild the documentation website in a format that is more closely aligned with the joinmastodon.org site, and would love to have some help with that.
I secured a table for the project at FOSDEM 2024, and I will be working with Renaud and others to run that presence.
Excited to announce that the @Mastodon project will have a stand at #FOSDEM2024 … February this year was my first time at #FOSDEM, and this time I'll be there with a project I support! Looking forward to it. fosdem.org/2024/news/2023-11-2…
With the aim to maintain a range of different relationships and channels of conversation, I’ve also been actively having discussions with organisations and supporting groups such as IFTAS, Fastly, Fediforum, and more.
I’d love to spend more time with the Mastodon team and contribute in even more ways; from the perspective of building a sustainable freelancer lifestyle, it is only a small part of my time, and I’m open to other opportunities. Mastodon in Malta! 🇲🇹 Looking forward to 2024! FOSDEM next, and then, Princeton…
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I bridge the gap between humans and technology, whether they are end users or developers.… · Experience: Mastodon · Location: Kingston Upon Thames · 500+ connections on LinkedIn.
Last week, I had the pleasure of talking to the Dublin #DevRel Meetup, organised by my friends at Voxgig – all about Developer Relations in the era of “Community Everywhere”. I covered a range of the current and emerging social platforms where we can connect with our communities, and later in the session I talked more specifically about what’s new in Mastodon 4.2.
A small hiccup meant that after about the 5th slide the presentation was no longer being shared into the online recording, but the full slide deck is here if you want to follow along with the talk, and I’ve also got a set of notes and links for the talk online.
The organisers also invited me to talk about the new release of Mastodon, version 4.2. This is the first major version to have come out since I started helping the team, and it’s a pretty big deal as it introduces a few major features that folks have been looking for, notably opt-in search. In the second part of my section of the meetup, I talked a bit about version 4.2, and also shared a few tools that I use regularly that give me additional features and ways to keep up with the conversations around the communities I want to connect with. The notes are again available at the same link posted above.
tl;dr (aka didn’t watch / or check the notes) – there are a few third-party apps and tools that I use regularly to help me to stay up-to-date. In particular, I love (and choose to pay for) Murmel and fediview which email me daily summaries of links or conversations I might otherwise miss in the reverse-chronological timeline. I also use some browser extensions that add a few niceties to the experience, such as Graze and Streetpass.
Thanks to Sinead and Richard for having me talk at the meetup, and for continuing to support the DevRel community with great content each month – there’s also a good podcast from Voxgig that you should check out.
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Voxgig has the tools and expertise to help organizations maximize their developer relations efforts. Let us put our experience to work for you, helping you achieve your goals and make a lasting impact in the developer community.
Last week, I had the pleasure of talking to the Dublin #DevRel Meetup, organised by my friends at Voxgig – all about Developer Relations in the era of “Community Everywhere”. I covered a range of the current and emerging social platforms where we can connect with our communities, and later in the session I talked more specifically about what’s new in Mastodon 4.2.
A small hiccup meant that after about the 5th slide the presentation was no longer being shared into the online recording, but the full slide deck is here if you want to follow along with the talk, and I’ve also got a set of notes and links for the talk online.
The organisers also invited me to talk about the new release of Mastodon, version 4.2. This is the first major version to have come out since I started helping the team, and it’s a pretty big deal as it introduces a few major features that folks have been looking for, notably opt-in search. In the second part of my section of the meetup, I talked a bit about version 4.2, and also shared a few tools that I use regularly that give me additional features and ways to keep up with the conversations around the communities I want to connect with. The notes are again available at the same link posted above.
tl;dr (aka didn’t watch / or check the notes) – there are a few third-party apps and tools that I use regularly to help me to stay up-to-date. In particular, I love (and choose to pay for) Murmel and fediview which email me daily summaries of links or conversations I might otherwise miss in the reverse-chronological timeline. I also use some browser extensions that add a few niceties to the experience, such as Graze and Streetpass.
Thanks to Sinead and Richard for having me talk at the meetup, and for continuing to support the DevRel community with great content each month – there’s also a good podcast from Voxgig that you should check out.
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Voxgig has the tools and expertise to help organizations maximize their developer relations efforts. Let us put our experience to work for you, helping you achieve your goals and make a lasting impact in the developer community.
I’ve been trying out as many shiny new things as I can. There are a couple of reasons: I find that folks often ask me for opinions on new technologies; and, I have a view that unless I do try things, I may miss something that’s really interesting or that might have a future impact.
The events of last year and specifically last November when Twitter began to be burned to the ground, caused another surge of innovation and interest around possible alternatives. I’m not about to go through them all extensively in this post, but really just wanted to share where you can find me.
Where you (might) find me
Primarily, I’m on Mastodon, and have no plans to be anywhere else in particular (more about this in a moment). For the sake of balance and information, here are some other places you can find my content.
I have accounts on Post and on Hive, but barely open either app. Hive doesn’t have a web presence for me to point you at, even. I’m not sure about the policies of either platform, and neither really stuck.
I’m on Cohost. It feels very Tumblr-y. I haven’t used it very much, but I see a few interesting features, and it definitely doesn’t seem to want to be any of the other existing networks, it feels more new and different.
I’m on T2Pebble. Pebble was called T2 until today, but that was always a temporary name, which I realised. A couple of former Twitter people are involved over there. It feels very friendly, but so far I have a limited network, and drop in from time to time.
I’m on Bluesky. Back when this was initially kicked off from inside of Twitter as the notion of a new protocol that would not be corporately-owned, it was very interesting to me, and I made some small efforts to talk to Parag about it when the initial recruitment was going on, and even referred some folks for conversations (who are not involved, in the end, possibly due to being more on the “existing standards are good” side of things – I have no idea). It feels very “early-Twitter crowd, but with more late-Twitter snark and memes”. I like it, and it has some good ideas, but:
Jack Dorsey. He fooled me twice already, so I’m incredibly wary.
The team’s efforts to stand back from having any kind of political / moderation position is, in my opinion, not a good one, and likely to lead to bad things on the platform(s).
I’ll believe in the federated bit when I see it; I’m actively working in a current, large, federated environment across platforms, and it is complicated. I think there will continue to be pushback from users who just want a Twitter-like, single server, experience, vs any move towards true decentralisation.
I don’t feel like I get a lot of engagement there. As with all of these different platforms, though, there’s an argument that I don’t get a lot of engagement because I don’t spend a lot of time there, which may be valid.
I’m on Threads, because, Facebook and Instagram. It’s… OK. It started off really badly, only pushing celebs and other stuff I had no interest in. That has calmed down a lot, and I see a lot more folks I recognise from my other networks on there. I’m interested in seeing how Threads moves forward with federation and ActivityPub (and, noting that I work on the Mastodon project, I have to say that I’ve been pretty impressed with their approach and conversations around this so far). Definitely an app I pop into at least as often as Bluesky.
I’m not on Nostr. See above re: Dorsey, and I don’t love the whole blockchain element to it either.
There are links to other places I have profiles – not just on social “microblogging”-style sites – at the end of my main landing page.
The Fediverse
Fundamentally, though, I’m all in on the #Fediverse, which I believe offers far better opportunities for the future.
Mastodon in particular is really fantastic, with a number of vibrant instances and communities that align to my interests, from History to 3D Printing to Electronics to the UK. It is the site I check multiple times a day, and I’m loving it. I’ll have to share a follow-up post at some stage with some tools I use that make it even better.
Of course, I realise that it is also all about the network. I like the fact that in these ActivityPub-based platforms, I can save my followers/following easily, and migrate between instances (I’ve done that once already on Mastodon). A number of my former Twitter network are on Mastodon; some are on Bluesky, some Cohost, some Pebble, many on Threads due to Meta’s huge scale. I don’t see myself stopping using several of these interchangeably for a while. That’s OK.
A couple of additional points to round this out. I don’t use any of these services for private messaging in the way that Twitter DMs used to be a channel I relied on; I’ve moved to other, actual end-to-end encrypted messaging systems. Also, I don’t believe that any of these platforms are for “reach” as such – that was a pattern of behaviour and usage I allowed myself to think was important at Twitter. None of these are drop-in replacements for those features, if those are things you’re seeking. Be prepared to try something new!
Finally…
In case you missed it: I am NOT on X. X was never something I signed up for, and I have no interest in using it. The owner actively encourages and enables hate speech, discrimination, and all the worst impulses of humanity – literally the very opposite of what I believe Twitter offered the world in its prime.
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I’ve been trying out as many shiny new things as I can. There are a couple of reasons: I find that folks often ask me for opinions on new technologies; and, I have a view that unless I do try things, I may miss something that’s really interesting or that might have a future impact.
The events of last year and specifically last November when Twitter began to be burned to the ground, caused another surge of innovation and interest around possible alternatives. I’m not about to go through them all extensively in this post, but really just wanted to share where you can find me.
Where you (might) find me
Primarily, I’m on Mastodon, and have no plans to be anywhere else in particular (more about this in a moment). For the sake of balance and information, here are some other places you can find my content.
I have accounts on Post and on Hive, but barely open either app. Hive doesn’t have a web presence for me to point you at, even. I’m not sure about the policies of either platform, and neither really stuck.
I’m on Cohost. It feels very Tumblr-y. I haven’t used it very much, but I see a few interesting features, and it definitely doesn’t seem to want to be any of the other existing networks, it feels more new and different.
I’m on T2Pebble. Pebble was called T2 until today, but that was always a temporary name, which I realised. A couple of former Twitter people are involved over there. It feels very friendly, but so far I have a limited network, and drop in from time to time.
I’m on Bluesky. Back when this was initially kicked off from inside of Twitter as the notion of a new protocol that would not be corporately-owned, it was very interesting to me, and I made some small efforts to talk to Parag about it when the initial recruitment was going on, and even referred some folks for conversations (who are not involved, in the end, possibly due to being more on the “existing standards are good” side of things – I have no idea). It feels very “early-Twitter crowd, but with more late-Twitter snark and memes”. I like it, and it has some good ideas, but:
Jack Dorsey. He fooled me twice already, so I’m incredibly wary.
The team’s efforts to stand back from having any kind of political / moderation position is, in my opinion, not a good one, and likely to lead to bad things on the platform(s).
I’ll believe in the federated bit when I see it; I’m actively working in a current, large, federated environment across platforms, and it is complicated. I think there will continue to be pushback from users who just want a Twitter-like, single server, experience, vs any move towards true decentralisation.
I don’t feel like I get a lot of engagement there. As with all of these different platforms, though, there’s an argument that I don’t get a lot of engagement because I don’t spend a lot of time there, which may be valid.
I’m on Threads, because, Facebook and Instagram. It’s… OK. It started off really badly, only pushing celebs and other stuff I had no interest in. That has calmed down a lot, and I see a lot more folks I recognise from my other networks on there. I’m interested in seeing how Threads moves forward with federation and ActivityPub (and, noting that I work on the Mastodon project, I have to say that I’ve been pretty impressed with their approach and conversations around this so far). Definitely an app I pop into at least as often as Bluesky.
I’m not on Nostr. See above re: Dorsey, and I don’t love the whole blockchain element to it either.
There are links to other places I have profiles – not just on social “microblogging”-style sites – at the end of my main landing page.
The Fediverse
Fundamentally, though, I’m all in on the #Fediverse, which I believe offers far better opportunities for the future.
Mastodon in particular is really fantastic, with a number of vibrant instances and communities that align to my interests, from History to 3D Printing to Electronics to the UK. It is the site I check multiple times a day, and I’m loving it. I’ll have to share a follow-up post at some stage with some tools I use that make it even better.
Of course, I realise that it is also all about the network. I like the fact that in these ActivityPub-based platforms, I can save my followers/following easily, and migrate between instances (I’ve done that once already on Mastodon). A number of my former Twitter network are on Mastodon; some are on Bluesky, some Cohost, some Pebble, many on Threads due to Meta’s huge scale. I don’t see myself stopping using several of these interchangeably for a while. That’s OK.
A couple of additional points to round this out. I don’t use any of these services for private messaging in the way that Twitter DMs used to be a channel I relied on; I’ve moved to other, actual end-to-end encrypted messaging systems. Also, I don’t believe that any of these platforms are for “reach” as such – that was a pattern of behaviour and usage I allowed myself to think was important at Twitter. None of these are drop-in replacements for those features, if those are things you’re seeking. Be prepared to try something new!
Finally…
In case you missed it: I am NOT on X. X was never something I signed up for, and I have no interest in using it. The owner actively encourages and enables hate speech, discrimination, and all the worst impulses of humanity – literally the very opposite of what I believe Twitter offered the world in its prime.
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880 Followers • 0 Threads • Occasionally of interest. Mostly posting at
@andypiper@macaw.social - accidentally becoming an artist with creative tech https://forgeandcraft.co.uk. See the latest...
Last week, there was a flurry of interest in a new addition to the #Fediverse: Postmarks. It’s social bookmarking (like Digg, del.icio.us, or more recently, Pinboard), now with ActivityPub support. Neat!
Organising stuff, “back in the day”
Back in the 2000s I was a huge fan of a site called del.icio.us, and the original iteration of our weekly podcast – currently called Games at Work dot Biz – was named Dogear Nation. Back when Michael and Michael kicked off that show, there was a podcast called Digg Nation which tried to round up the interesting community links and trends from the week on Digg. IBM at the time had an internal version of a social bookmarking / folksonomical platform similar to del.icio.us called “dogear” (like, folding the page of a book to mark it), so Dogear Nation encouraged listeners to tag links on del.icio.us for us to discuss each week… del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo! in 2005, and eventually, went away.
Fast forward 15 years to our current podcast, and we still love it when listeners share links for us to discuss, but there’s less of an organised way to do it!
Join the Federation
A brief diversion, because I’ve not written too much about this on my blog up until now.
Unlike the centralised “Web 2.0”-based, largely corporate-owned sites that dominate the current web, the Fediverse is a set of related services that share some common protocols (ActivityPub is one, but there are others involved) and are loosely-connected. As well as each service usually having some form of “flagship” instance, it is is also very common to encourage diversity by location and interests, and often self-hosting, so it won’t be possible for an unsavoury billionaire to buy the things you use, or misuse and steal the data that you’ve put into them. Your network and your data are your own.
I’m very active across a range of sites and services that are analogous to those you might be familiar with. On Mastodon, for instance, I currently do some work with Mastodon gGmbH, the non-profit behind the project and host of two of the larger service instances; and although my original account was on one of those instances, at the end of last year I moved my account (taking the related network of connections with me) to a much smaller server run by a former coworker, mostly populated by other former coworkers, but I’m still connected with users across the rest of the Fediverse.
You can also find me on PixelFed (Instagram-like photo sharing), on Lemmy (Reddit-like groups and communities), on PeerTube (YouTube-like video channels) where I live on the diode.zone instance for makers and electronics enthusiasts, on Bookwyrm (GoodReads-like community), and so on. Basically there are a number of slices of “me” out there, in spaces where it makes sense. Essentially, if you’re on Mastodon and you’re interested in my videos, you can follow my PeerTube account from Mastodon without having to sign up for PeerTube. It’s pretty cool.
I strongly believe that federated services are the best opportunity for us to maintain a free and open Web.
– me, 2023
So, Postmarks?
Yes! Postmarks is a single-user, super small and simple server for managing your own bookmarks. When I add a bookmark on my own Postmarks server, my Postmarks account effectively publishes the new entry to the rest of the Fediverse as an activity. So, if you’re interested in what I’m bookmarking and you have a Mastodon account, you can follow @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url]@pipesmarks.glitch.me and you’ll see the new entries as they get added. If you’re not interested, don’t follow my account, and we’re all good. Oh, and it supports Atom feeds for different tags (categories), too.
Postmarks runs on Glitch – or, anywhere else you can stand up a Node.js / Express app. Personally I love Glitch, and I’ve been using it for many years now for hosting demos and trying out different projects – in fact, my main links page runs on Glitch. The Postmarks developer Casey Kolderup works there, and Casey has made it really straightforward to remix directly on Glitch, or import from GitHub there or to another service of your choice – it has very few dependencies.
Getting involved
My usual pattern for reading and saving content is whilst mobile. There’s a bookmarklet that’s part of the project, but no easy way to add it to my system for links to end up on Postmarks from my phone or tablet. I turned to Apple Shortcuts to help out. A screenshot of Apple Shortcuts on iPadOS 17 beta, showing the sequence of steps to send a link to Postmarks This does not do too much – it takes a link from the share sheet or clipboard, and opens the add bookmark page popup in a browser tab. At the moment there’s no full API for Postmarks, so this is a bit of a stopgap or workaround. Annoyingly, it will also leave you with an empty browser tab you’ll need to close, but it works.
If you’d like to try the automation, you can get it via RoutineHub, which links to the Shortcut in iCloud. You’ll be prompted to add the hostname of your Postmarks instance, and you will already need to have signed in to that site in your web browser of choice.
Beyond that, Glitch makes it easy to hack on features, because everything runs in the browser, including a code editor. So far I’ve been adding small features such as support for the nodeinfo endpoint used by other Fediverse servers, and a slightly improved Atom feed. There’s lots I can think of to add, but not so much time to play – this is giving me a chance to learn a bit more about ActivityPub internals, as well as “scratching an itch”.
I’m also playing with another single-user ActivityPub server, Shuttlecraft, but that’s a post for another day.
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I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.
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I was pretty actively commenting from the event and taking part in the live uStream channel… others have written up some of their experiences and thoughts, so I don’t propose to say much here. My main contribution was to make a (shaky!) video of Andy Stanford-Clark’s talk towards the start of the morning – a half hour overview of his home automation projects. I’ve posted it on Viddler, and if you are interested you are very welcome to comment on it, embed it in your own sites, or add annotations on the video timeline.
[viddler id=e4676600&w=400&h=267]
The nice part about Viddler over, say, YouTube is that it let me post the whole thing as a single video rather than having to chop it up into 10 minute chunks. I’ll try to post some notes on how I went about producing the video at some stage soon.
Some very general comments on the day:
Well-organised, well-run, great venue, nice to have wireless access – thanks to everyone involved in the logistics!
A brilliant, exciting array of skills, talents and interests. It was kind of funny to realise just how many of the folks I knew of as we were doing introductions at the start, and great to find that it wasn’t only a bunch of IBM hackers – this movement is really building momentum.
I’m at Homecamp at Imperial College in London today – learning about home automation and energy monitoring. There’s an amazing group of people here. Follow the Twitter stream or watch it on uStream.
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IBM’s Chairman and CEO, Sam Palmisano, has been speaking to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York today. He’s been discussing how the planet is getting smarter:
These collective realizations have reminded us that we are all now connected – economically, technically and socially. But we’re also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get “flatter.” And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected. But something is happening that holds even greater potential. In a word, our planet is becoming smarter.
In the speech, Sam talks about how the world has become instrumented, more interconnected, and devices more intelligent. And he talks about how the current world crises – ecological, financial, and others – represent an opportunity for change. The next step for the globally integrated economy is a globally integrated and intelligent economy and society.
Some of the problems and solutions that are being mentioned are interesting.
67 per cent of all electrical energy is lost due to inefficient power generation and grid management… utilities in the U.S., Denmark, Australia and Italy are now building digital grids to monitor the energy system in real time.
Congested roadways in the U.S. cost $78 billion annually in wasted hours and gas… Stockholm’s new smart toll system has resulted in 22 percent less traffic, a 12 to 40 percent drop in emissions and 40,000 additional daily users of the public transport system
This is exciting for me on many levels. Let me step up through them.
As regular readers will know, I’ve become increasingly interested in pervasive computing and home automation. The little “Current Cost craze” that has swept through my group of friends at work could be seen as a mark of the individual interest in applying technology in a smarter way. I’m excited that this has widened out to a group of folks who are supportingChris Dalby’s Home Camp idea in London later this month.
First on stage were hosts Brady Forrest [http://radar.oreilly.com/brady/] of
O’Reilly Media [http://oreilly.com/] and Jennifer Pahlka
[http://blog.pahlka.com/] of TechWeb [http://www.techweb.com/home].
The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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For a while now I’ve wanted to be able to check my CurrentCost meter‘s graphs on my iPhone.
Up until now I’ve been hooked up to the “Hursley mothership” and been publishing my data to a central dashboard. Unfortunately, although that draws some pretty graphs, it runs in Java and therefore isn’t supported in Mobile Safari on the phone.
This is still a work in progress, but with a combination of Ubuntu running on a Viglen MPC-L, rrdtool for gathering and graphing the stats, and the iWebKit framework for creating the user interface, I now have a simple iPhone-optimised web application which lets me view the graphs. All that’s happening here is that the data from the serial port is being dropped into rrdtool and graphs generated; and then Apache / PHP is serving up an optimised dashboard for looking at the graphs.
I just mentioned about three different topics I really should blog about in more detail (MPC-L, rrdtool, and iWebKit) but that will all have to wait.
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The buzz There’s a bit of a buzz going on at work at the moment – a bunch of us from “the Hursley crowd” have started playing with Current Cost meters. These devices are intended to enable consumers to see exactly what their energy usage is and, hopefully, modify behaviour to save electricity accordingly. The idea, simply, is that it provides real-time information about energy consumption.
The product The device itself comes in two parts. The unit that goes inside the house is a wireless LCD display which shows the current usage in watts, the current estimated cost per day assuming that usage is maintained, a bar chart with yesterday’s usage, overall KWH in the past day and month, and the time and temperature. The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
Update: I should point out, given some comments, that we’re using an early batch of the meters and I’m not certain when they will be generally available.
One of the other features of the device is that it can be plugged in to a computer, and the data can then be captured and analysed over time. We are using some homebrew software to do this, pulling the data from the serial port (most of the meters use 9600 baud, it turns out that mine is set to 2400 for some reason).
It’s kind of scary to see some of the spikes in the graph, and just watching this has certainly made me adjust my behaviour in terms of switching things off and unplugging chargers and so on when they are not in use. We’ve all got our meters hooked up via a Microbroker, and this has been my first opportunity to really play around with MQTT technology… I’ve obviously been aware of it for a very long time, but it’s nice to have something tangible to hack around with. It has also led me into a bunch of interesting discussions about home automation, tweetjects and low-power servers. Fascinating stuff.
The ideas
I have a bunch of thoughts about this. I have it hooked up to an old Linux box, but I’ve also successfully attached it to my Macbook Pro and a Windows Thinkpad. Currently the software is sending the MQTT data to a Microbroker and a Java app is drawing the graph shown above, but it would be fairly straightforward, for example, to squirrel the data locally and do some interesting analytics using Project Zero (aka WebSphere sMash) and some AJAX-y Google Chart goodness. I can also capture ambient temperature over time. It’s all just a matter of finding the hacking opportunity!
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We just presented our team’s hack for HackDay in London…
An awesome team effort inspired and led by Paul Johnston and Nigel Crawley. A mixed reality naval game from the Supernova team.
Here’s the science part.
The real world part(s) of the hack involved a DV cam feeding Nigel’s G4 iBook with a live feed of some pieces which represented two teams, “crabs” and “sharks” (cut from O’Reilly postcards). The camera rig – managed by Jon Hadley – was a highly technical setup involving gaffer tape and a borrowed tripod – thanks to Twitter! The iBook then used the TUIO protocol to update the coordinates of the game pieces to a web server.
The second RL part of the hack was my MacBook Pro rigged with Quicktime Broadcaster and Darwin Streaming Server, pointing at the game board. This provided a video feed that could be used within Second Life. This was technically challenging to set up due to issues connecting between the laptops on the BTOpenZone network… so someone donated us an Airport hub (again following a Twittered plea for help), and I shared my connection with Jim Purbrick who was then able to tunnel through to Second Life, as well as seeing my Quicktime stream. We experimented with a cheap USB webcam too, but the iSight just worked a lot better (positioning was “interesting” though!)
Meanwhile… in Second Life, the team of Jim Purbrick, Ben Hardill, Chris Mahoney and James Taylor built an amazing setup. We had a floating blimp (on Arcanum, the sim that Linden Lab had donated for the Hack Day event). The blimp contained a table which showed the live video feed of the game being played in real life. Below that, the sim was submerged. During the demo, Babbage Linden showed off the live feed, and then flew under the blimp. When he hit the floating buoy, a group of submarines were rezzed in that corresponded with the movement of the pieces in real life. Oh, and the subs were named after names found via the Yahoo! Answers API.
We didn’t quite have time to sort out the audio, but there were supposed to be some sonar noises as the subs were rezzed. Pretty easy to add, but we got moved around a couple of times prior to the demo, and had to disassemble our rig each time.
Oh, and as a complete aside – it is interesting to see the distribution of hardware and operating systems at the event. I’d say Macs dominate, Windows are probably second (I’ve only seen one running Vista but there may be more), and there are quite a few people running Linux too. Almost all of the demos and presentations seem to be run from Macs. W00t!
I had a spot on stage earlier in the afternoon as the “glamorous” helper for the MyBlogBunny hack, holding the Nabaztag – thanks Lance 🙂
[ edit 19/06 – links and photos added, minor edits ]
[ edit 21/06 – added some more links to interesting Flickr photos ]
One of the first Hursley-related things I wrote about here and on the eightbar blog back in 2006 was how much I enjoy helping with our annual schools event for National Science and Engineering Week in the UK – Blue Fusion (the event website has gone AWOL at the moment but here’s a link to the press release).
This year was no exception, and referring back to my old blog entries it turns out that this is now the fifth year that I’ve been a volunteer. Unfortunately I only had room in my schedule to spend one day helping this time around, so I chose to host a school for the day rather than spending all day on a single activity (that way, I got to see all of the different things we had on offer).
So, yesterday I had the pleasure of hosting six intelligent and polite students from Malvern St James School and their teachers – they had travelled a fair distance to come to the event, but despite the early start I think they did really well.
I won’t go into too much detail and spoil the fun for people who might read this but have not yet taken part in this week’s event, but I think we had some great activities on offer. I twittered our way through a few of them. My own personal favourite was a remote surgery activity. You can’t see much in this image (it was a dark room) but the students basically had a “body” inside a box with some remote cameras to guide their hands around and had to identify organs and foreign objects.
There was also some interesting application of visual technology / tangible interfaces – a genetics exercise using LEGO bricks and a camera which identified gene strands, and an energy planning exercise which used Reactivision-style markers to identify where power stations had been placed on a map (sort of similar to what we built in SLorpedo at Hackday a couple of years ago). We also had some logic puzzles to solve, built a, err… “typhoon-proof” (ahem) tower, simulated a computer processor, and commanded a colony of ants in a battle for survival against the other school teams.
Things I learned
Facebook (not Bebo) is now where it’s at.
If a tornado is coming, get out of the way or into a safe room.
Girls are much better than boys at listening to multiple streams of conversation (actually I think I worked this out a long time ago!).
A now, some notes just for my team…
Here are links to a few of the other things we talked about during the day:
Home Camp, the home automation and green energy event (next one is at the end of April).
And most importantly, here’s the evidence that we started off in first place 🙂 and I think you were an awesome team throughout. Well done, it was brilliant spending the day with you.
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We just presented our team’s hack for HackDay in London…
An awesome team effort inspired and led by Paul Johnston and Nigel Crawley. A mixed reality naval game from the Supernova team.
Here’s the science part.
The real world part(s) of the hack involved a DV cam feeding Nigel’s G4 iBook with a live feed of some pieces which represented two teams, “crabs” and “sharks” (cut from O’Reilly postcards). The camera rig – managed by Jon Hadley – was a highly technical setup involving gaffer tape and a borrowed tripod – thanks to Twitter! The iBook then used the TUIO protocol to update the coordinates of the game pieces to a web server.
The second RL part of the hack was my MacBook Pro rigged with Quicktime Broadcaster and Darwin Streaming Server, pointing at the game board. This provided a video feed that could be used within Second Life. This was technically challenging to set up due to issues connecting between the laptops on the BTOpenZone network… so someone donated us an Airport hub (again following a Twittered plea for help), and I shared my connection with Jim Purbrick who was then able to tunnel through to Second Life, as well as seeing my Quicktime stream. We experimented with a cheap USB webcam too, but the iSight just worked a lot better (positioning was “interesting” though!)
Meanwhile… in Second Life, the team of Jim Purbrick, Ben Hardill, Chris Mahoney and James Taylor built an amazing setup. We had a floating blimp (on Arcanum, the sim that Linden Lab had donated for the Hack Day event). The blimp contained a table which showed the live video feed of the game being played in real life. Below that, the sim was submerged. During the demo, Babbage Linden showed off the live feed, and then flew under the blimp. When he hit the floating buoy, a group of submarines were rezzed in that corresponded with the movement of the pieces in real life. Oh, and the subs were named after names found via the Yahoo! Answers API.
We didn’t quite have time to sort out the audio, but there were supposed to be some sonar noises as the subs were rezzed. Pretty easy to add, but we got moved around a couple of times prior to the demo, and had to disassemble our rig each time.
Oh, and as a complete aside – it is interesting to see the distribution of hardware and operating systems at the event. I’d say Macs dominate, Windows are probably second (I’ve only seen one running Vista but there may be more), and there are quite a few people running Linux too. Almost all of the demos and presentations seem to be run from Macs. W00t!
I had a spot on stage earlier in the afternoon as the “glamorous” helper for the MyBlogBunny hack, holding the Nabaztag – thanks Lance 🙂
[ edit 19/06 – links and photos added, minor edits ]
[ edit 21/06 – added some more links to interesting Flickr photos ]
I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.
What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.
Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.
We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.
Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.
Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.
I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.
A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:
Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service
I’m in San Francisco today for the launch of a new company – Pivotal.
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like PivotalHD.
In late 2011, I was contacted by a very charming, smart and persuasive French gentleman who spoke of clouds, platform-as-a-service, and polyglot programming. It took him and his team a couple of months to get me thinking seriously about a career change, after 10 great years at IBM. I’d spent that period with “Big Blue” coding in Java and C, and primarily focused on enterprise application servers, message queueing, and integration – and yet the lure of how easy vmc push[1] made it for me to deploy and scale an app was astounding! Should I make the transition to a crazy new world? Over Christmas that year, I decided it would be a good thing to get in on this hot new technology and join VMware as Developer Advocate on the Cloud Foundry team. I joined the team early in 2012.
The Cloud Foundry adventure has been amazing. The day after I joined the team, the project celebrated its first anniversary, and we announced the BOSH continuous deployment tool; I spent much of that first year with the team on a whirlwind of events and speaking engagements, growing the community. The Developer Relations team that Patrick Chanezon and Adam Fitzgerald put together was super talented, and it was brilliant to be part of that group. Peter, Chris, Josh, Monica, Raja, Rajdeep, Alvaro, Eric, Frank, Tamao, Danny, Chloe, D, Giorgio, friends in that extended team… it was an honour.
A year after I joined, VMware spun out Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and other technologies into a new company, Pivotal – headed up by Paul Maritz. I’ve been privileged to work under him, Rob Mee at Pivotal Labs, and most closely, my good friend James Watters on the Cloud Foundry team. I’ve seen the opening of our new London offices on Old Street, welcomed our partners and customers into that unique collaborative and pairing environment, and observed an explosion of activity and innovation in this space. We launched an amazing product. James Bayer heads up a remarkable group of technologists working full-time on Cloud Foundry, and it has been a pleasure to get to know him and his team. Most recently, I’ve loved every minute working with Cornelia, Ferdy, Matt, Sabha and Scott (aka the Platform Engineering team), another talented group of individuals from whom I’ve learned much.
Over the course of the last two years I’ve seen the Platform-as-a-Service space grow, establish itself, and develop – most recently resulting in my recent talk at bcs Oxfordshire:
Last week, we announced the forthcoming Cloud Foundry Foundation – and one could argue that as a community and Open Source kinda guy, this was the direction I’ve helped to move things in the past two years, although I can claim no credit at all for the Foundation announcement itself. I’ve certainly enjoyed hosting occasional London Cloud Foundry Community meetups and drinks events (note, next London PaaS User Group event has 2 CF talks!), and I’ve made some great friends locally and internationally through the ongoing growth of the project. I’m proud of the Platform event we put on last year, I think the upcoming Cloud Foundry Summit will be just as exciting, and I’m happy to have been a part of establishing and growing the CF community here in Europe.
Cloud Foundry is THE de facto Open Source PaaS standard, the ecosystem is strong and innovative, and that has been achieved in a transparent and collaborative way, respectful to the community, in a good-natured way in the face of competition. Rest assured that I’ll continue to watch the project and use PaaSes which implement it (I upgraded to a paid Pivotal Web Services account just this past week, I tried BlueMix, and I’m an ongoing fan of the Anynines team).
There are many missing shout-outs here… you folks know who you are, and should also know that I’ve deeply enjoyed learning from you and working with you. Thank you, Pivotal team! I do not intend to be a stranger to the Bay Area! In my opinion, Pivotal is positioned brilliantly in offering an end-to-end mobile, agile development, cloud platform and big data story for the enterprise. I look forward to continuing the conversations around that in the next couple of weeks.
[…]
What happens after “the next couple of weeks”? Well, this is as good time as any (!) to close that chapter, difficult though it is to leave behind a team I’ve loved working with, on a product and project that is undoubtedly going to continue to be fantastically successful this year and beyond. So, it is time to announce my next steps, which may or may not be clear from the title of this post… 🙂 Joining Twitter! I joined Twitter as a user on Feb 21 2007. On the same day, seven years later, I accepted a job offer to go and work with the Twitter team as a Developer Advocate, based in London.
If you’ve been a long-term follower of mine either here on this blog, or on Twitter, or elsewhere, you’ll know that Twitter is one of my favourite tools online. It has been transformational in my life and career, and it changed many of my interactions. True story: between leaving IBM and joining VMware I presented at Digital Bristol about social technologies, and I was asked, which one I would miss the most if it went away tomorrow; the answer was simple: Twitter. As an Open Source guy, too, I’ve always been impressed with Twitter’s contributions to the broader community.
I couldn’t be more #excited to get started with the Twitter Developer Relations team in April!
Follow me on Twitter – @andypiper – to learn more about my next adventure…
Pivotal is bringing together a number of key technology assets – our Open Source cloud platform (Cloud Foundry), agile development frameworks like Spring, Groovy and Grails, a messaging fabric (RabbitMQ), and big, fast data assets like Pivotal HD.
What we’re announcing today delivers on that promise and our vision – the consumer-grade enterprise, enabling organisations to create new applications with unprecedented speed. The cloud – infrastructure clouds, IaaS like Amazon EC2, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, CloudStack, etc – can be thought of as the new hardware. It’s like buying a beige server box back in the 90s – the IaaS layer gives you a bunch of CPU, network, and storage resources, and for your application to use them, you need a layer in between – an operating system, if you like. We’ve spoken of our ambition for Cloud Foundry as “the Linux of the Cloud”, and it already runs on all of those infrastructures I’ve listed above – in the future, hopefully more.
Why is that important? Why should developers care about this Platform (PaaS) layer? A development team shouldn’t have to go through an 18 month delivery cycle to deliver an app! We’re putting an end to the whole cycle of calling up the infrastructure team, having new servers commissioned, operating systems installed, databases configured etc etc just to get an application deployed and running. When you first push an application to Cloud Foundry, and can then bind data services and scale out with simple individual commands, it really is a liberating experience compared to what traditionally has been required to get your application running. We’re making it quicker and easier to get going – a friction-free, turnkey experience. You should just be able to write your code and make something amazing.
We’re also delivering choice – of runtimes and languages, data services, and also importantly, a choice of “virtual hardware”. When Comic Relief ran in the UK this year, in order to avoid any risk of hardware failure (we all know there’s a risk that Amazon might go down), the applications were deployed on Cloud Foundry running on both Amazon EC2 with geographical redundancy, and on VMware vSphere – no lock-in to any cloud provider, and the developers didn’t have to learn all of the differences of operating different infrastructures, they just pushed their code. We’re happy to know that it was a very successful year for the Comic Relief charity, and that Cloud Foundry helped.
Pivotal One also includes some amazing data technologies – Pivotal HD (a simple to manage Hadoop distribution) and Pivotal AX (analytics for the enterprise). We recognise that as well as building applications, you need to store and analyse the data, so rather than just shipping a Cloud Foundry product, we roll up both the elastic scalable runtime, cutting-edge technologies like Spring.io, and and our big data offerings. That’s different from many of the others in the same market. We’ve been running our own hosted cloud, now available at run.pivotal.io, on AWS for over a year now, so we’ve learned a lot about running systems at scale and Pivotal One can do just that.
Above all, I wanted to say just how excited I am to be part of this amazing team. It is an honour to work with some incredibly talented engineers and leaders. I’m also personally excited that our commercial and our open source ecosystems continue to grow, including large organisations like IBM, SAP, Piston … it’s a long list. We took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal to thank them. I also want to thank our community of individual contributors (the Colins, Matts, Davids, Dr Nics, Yudais… etc etc!) many of whom, coincidentally for me, are in the UK – check out the very cool Github community where some of their projects are shared.
I’m convinced that this Platform is the way forward. It’s going to be an even more exciting year ahead.
A small selection of other coverage, plenty more to read around the web:
Today, Pivotal announced the availability of Pivotal CF, an enterprise cloud platform based on Cloud Foundry, along with a number of Pivotal One services such as an Apache Hadoop and Analytics service
I’m very excited to announce that, from April 10th, I will be joining the Developer Relations team for Cloud Foundry at VMware.
This is a thrilling opportunity for me for a number of reasons.
from a technology perspective: Cloud Foundry is very, very, very cool. In my opinion, it really comes from a different set of thought processes than the other Platform-as-a-Service offerings out there, which make it unique and compelling.
the operating system stuff gets out of the way (why should it matter?), but multiple language runtimes and backend resources are available for easy scaling. Seriously, the first time I walked through the command-line tutorial and scaled a Ruby app to 6 load balanced instances with a single command, I was instantly impressed.
it is Open Source. The code is on Github. You can run your own cloud if you like. You can add support for your own languages and frameworks, much as AppFog have done for PHP, Tier 3 and Uhuru have done with .NET in Iron Foundry, and so on. This provides a huge amount of flexibility. Oh, and of course mobile and cloud go hand-in-hand, so last week’s announcement of FeedHenry providing tools to develop HTML5 apps to deploy on Cloud Foundry was really significant, too.
you can take your cloud with you using Micro Cloud Foundry – so the development and deployment model remains the same whether you are online or offline. I love this idea.
for me, personally: it’s a natural evolution of much of the work I’ve been doing over the past few years – focusing on developer communities and promoting technology adoption, as much as top-down solution selling. As my good friend James Governor is fond of saying and as his colleague Steve O’Gradywrote, developers are the new kingmakers – and with trends like mobile, cloud, and devops, nurturing those communities is more important than ever. You don’t impose technology on a community – you explain it and earn your place and reputation.
I’m looking forward to more speaking, more writing, more mentoring, and more online community building. These are things I’ve grown to enjoy (and in the case of the latter, appear to do naturally).
I’ve followed Patrick Chanezon, the Senior Director of the team, since he was setting up the developer advocacy programme back at Google – I have a lot of respect for what he’s achieved and the way he operates, so I’m delighted to have the chance to work closely with him. I’m excited to join everyone in the team, of course – I have spoken with most of the group already and I’m really looking forward to learning from their diverse range of experiences and backgrounds.
Between now and April 10th, I have a few things planned including a vacation (!), heading to EclipseCon to talk about MQTT and M2M topics, and some other speaking engagements. After I start the new role, I expect I’ll join in on the Cloud Foundry Open Tour and start to meet folks. I’ll also be on the team for the GOTO conference in Aarhus in October – exciting times ahead!
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In November last year, I abandoned my Twitter account – I set it to private, did not visit, did not interact, ignored any direct messages, etc. It was simply too painful to watch friends and coworkers suddenly and systematically being fired, the company culture destroyed, and the developer communities that I supported for 9 years, finally cut off without support or API access. It has been a heartbreaking time.
Today, I took the last step in going back through my password manager vault and deleting all of my X/Twitter accounts. I’ve watched the shambolic rebranding over the past week, and frankly, I wish it had all happened far sooner – rather than seeing my beloved bird being dragged down, and the brand and memory ruined, piece by piece.
There are a few accounts that I share access to with others (for podcasts, sites or communities) that remain, but over the past hour or so I deleted 15 accounts, four of which had associated Twitter Developer Accounts.
Why so many?
Of course, I had my main account, @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url], which was first created after hanging out with my friend Roo Reynolds in his office at IBM Hursley, and hearing about Twitter, just starting to gather buzz from events like SxSW. Created February 21, 2007. The title of the blog entry I wrote that day seems accidentally prophetic (although, in truth, I do not regret it at all).
my jobs at VMware / Cloud Foundry in 2012, and at Twitter from 2014, were both direct results of being on Twitter, sharing my knowledge, interacting with different communities, and doing my work on the platform.
I’ve made countless friends through being on Twitter, and I’m grateful for that. It truly changed my life to be there.
Back at the start, those heady times of 2007-2009, it was not unusual to have a few accounts for fun, so certainly there were a few of those that just went away.
There were the super-sekrit accounts I had for testing features, such as the original internal test for ten thousand character Tweets (yes, this nearly happened, a long time back), the customisable Tweet Tiles we would have launched at the developer conference that was cancelled at the end of last year, and so on.
Finally, it’s time to say goodbye to my main @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url] account. Twitter is not Twitter any more, it is X – and I never signed up for X. In the near future, I’ll upload a searchable archive of my Twitter content, likely using Darius’ Twitter Archive tool. For now, it’s all done. I’m very happy elsewhere (personal sites and links here and here), and I will not be sad that X is out of my life.
… apart from the laptops that they still have not collected!
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In the past, I’ve posted a blog entry here whenever I’ve been a guest on the Dogear Nation podcast.
Well, not any more. That’s because this year, I’m one of the regular co-hosts of the podcast, and we’d only end up with a weekly entry over here as well as on the Dogear Nation blog and the show itself in iTunes.
Dogear Nation is a listener-driven podcast, so we’d love to have you on board with us. Throughout the week, listeners mark their latest discoveries and news stories on the web with the tag “dogear-nation” on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. We record the show each Friday, picking out your best news stories from around the web. The content is varied – we have a “technology and innovation” slant, but cover all kinds of topics. Our regular segments are “the obligatory 3D Internet section” and “Mac-a-rooni” but we also talk about coffee, gaming, the environment, social software, books, gadgets, iPhones and mobile devices, hardware hacking, and just whatever is hot in the week the show is recorded. Ultimately though, it’s about what our listeners tag for us to talk about, so the content changes dynamically from week to week. If you do tag something which we choose for the show, we’ll be sure to give you a shout-out.
Each episode is usually about 30-45 minutes (perfect for a commute!) and we have a lot of fun recording it 🙂 If you haven’t tried us before, it would be great if you dipped in to check it out, and let us know what you think.
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Last week, there was a flurry of interest in a new addition to the #Fediverse: Postmarks. It’s social bookmarking (like Digg, del.icio.us, or more recently, Pinboard), now with ActivityPub support. Neat!
Organising stuff, “back in the day”
Back in the 2000s I was a huge fan of a site called del.icio.us, and the original iteration of our weekly podcast – currently called Games at Work dot Biz – was named Dogear Nation. Back when Michael and Michael kicked off that show, there was a podcast called Digg Nation which tried to round up the interesting community links and trends from the week on Digg. IBM at the time had an internal version of a social bookmarking / folksonomical platform similar to del.icio.us called “dogear” (like, folding the page of a book to mark it), so Dogear Nation encouraged listeners to tag links on del.icio.us for us to discuss each week… del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo! in 2005, and eventually, went away.
Fast forward 15 years to our current podcast, and we still love it when listeners share links for us to discuss, but there’s less of an organised way to do it!
Join the Federation
A brief diversion, because I’ve not written too much about this on my blog up until now.
Unlike the centralised “Web 2.0”-based, largely corporate-owned sites that dominate the current web, the Fediverse is a set of related services that share some common protocols (ActivityPub is one, but there are others involved) and are loosely-connected. As well as each service usually having some form of “flagship” instance, it is is also very common to encourage diversity by location and interests, and often self-hosting, so it won’t be possible for an unsavoury billionaire to buy the things you use, or misuse and steal the data that you’ve put into them. Your network and your data are your own.
I’m very active across a range of sites and services that are analogous to those you might be familiar with. On Mastodon, for instance, I currently do some work with Mastodon gGmbH, the non-profit behind the project and host of two of the larger service instances; and although my original account was on one of those instances, at the end of last year I moved my account (taking the related network of connections with me) to a much smaller server run by a former coworker, mostly populated by other former coworkers, but I’m still connected with users across the rest of the Fediverse.
You can also find me on PixelFed (Instagram-like photo sharing), on Lemmy (Reddit-like groups and communities), on PeerTube (YouTube-like video channels) where I live on the diode.zone instance for makers and electronics enthusiasts, on Bookwyrm (GoodReads-like community), and so on. Basically there are a number of slices of “me” out there, in spaces where it makes sense. Essentially, if you’re on Mastodon and you’re interested in my videos, you can follow my PeerTube account from Mastodon without having to sign up for PeerTube. It’s pretty cool.
I strongly believe that federated services are the best opportunity for us to maintain a free and open Web.
– me, 2023
So, Postmarks?
Yes! Postmarks is a single-user, super small and simple server for managing your own bookmarks. When I add a bookmark on my own Postmarks server, my Postmarks account effectively publishes the new entry to the rest of the Fediverse as an activity. So, if you’re interested in what I’m bookmarking and you have a Mastodon account, you can follow @[url=https://andypiper.co.uk/author/andypiper/]andypiper[/url]@pipesmarks.glitch.me and you’ll see the new entries as they get added. If you’re not interested, don’t follow my account, and we’re all good. Oh, and it supports Atom feeds for different tags (categories), too.
Postmarks runs on Glitch – or, anywhere else you can stand up a Node.js / Express app. Personally I love Glitch, and I’ve been using it for many years now for hosting demos and trying out different projects – in fact, my main links page runs on Glitch. The Postmarks developer Casey Kolderup works there, and Casey has made it really straightforward to remix directly on Glitch, or import from GitHub there or to another service of your choice – it has very few dependencies.
Getting involved
My usual pattern for reading and saving content is whilst mobile. There’s a bookmarklet that’s part of the project, but no easy way to add it to my system for links to end up on Postmarks from my phone or tablet. I turned to Apple Shortcuts to help out. A screenshot of Apple Shortcuts on iPadOS 17 beta, showing the sequence of steps to send a link to Postmarks This does not do too much – it takes a link from the share sheet or clipboard, and opens the add bookmark page popup in a browser tab. At the moment there’s no full API for Postmarks, so this is a bit of a stopgap or workaround. Annoyingly, it will also leave you with an empty browser tab you’ll need to close, but it works.
If you’d like to try the automation, you can get it via RoutineHub, which links to the Shortcut in iCloud. You’ll be prompted to add the hostname of your Postmarks instance, and you will already need to have signed in to that site in your web browser of choice.
Beyond that, Glitch makes it easy to hack on features, because everything runs in the browser, including a code editor. So far I’ve been adding small features such as support for the nodeinfo endpoint used by other Fediverse servers, and a slightly improved Atom feed. There’s lots I can think of to add, but not so much time to play – this is giving me a chance to learn a bit more about ActivityPub internals, as well as “scratching an itch”.
I’m also playing with another single-user ActivityPub server, Shuttlecraft, but that’s a post for another day.
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In the past, I’ve posted a blog entry here whenever I’ve been a guest on the Dogear Nation podcast.
Well, not any more. That’s because this year, I’m one of the regular co-hosts of the podcast, and we’d only end up with a weekly entry over here as well as on the Dogear Nation blog and the show itself in iTunes.
Dogear Nation is a listener-driven podcast, so we’d love to have you on board with us. Throughout the week, listeners mark their latest discoveries and news stories on the web with the tag “dogear-nation” on social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. We record the show each Friday, picking out your best news stories from around the web. The content is varied – we have a “technology and innovation” slant, but cover all kinds of topics. Our regular segments are “the obligatory 3D Internet section” and “Mac-a-rooni” but we also talk about coffee, gaming, the environment, social software, books, gadgets, iPhones and mobile devices, hardware hacking, and just whatever is hot in the week the show is recorded. Ultimately though, it’s about what our listeners tag for us to talk about, so the content changes dynamically from week to week. If you do tag something which we choose for the show, we’ll be sure to give you a shout-out.
Each episode is usually about 30-45 minutes (perfect for a commute!) and we have a lot of fun recording it 🙂 If you haven’t tried us before, it would be great if you dipped in to check it out, and let us know what you think.
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This year, we’ve been working on improving the profile of our small maker studio – in particular, through getting out to different kinds of events.
For those not aware, for about 18 months now we’ve been building an art / maker space and studio, which is known as Forge & Craft – based in the Wimbledon Art Studios community, in south west London. The concept is that we are interested in making physical art with technology, and in particular our primary work is using pen plotters. I wrote some more about it last year.
We’ve now taken part in three Wimbledon Art Fairs at the studios (and we’ve signed up to take part in the next show, in November). These are four day open studios weekends, where you can visit us as well as exploring over a hundred (!) other artist spaces.
Since the last show in April, we also had a stall in the Night Market at Electromagnetic Field (where I also gave a talk about the history of computer art with plotters – I’ll be sharing more about the talk when the videos become available; and, we showed our machines and craft in our popup village). Two weeks ago we travelled up to Liverpool for this year’s Liverpool Makefest – we went as visitors last year, but this time, we got involved as exhibitors. It was a lot of fun! Our stand at Liverpool Makefest 2024My brachiograph and other drawing machines on display Coming up next, we’ll be at the Twickenham High Tide Festival (specifically, we will be located at Twickenham Green), on Sunday 28th July; and then, as mentioned above, we’ll also open the studio again in November for the next Wimbledon Art Fair.
Finally, as well as the talks and shows, I was really honoured to be commissioned to create some prize pieces for CommCon this year. It was a lot of fun to work with my restored, vintage 1980s Roland DXY-1100 flatbed plotter, and to collaborate with Dan to create some images of London and San Francisco for the event. CommCon 2024 LondonCommCon 2024 San Francisco We’re working on a refresh of our simple web landing page at the moment, but in the meantime, you’re free to also take a look at the shop and see the kinds of art we’re working on. We have a Pixelfed profile with images of our work, as well. If you are interested in discussing commissions or any other opportunities you have in mind, please get in touch.
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A day at a very fun maker event, Liverpool Makefest 2023, meeting back up with long-time friends and watching young people learn about both making, and more sustainable practices.
Finding communities to join can be hard because each fediverse server only knows about a community after someone has joined it before. It's a chicken and egg problem. To solve this, PieFed comes with eggs included!
Techy details: a local copy of data.lemmyverse.net/data/commu… is regularly updated, inactive and nsfw communities removed and then the resulting shortlist is used to suggest search results to people when adding a remote community.
Check out the video for a quick demo.
Massive props to @JollyDevelopment@piefed.social for their work on this feature!
A screenshot of Apple Shortcuts on iPadOS 17 beta, showing the sequence of steps to send a link to Postmarks
The buzz
The other half of the device is a somewhat larger and heavier transmitter (shown at the top of the picture, the top of the two black boxes inside our cupboard) which sits next to the electricity meter, with a clip that gently attaches around the cable (you can see that hanging off the cable at the bottom of the picture). The product is completely non-invasive and it’s incredibly easy for anyone to install: there’s no rewiring, just a clip. I was extremely impressed. It “just worked”.
