John’s newsletter 1/52
John’s newsletter 1/52
I’ve decided to try and send a newsletter every week for 52 weeks. I deliberately missed the first week of 2023 because I don’t believe in New Year's resolutions.
Before we dive in, I will mention that I’m in the middle of an active job hunt. I’m looking for a remote software engineering role where I can do interesting and meaningful work with great people. I’m really good at writing TypeScript, Node.js, and React. I’ve also got experience writing Haskell, Ruby, Go, and Rust - and I’m happy to learn pretty much anything for the right role. If you want to work with me, or know of somewhere that might be a good fit - please get in touch.
What’s new?
I spent some time around the new year working on my website. It now supports comments and the sending and receiving of webmentions! Both were fun little projects, and I’ll probably write up the implementation of each soon.
So far, I’ve received quite a lot of comments - which is really exciting. It’s nice to see people engaging with my website. I’d like to make it even better, my letting people subscribe to email updates about replies to their comments, maybe adding a link to the commenter’s website, etc. If you’ve any ideas - please let me know!
Unfortunately, I have not received any webmentions yet. So much for decentralisation. You, dear reader, could be the first.
Finally, I created my own private Twitter. This was in part to support sending webmentions, but also just for fun.
Writing
I wrote on the website about using Vim and some of my favorite songs of 2023.
My writing got turned into “Content”
My article about Vim was read out live on stream by popular tech streamer “The Primeagen”. I think their comments on the article were thoughtful and reasonable, and it was nice to be forced to confront my fear of hearing someone read something I wrote.
However, I’ve realised that I feel quite weird about having been turned into “Content” on a big platform. In fact I feel sort of unhappy about it.
I like the indie web, decentralised things. I’d love for everyone to stop using YouTube, Twitch, whatever. This is why I primarily write on my personal website, rather than on Medium or Substack.
In this instance, someone has taken my work, read it aloud to fill time on the stream that they run, and presumably made some advertising revenue off of it. Essentially they have taken my work, and packaged it into a format which can generate profits - and then allowed YouTube and Twitch to reap the majority of that profit.
I’m not opposed to people making derivatives of my work, and I don’t write with the expectation of making any money from it. I do feel resentful knowing that some of the world's largest corporations are profiting from my work, without my permission, no matter how small that profit may be.
At the time of writing, the video has 46,046 views, and presumably, more people saw it on Twitch/live. On Plausible, I can see a total of 200 click-throughs to the post from YouTube. I believe that two people have signed up for this newsletter after watching the video. The exposure has not been that great.
Big platforms want to turn everything into “Content”, and then use it to sell advertising. Even if you try and work outside of it, someone will try and monetise your work by “reacting” to it. A better world is possible.
Elsewhere on the web
Poached Pears Recipe I made some Poached Pears. I’ve always loved eating poached pears in restaurants but somehow never thought to try and make them at home. Anyway, it turns out that they are really easy to make, and still really delicious when I make them. You can chop them up and put them in a salad with blue cheese, or serve them as a dessert. Highly recommended.
I discovered Kinopio (referral link) - and I really like it. If you want to do mindmaps, or diagrams, or plan projects, I think it’s a great tool. Along with Are.na, it's become one of my favorite websites. And it’s made by one person, which is very cool.
Diagram Website is really cool. Essentially, it's a list of links, grouped under various headers. Except that it’s not just a list, instead, it's arranged in what is I think a Semi-Lattice - not a tree. Because as we know, the internet is not a tree. It is a nice map to all the cool bits of the internet, and is something that I will be referring back to in future.
Till next time, Lots of Love from John