Meetups make me think

My biggest fans will note this is a different old photo to the one I've been photoshopping into images lately. This photo is from my meetup profile. As I'm talking about meetups, it seemed appropriate.

I used to do a lot of meetups pre-pandemic...but I didn't really adjust to them being remote during lockdown (I've always felt that getting out of the house is part of the point!), so kinda got out of the habit.

I've made it to a couple of geek nights in the last year or so, but that's been about it.

But, I knew a couple of people that were going to .NET Oxford, so I figured "why not?".

Needless to say, it was really interesting! And it triggered in me a kind of muscle memory. Whenever I went to meetups in the olden days, I'd blog about it and share it with my team at work. So I figured I should write a blog post to "share my learnings".

That said, there's no point in me regurgitating content a little worse than the original presenters did it. And if you really want to learn the stuff, you should try and make it to the event in the first place. :)

Anyway, as I scribbled stuff down in my notebook, I was struck by how much stuff I was compelled to scribble down. More interestingly, I was struck by how much was not, really, anything to do with what was being said.

So I thought it might be interesting to share the stuff I thought about during the meetup...whilst largely, I promise, paying attention to the speakers.

Here goes:

In the introduction / news, it was mentioned that there's an official .NET library out for OpenAI. That could be interesting to look in to. Or worth flagging with the engineers, maybe.
In a market update from the event's wonderful sponsor, Corriculo, it was mentioned that 12% of companies have either made, or are planning to make redundancies this year. And that 30% of companies made redundancies last year. I wondered how many of those 30% would have said they planned to make redundancies at this point last year. And I felt a little sad that the layoffs continue to affect so many families.
I also noted that there was really high engagement in this talk - with more people asking questions than there was time to answer. Goes to show how concerned people are about the state of the industry at the moment.
I also wondered whether the statistics really paint the right picture of the market. There was one statistic showing the high number of people taking more than 3 months to find a new role (I think it was 60 something %...someone correct me!)...but other than that, the numbers seemed quite detached from the brutal reality a lot of folks are experiencing in the market right now.
Dan Clarke, the overlord of .NET Oxford, gave a really interesting talk about automating things with .NET and Tasker. This was right up my street, so I wrote down a lot of things to look into: TickTick, Tasker, Morning Brew.
More specifically, and excitingly, I wrote down "CAN THIS FIX THE FISH TANK??" - I've had a long-standing problem with the light on my fish tank. The light is designed to emulate different times of the day - day, morning, dusk, night. Or something like that. That's how I think about them anyway.

In an ideal world, I'd schedule the light to be as close to real-life as possible. Something like night --> dusk --> morning --> day --> morning --> dusk --> night.

The issue comes in that you change mode by turning off the light and turning it back on again within 5 seconds.

The more specific issue is that Alexa routines are unable to send commands to the smart plug that quickly...So I've always thought "somehow I must be able to do off...wait 2 seconds...on...wait 2 seconds..."

As it stands, the poor fish have a binary existence, harshly transitioning from night to day and back again!

So I will be exploring whether any of the bits and bobs in Dan's talk can help fix this.

I never lie to you, dear reader. If I say I wrote it down, I wrote it down. See.
I also wrote a note about Dan's use of ChatGPT to improve WhatsApp messages before they're read aloud to him - by filtering out links, emojis etc. I thought it was a really good use case.

I've been very cynical of the whole ChatGPT/LLM space since it's inception. I don't believe it's the threat to jobs people believe it is...and, more fundamentally, it still does quite stupid things a lot of the time. (see związook) So for the most part I've been stubbornly ignoring the whole thing.

I am, however, starting to stumble over more instances where it seems actually quite helpful. Usually small, targeted interventions, like Dan's. Or, for another example, otta.com have a neat little feature to rewrite your experience for you...and it actually suggested some pretty good changes. (which I keep meaning to implement).

I still believe that in a lot of instances these technologies are being used to solve problems that don't exist, or to satisfy shareholders' demands... but my interest is certainly being piqued to the point where I feel I should explore more ways of using it sensibly.
In talking about improving software designs, James World mentioned "ADO" in passing...and I immediately pieced together "Azure DevOps". As someone working in "ADO" for the first time, I've been endlessly annoyed by people referring to "DevOps" and my being confused wondering if they're referring to the practice or the software of that name. A LinkedIn post on the subject is imminent. Anyway, I feel like this solves the problem - I'll encourage people to adopt "ADO" to disambiguate.
I also wrote down "mermaid.js" and "7-11 concepts per diagram" - things I'll look into. Good that I actually took something away from the rest of the talk, not just an abbreviation for Azure DevOps!
Matt Lacey presented on how he accidentally created a new language, and I scribbled down the paraphrased "If you don't like a language, make a language you do like that writes that language". I found that concept quite inspiring. I don't really know what I'll do with that inspiration yet, but we'll see.
Speaking of things I don't really know what to do with...I wrote down "A virus doesn't know it's causing a cough". This isn't related to malware. Someone in the audience sneezed, loudly. And I thought "that virus is well evolved...it has managed to make that human sneeze really loudly. Its germs will travel far. It will be proud!"

Then I thought that the virus probably wouldn't be proud - even if it were capable of such emotion. The virus doesn't exist to make people sneeze. The sneeze is just a genetic advantage that helps the virus prosper. Yes, I appreciate that I'm just describing how evolution works...but something mentally clicked there...the difference between what's important for a species and what's important for the individual. It feels like there's a metaphor there I'll exploit at some point.
I sketched out a plan for another blog article, based on an introduction I had to someone else at the event. More on that later.
I doodled a picture of me, and a talk going way over my head. That talk went way over my head.
I imagine during this talk, I also wrote down "ambient noise". I guess I tuned out, and listened to the sound coming in the window. The sound of people walking and chattering amongst themselves on a warm Oxford evening. I imagined a coffee shop where they pumped this sound in to create atmosphere. I guess being a country bumpkin I'm always excited by sounds of the city.
And I wrote down the name of a company that's hiring. I always like to keep tabs on who's hiring and firing, in case I need to know personally, or can connect people in my network.

And that's it.

As you can see, it's a mixed bag. I've left having learnt a few things. I've got a few things to research more. I've got a couple of things that are immediately applicable and actionable. And I've obviously got a little meditation to do.

Ultimately, I feel like I remembered why I used to love meetups so much. Not just for the free beer, or the networking, but for the chance to shove a bunch of random stuff into my head and shake it about a bit. I'm convinced that one of these days putting the right ideas into my head and shaking it about will make me A MILLIONAIRE.

But I'll start by looking at the light on my fish tank.