About Open Alternatives

01/02/23 • 64 min

The continued cratering of Twitter, and the joy of discovering open alternatives. Lars and many others find themselves on the open and federated Mastodon instead of Twitter, having a great time, and feeling more excited about open systems than in a long time.

On the level of individuals, owning and controlling your own data feels back in fashion, but there is even more to dig into on the level of large organizations.

Perhaps when GDPR says no and the good spirit of the internet is strong, there is a chance for municipalities and other public sector organizations to get and help build open alternatives to the closed, proprietary, and often hair-raisingly expensive and poorly received software they have today?

Lars sees exciting business opportunities, better software for all, as well as the interesting challenges of navigating tender processes and plain old corruption.

Links

Mastodon
genserver.social
fosstodon.org
Ruby on rails
PostgreSQL
Object storage
Redis
Pleroma
Akkoma
glitch-soc - "Mastodon Glitch Edition" - where Mastodon UI discovers new features
Glesys' object storage
PeerTube
Pixelfed
Activitypub
SpaceX rockets exploding compilation video
WebTorrent
Element and Matrix
eSam
Mattermost
SPF - Sender policy framework - email authentication method
Skolplattformen
Offentlighetsprincipen

Quotes

Elon happened
A very straight path to somewhere else
As open as email
Satiate my doomscrolling needs
A Twitter on IRC
I don't trust the ecosystem under my feet
Lectured about a culture I'm not in
Teams was dubbed illegal
videos.varberg.se
The good spirit of the internet
GDPR says no!
People software
You have people living in you
I want "Svenska IT-myndigheten"
Pointless, annoying, and wasteful

On the level of individuals, owning and controlling your own data feels back in fashion, but there is even more to dig into on the level of large organizations.

Lars sees exciting business opportunities, better software for all, as well as the interesting challenges of navigating tender processes and plain old corruption.

Links

Mastodon
genserver.social
fosstodon.org
Ruby on rails
PostgreSQL
Object storage
Redis
Pleroma
Akkoma
glitch-soc - "Mastodon Glitch Edition" - where Mastodon UI discovers new features
Glesys' object storage
PeerTube
Pixelfed
Activitypub
SpaceX rockets exploding compilation video
WebTorrent
Element and Matrix
eSam
Mattermost
SPF - Sender policy framework - email authentication method
Skolplattformen
Offentlighetsprincipen

Quotes

Elon happened
A very straight path to somewhere else
As open as email
Satiate my doomscrolling needs
A Twitter on IRC
I don't trust the ecosystem under my feet
Lectured about a culture I'm not in
Teams was dubbed illegal
videos.varberg.se
The good spirit of the internet
GDPR says no!
People software
You have people living in you
I want "Svenska IT-myndigheten"
Pointless, annoying, and wasteful

Previous Episode

About Teaching Functional Programming

How to teach functional programming? What are the proper steps, beyond the first ones? Especially when you can't or don't want to point to a framework and say "we do it this way!"

Lars outlines his ideas for teaching Elixir to someone without requiring any prior programming experience.

There is also discussion of mapping, reducing, and representing one in terms of the other. Also things which are better in Haskell than Elixir, perfectly named modules, and - inevitably - why you don't just use Rust instead.

Links

Chalmers
CakeML
Elixir in action - Saša's Elixir book
Monad
Map
Reduce
Filter
MapReduce
Elixir's enum module
Multiple function heads in an anonymous function
Immutability
Guards in Elixir and Haskell
Witchcraft - the module
Nerves
Frank Hunleth
REPL

Quotes

It felt like I cheated, I don't know if I did
In my bone marrow!
Putting the module before the functions
Try to explain a monad (there is no second step)
Pretend that the rest of computing doesn't exist
Ignore the rest of the world
Save brain cycles
Solid, sound, and true
It's going to have to be a reduce
I never really updated my map

Next Episode

About Meeting Developers

Passing pandemics make it possible to meet developers in real life again. Elixir-Lars makes a splash, and tells about recent and coming real-life events he's enjoyed. Things learned from real-life events and the need - or not - of constant learning are mentioned.

(It's not bit rot, it's data composting!)

Finally, a deep dive into the art of arranging good events, including preparatory pre-event events.

Who wouldn't like a movie night with a bunch of developers and pizza?

Linkable matter