Tag: travel

Liverpool Makefest 2023

Andy Piper3 Comments

Last weekend, we visited Liverpool for a few days. I had an ulterior motive for the trip – my friend Caroline Keep and team were running the Makefest 🛠️️ at the Central Library.

[aside: does anyone know whether there’s a good way to stay up-to-date and aware of where and when maker-centric (and adjacent!) events are happening around the UK? I’d love to get to more of them, if I’m able – in this case, I was following various related folks over on Mastodon, spotted that it was happening, and emailed Caroline to check how things were going]

It had been a few years since we were last in Liverpool, and of course it is a city that is always evolving. We caught the train from Euston to Lime Street on the Friday (I got a few bits of Mastodon-related work done on the way), and made our way to the waterfront where we were staying. It seemed as though every hen party, birthday celebration, and wedding was happening in Liverpool at the start of July, plus, there was the big On The Waterfront festival happening just a short throw from our hotel, so the city was really buzzing, even though the weather was sometimes a bit grim!

On Saturday we made our way to the library, and immediately bumped into my good friends Dan Lynch and Les Pounder (both of OggCamp fame, and with ongoing, separate, high reputes!), as well as finally getting the chance to meet Simon Walters in person, after many years of online connection. I’ve been a long-time supporter and volunteer of events like this one, but on this occasion I did skip the opportunity to get directly involved, as I wanted to be able to explore the show – so, here’s what I saw:

The Makers

The fantastic Neston High School in the Wirral have their own Makerspace, and they were busy recycling plastic into objects that they were selling just outside the library. I’d just been reading about makeshift plastic recycling methods in the latest edition of HackSpace magazine on the train journey up, and the ones on display here seemed pretty sophisticated (it turns out that they have a version of the Precious Plastics recycling system that the teachers operate, to press the plastic sheets). As someone who uses 3D printers, I’m extremely aware of the sustainability questions around the use of the materials, and this was very good to watch in action – it is wonderful that the students have access to their own makerspace at the school, and can learn to use these techniques. A step up from the CDT lessons of my youth!

Inside the venue, Caroline was kind enough to make us honorary Makers for the day, which meant that I got a brilliant badge… maybe next time I can do more than just look around, and exhibit something instead. Remarkable though it may seem, this is the first point in my life that I feel like it might be something I could do.

The Central Library is an amazing space. A friend referred to it as “the most magnificent public reference library in Europe” and it is hard to disagree – a series of galleries spiralling upwards to a glass roof, with some very special reading rooms. A brilliant spot to hold a maker event, and to inspire youngsters.

[WordPress(.com) is unable to embed an image from Pixelfed, so go look HERE]

I’ll skip a booth-by-booth account of of the visit (we were there for most of the day!), but here just a few of things that I was excited about:

  • the lower level of the library had some fun displays, including Spencer’s RC2014 kits (I really need to build my Pride kit!), Derek from Extreme Electronics with his Pico Cray (also just featured in HackSpace magazine issue 68!) and other gear, and a gentleman “Toy Hacker” who converts and upcycles old toys using electronics – his wife “Creative Stitch” had some absolutely wonderful mixed media pieces on display as well.

  • ConcreteDog aka Jo Hinchliffe (another one of my primarily-online contacts from the hacking sphere) was launching hot air balloons through the atrium space…
    [annoyingly, WordPress will not let me embed the video, so you can watch it HERE]
  • I was very excited to see Tanya Fish, who was busy showing off her NFC-related magic. Tanya is such a great ambassador for technology and a wonderful communicator, I’m a fan! (and I may have picked up a couple of her kits, which you should do as well, so that she can do more events like this!)
  • In the run-up to the event I’d been looking through the list of makers and saw Electric Flapjack Guitars… I looked up his site and saw the amazing stuff he is doing with 3D printing and traditional methods to create some very cool custom guitar builds. The Älgen did not disappoint: it is a thing of beauty…
  • There was a strong emphasis on sustainability and recycling, with the Plastic Tactics group also showing their recycled items. Overall, this has inspired us to think a lot more about how we can do more to improve our material usage and footprint.
  • Finally (just for this round-up, since there was so much more to see and investigate!) SolidMaps had an interesting 3D rendering of the centre of Liverpool, which was very cool. The challenge with this kind of topological modelling is the data for the buildings etc. This was printed using an SLA (resin) technique, which is something that I’ve not yet explored for myself.

Lots more was on offer to explore, and I tried to talk to most of the makers if they were not too busy, although I preferred to give priority to the youngsters who had come along with friends or parents so that they could have their imaginations sparked by all of the cool stuff on offer.

After the show

In the evening, we were fortunate enough to also be able to head along to DoES Liverpool to hang out with some of the makers. Adrian McEwen, yet another old friend and contact from the IoT and MQTT circuit, was one of the founders of this makerspace and co-working club and was gracious enough to give us a full tour – so many useful and exciting gadgets and tools, many of which I was aware existed, but don’t currently have ready access to. Thank you again, Adrian! (we may well be back…!)

A few more images [because WordPress(.com) will not let me embed a Mastodon post… 😠️]

I’ll end with an image taken at the makerspace, as it was a suitably inspiring way to conclude the Saturday.

Thank you, Liverpool Makefest team, volunteers, makers, and library staff! 🫶🏻

What I’ve been doing in 2022 (so far)

Andy Piper2 Comments

Preamble: my content

It has been a while since I’ve written a general “what I’m working on” post, so I’m fixing that now. It has been a busy year — I last published a newsletter in March 2021, and I didn’t get back to writing — primarily technical writing– until the start of 2022.

I’ve also diversified my writing between my own site, occasionally Medium, developer-focused posts on DEV, and elsewhere. Truth be told, I’m not completely sure how to manage the spread, whilst also maintaining a consistent way to share with an audience — apart from the fact that I Tweet a lot, of course! In an effort to bring things together, at least from an audience perspective, I plan to cross-post this extended update on a number of those channels, and think about how to continue from there.

The Games at Work podcast icon

One thing I’ve tried to keep at regularly is our podcast, Games at Work dot biz. If you’ve not come across that yet, the show is available via all of the major podcast services, and directly on our website. Each week, my two good friends Michael Martine and Michael Rowe, join me to talk about various tech topics: mostly relating to virtual worlds and gaming (now usually called “the Metaverse”), social web, collaboration, and other fun snippets. We’ve actually been running for over 10 years now, and before that, had another podcast that itself ran for 200 episodes — it has been a lot of fun. The episode we just recorded, as I type this, talked about retail brands exploring the Metaverse, which brought back strong vibes of my days exploring and working in Second Life at IBM in the mid 2000s! 

 — We’d love to hear what you think of the show; if you like it, please leave a podcast review, and tell a friend.

A personal (and health) update

Last year I took ~5 weeks out, completely disconnected from the online world, for mental health and personal reasons. It was much-needed, and I think it has enabled me to get much better perspective in various parts of my life.

Since the start of 2022 in particular I’ve been thinking of what I’m doing online, in Open Source, and across different communities, as a bit of a reset or “back to my roots”. I’ll come back to mention side projects and interests later in this post, but I felt really energised at the start of the year, and consistently blogged something technical at least once a week though January and February, over on DEV. DEV is a community that I’ve been spending a lot of time in during the past couple of years, and I’m happy to be connected there as a moderator and community helper. I want to get back to writing more frequently.

More recently, in the past month I finally had a procedure to “fix” the heart anomaly that I shared on my blog back in 2013. The pandemic thoroughly messed up the waiting times for this, of course. I’m in complete awe of the medical science that enabled the operation — a keyhole procedure on a day surgery basis, with minimal lasting visible signs of entry, despite the complicated internal navigation involved. I appear to be doing pretty well, although the SVT itself was always a random occurrence, so it’s difficult to know whether the outcome is 100% confirmed, but having read the notes from the operation, I know they performed “regression tests” to check that they did what they intended. Absolutely thankful for our NHS, and for scientific advancement.

Another item on the personal side of this update, is that we had a chance to do a couple of trips away. The first of these was a ~10 day trip down to Italy, where we travelled by train on Eurostar to Paris, and on Trenitalia via a stop in Milan, down to Puglia. On return, we had tickets for Electromagnetic Field (#EMFCamp), a camping festival celebrating all things geek and tech around maker culture, open standards, electronica, and community. It was my first time at EMF, but I’m hoping to be able to go again when it returns in two years’ time.

Tents in a field at dusk. A lightbulb glows on a cable above them, against the orange sky.
Tents at dusk at Electromagnetic Field

Speaking gigs, current and future

As the world has started to open back up (for reasons good or bad), I’ve been excited to get back to one of my favourite activities — public speaking. I gave a number of talks over Zoom towards the end of last year, both professionally to our Twitter Developer Communities in different places around the world, and personally where requested to provide my experiences in fields like advocacy and community.

https://twitter.com/andypiper/status/1497258071709696003

During March, I hosted eight Spaces on Twitter as open community feedback conversations about some new ideas we’re working on for the developer platform — new ways to add content to Tweets, similar to the current “cards” that appear when links are shared but more customisable; and, the ability to have more control over timelines. This is part of an effort to continue to build in the open, and I’m excited to be able to run sessions like this.

In May we held our first in-person @TwitterDev community meetup in 2 years, at the Twitter office in London — that was a huge buzz — it is always a privilege to talk to our developer community. More of these to come! As I mentioned above, next week I’ll be in Dublin (on my own time), giving a talk about MicroPython at the EuroPython conference (I also acted as a content reviewer for the event, and I’m looking forward to it — lots of good stuff on the schedule).

I’m also excited to have been invited to join Isaac Levin as a guest on his excellent Coffee & Open Source show; watch out for that coming up, in the next couple of months. There’s another unconfirmed podcast opportunity on the horizon as well.

I’m open to other podcast guest invitations, and speaking invitations, time and work permitting.

The day job

I touched on a few of the things that I’ve been working on at Twitter in the previous sections, and I expect to be particularly focused on preparing for Chirp, our developer conference, in the months between now and the event itself, in November.

It’s an exciting time for the Twitter Developer Platform, and I’ve written a number of pieces to help folks to learn more about Twitter API v2, in other locations. There have been a raft of updates and announcements since the end of the year, from OAuth 2.0, to Chirp and the Chirp Developer Challenge, completely new concepts we are exploring, expansion of our Twitter Developer Insiders program, and the announcement of the Student Ambassador program. In case you missed it, the Twitter API Playground has been a particularly popular addition to the range of tools, demos and samples to help to get started with the latest API version.

Side-projects; aka what I’ve really been doing…

My “outside work” interests recently have covered a whole range of different areas of tinkering, and it has occasionally been difficult to keep up with my own thoughts and excitement. There’s a lot of time-slicing involved…

I started to put a bit more time into my Fediverse presence, particularly around #EMFCamp — you’ll find me @andypiper@mastodon.social if that’s your preference. It’s not completely identical to my Twitter feed, but there is some bridging involved. There’s definitely a new swirl of possibility around federated networks.

MicroPython has led me along a number of different paths — since it runs on a whole variety of different hardware.

https://twitter.com/GeekMomProjects/status/1483695065629224960

In January a tiny ESP32-C3-powered board covered in RGB LEDs caught the attention of the maker community, and I subsequently wrote a small blog series and created a project around it (fivebyfive on GitHub). It also highlighted a few learning opportunities around MicroPython on the ESP32-C3, which have been addressed in the current release. The worldwide chip shortage has meant the RP2040 chips from the Raspberry Pi folks have been more available than some alternatives, so I’ve been playing with a lot of boards based on those, but until about a week ago, connectivity was more of an issue than with the Espressif chips!

On another side of the hardware arena, I’ve long been curious about the RC2014, a Zilog Z80-based homebrew computer with a variety of different options. My friend Chris Swan was able to give me some advice on what pieces I might want to look into, and I ordered an RC2014 Pro kit; I then met the creator, Spencer, at #EMFCamp and put together the smaller RC2014 Micro.

https://twitter.com/andypiper/status/1532820264127438849

I also had a play with the RC2040, a way to emulate the system on an RP2040 board. Why am I doing this? Well, I grew up on 8-bit computers similar to this back in the 1980s, and it is fun to dig in on the electronics side, again. Not a completely successful enterprise so far, I’m working on it!

Talking of retro technology, I’ve also continued to enjoy building or customising consoles of a bygone era. The Miyoo Mini v2 is a really nice little handheld with a gorgeous screen, with a number of custom OS options. I also want to get back to my MiSTer setup at some point, to give all of the cores a refresh to their current releases (and to actually get it hooked up to the TV). Apart from the retro stuff, I was also relatively (!) early on in the waves of recipients for the Steam Deck. So, not only am I dividing my attention between a number of side projects, I’m also jumping between gaming devices and platforms and eras… 🤦

There are a number of other gadgets that have arrived in the past 6 months, but one I’ll call out is the ClockworkPi DevTerm, a 1980s TRS-80 lookalike slab portable that is clipped together in parts, and can take a number of different “cores”, or processor boards. I picked mine up with the R01 core, a RISC-V Allwinner D1 chip which is experimental in the context of trying to run a Linux distribution. There are other options available; I have a CM4 adapter on the way. This is another community that I’ve enjoyed interacting with, as we learn new things together, and share our experiences.

Oh, and I picked up a Bluetooth thermal printer, with the face of a cat.

Because, Dan Hon.

(also, subscribe to Dan’s newsletter. He’s good)

Finally, I connected with a new group, Together, We Open Source, and have been following the meetups there, helping people get comfortable with OSS contributions. It feels like a bit of a full circle experience for me, to revisit my roots and share what I’ve learned.

What’s next

I don’t plan to broadly expand the various side projects I listed out above, but I’m enjoying the things I’m contributing to. I also have a couple of lists full of the next thing I want to build! Mostly, I want to stay connected with others, and to learn, and share what I’m doing — back to where I started in communities and Open Source.

I’m going to think more about where and how I share my content / ramblings / thoughts. This is intended to be a one-off multi-channel post, but maybe I’ll do something similar again at some point.

#ThankYou

I have had… a really strange, very challenging, couple of years. If you’re reading this, and you’ve read this far, it’s probably because you subscribed to my content at some point, which means I’ve been interesting to you at some level.

Thank you for your attention and interest, and your support. I hope I’ve helped you or inspired you somehow, along the way. I’d love to hear what you think, about anything from the stuff I’ve been working on, to our podcast, or just to tell me to [stop / continue / Tweet less often / drink more water] *delete as appropriate

If you’re so inclined, I have a page on Ko-fi, as well, where you can contribute to my habit of buying random dev boards on AliExpress. All (ok, almost all) of my interesting links are here.

Until next time.

Three notions / plans for 2016

Andy Piper2 Comments

Hello. I haven’t written here in a while. That’s something I hope to change.

I realise it is 6 weeks into the year already, but after a trip to California last week, my own vague ideas about what 2016 should mean for me, have solidified.

  1. Travel (a bit) less / be more thoughtful about travel. I’m in an International role, and I work for a company with headquarters and many of the decision-makers 8 hours behind me. This makes the notion of travelling less in 2016 a little ironic and possibly, untenable! Nevertheless, I work with a great team and I hope to be more thoughtful about where and when I travel (and for how long) this year. I know I’ll do more again, but right now, I’m at a point in my life where I need to be setting more roots and plans locally. Interestingly, my trip to SF this week was my first significant travel since October, so this is already working (to an extent), but the global #HelloWorld tour will of course eat into that significantly – not that I’m complaining!
  2. Make more Stuff. Per Chris Heilmann’s fantastic post about Developer Relations / Evangelism / Advocacy this past week, “how often do you code?” is a key question in understanding our role(s), and I’d been aware for a while that I simply hadn’t been doing much of it lately (beyond testing out examples where devs said they were unable to make samples work). My plan in 2016 is to build something – anything – at least once a month. So far this year I’ve dabbled in Twitter ebooks bots and Alexa skills – both built on the backs of others – but I hope to build, publish, and write about more in the coming months. I’m particularly excited by the growing trend towards No UI / conversational interfaces and it has been great to re-connect with friends like Matt and Haje in the preceding months on these topics. I’m also hoping to write a lot more, as blogging and sharing is a major part of where the amazing ride and network I’ve enjoyed since ~2006, started.
  3. Invest more time in mentoring others. In my previous lives at IBM and Pivotal I had a lot of opportunity to get involved in these activities. I’ve been at Twitter very close to 2 years now, and it is incredible to realise how much I’ve learned “through osmosis” – partly from amazing individuals like Isaac, Sylvain, Taylor, Craig, Chris, and Romain – and more often, from others still around me. My goal in 2016 is to share my knowledge and support much more widely: both to co-workers, third party developers, and up-and-coming members of the tech community around me. Time to hit the local meetup circuit, and to do more coaching of others in public speaking, career mentoring, and personal support.

I’ve got a lot of exciting stuff to look forward to this year professionally – I’m deeply involved in a number of initiatives, and I’m excited that @jack has put Developers firmly on our list of priorities! This is where I’d always hoped we would get back to. Nevertheless, on top of that, these are three of my personal plans for the next ~10 1/2 months. I’ve made a good start.

As always, I’m open to comments here, but you’ll also find me open to discuss on Twitter @andypiper.

(also on Medium)

Upcoming speaking gigs

Andy PiperLeave a comment

Fresh from a quick presentation and supporting Hackference this past weekend (more on that soon), I’ve turned my attention to the next couple of months of travel and events. There’s a lot of stuff happening!

Firstly, to my enormous regret I have to miss the Brighton Mini Maker Faire this coming weekend – if you are in the UK then it is a great day out, and I encourage you to go along, with or without a young family in tow.  I wrote about attending the first one in 2011, and helped as a volunteer last year. I’m sure it is going to be fabulous!

platform

Instead of being in the UK, this coming weekend I’m headed to Santa Clara for Platform: the Cloud Foundry Conference – our first developer summit for the whole Cloud Foundry community. On the back of partnership announcements with companies like IBM, Savvis and Piston, this is looking extremely exciting. I don’t have a formal speaking slot, but I’m going to be heavily involved and have helped with the planning and scheduling. I’m hoping to get a couple of topics onto the agenda for the unconference slot on the Monday afternoon, too!

Follow along via the Twitter hashtag #platformcf

SpringOne2GX

Immediately after Platform is the annual SpringOne 2GX event. There has been a huge amount of activity in the Spring community over the past couple of months and I think it is safe to say that this year there is some major excitement around where Spring has been headed. I’ve been privileged to spend some time with folks like Adrian Colyer recently, and I know the entire team has been working hard on many projects, so expect some very interesting news about the evolution of Spring and its capabilities. I’m speaking on the Cloud Foundry track, on the first morning of the conference, with my good friend (and Spring Developer Advocate) Josh Long, covering the topic “Build your Spring Applications on Cloud Foundry”.

The Twitter hashtags are #s2gx or #springone2gx

Later on the same day I’ll be zipping up to San Francisco to participate in a panel discussion at CloudBeat 2013, alongside my friend Diane Mueller and others. The panel topic is “Is PaaS Still Coming?” and we’re on at 1.50 in the afternoon slot. If you are interested in coming along, full event details can be found here, and you can save 20% on a ticket (there is a bunch of great content throughout the event, so if you are in the Bay Area it looks worthwhile). Hashtag for this one is #cloudbeat2013.

[pause for breath… and relax]

structure-europe_media-badge_see-me-speak

The following week I’m enormously honoured to have been invited to a panel at GigaOM Structure Europe, at home here in London.  The topic of this one is “DevOps: Is Synchronicity Here?” and rounds out day 2 of the event by taking a look at the current state of DevOps. This link should save you 25% on a ticket and I’d be delighted to see you there.

Next up, the speaking circuit takes me to Aarhus in Denmark, which is exciting as I’ve only ever visited Copenhagen before. I’ll be at GOTO Aarhus 2013, speaking on Cloud Foundry and why it is a great platform for running Java apps in the cloud.

Later in October I have a trip to Singapore, to talk to Pivotal customers about the products, projects and technologies we are developing, at our first Asia Pacific Pivotal Summit.

Finally – last but by no means least – to finish off October, I have two talks on the slate at JAX London 2013: “Run your Java code on Cloud Foundry” and (with my non-Pivotal, Open Source Community hat on) “Eclipse Paho and MQTT – Java messaging in the Internet of Things“. Both of these are on October 30th in London. If you want to get a ticket to come along to JAX London (it looks jam-packed with great content) then the promo code JL13AP should get you a 15% discount on the ticket price.

Beijing in pictures

Andy Piper2 Comments


Courtyard

Originally uploaded by andyp uk

I’m spending a couple of weeks on business in China. It’s an exciting trip as it is my first time in mainland China, I’m getting to do a lot of travelling around, and I’m building some connections with my colleagues in IBM’s China Development Labs (and I was able to spend time with Chinese colleagues in the UK in preparation, learning about the business culture and language here).

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind already. Shortly after landing on Friday I gave a relatively impromptu 2 hour presentation to the WebSphere developers in CDL, which covered everything from life in Hursley, through my career, our product strategies, and the latest news on technologies like WebSphere MQ, MQTT, Message Broker and WebSphere Registry and Repository.

My first “free” day in Beijing, Saturday, was very wet… and I underestimated the distances on the map in an attempt to walk to an attraction which I deemed “fairly close” to my hotel. Word of advice: the guidebooks describe Beijing as “not very walkable”, and my impression is that it really isn’t; I should have taken a cab! Today though, the weather changed and I was able to get out to see a couple of the sights including the Forbidden City (which I’ve previously mentioned here on my blog, in the context of the Beyond Space and Time project which utilises IBM technology and our experience in virtual worlds), and part of the Great Wall. Really spectacular stuff. Colleagues helped me to arrange a tour with Grayline and I have to say that they were excellent. The one obvious issue here is traffic, which is really choking movement – other than that it’s a very pleasant, modern (but utterly vast!) city with some wonderful people.

I didn’t bring an SLR with me but I captured a few shots with the iXUS and iPhone 4. Keep an eye on Flickr.

Tomorrow it’s straight into workshops, roundtables and presentations, and I’ll be travelling around for much of the next couple of weeks, so online interactions may be limited.