New blog post!!

CodeMash 2026 #codemash #usergroups

https://barretblake.dev/posts/conferences/2026/01/codemash/

The Importance of Having In-Person User Group Meetings.

https://joeydantoni.com/2025/06/05/the-importance-of-having-in-person-user-group-meetings/

#devcommunity #usergroups #developers #database #itpro

Finally got around to reading a really good article from @curtispf / @curtispf titled "Engineers don't make public squares. People do."

https://cpf.sh/blog/2025/01/25/engineers-dont-make-public-squares-people-do

Some choice comments:

>The bigger sociotechnical challenge, though, that would absolutely be necessary to solve to make this viable in practice would be making this kind of setup not only possible but absolutely trivial - trivial to set up, trivial to use, trivial to manage, and trivial to back up and restore. For this kind of setup to ever take off, it has to be the kind of thing you could give to your grandparents and have them be able to use at least as easily as an iPhone.

I really like the idea of giving everyone an "Internet Box" of sorts; plug it into your network and power, and off it goes. And I don't think we necessarily need to make it trivial to manage. I believe we can delegate that responsibility to more technically inclined people that the owner trusts. It feels an awful lot like the BOINC project: install the software, and let other clever people write the code that does socially useful computation on top of your device. Only, for the Internet Box, it is instead "choose which entities you want to give shell access to."

>Bluesky users may not know or understand what ATproto is, or what PDS they’re on, or how their messages are federated - but, they are on federated social media, and they are (at least moderately) happy about it.

[Not really](https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/):

>However, I stand by my assertions that Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. To claim that Bluesky is decentralized or federated in its current form moves the goalposts of both of those terms, which I find unacceptable.

Moving on...

>That being said, I think we’re overlooking that these people do exist. I’d actually really like to see organisations like Mastodon gGmbH use some funding not just on development, DevOps and DevRel, but what I’d like to call CitRel: citizen relationships. We should be focus grouping onboarding strategies to get people to choose their communities; we should be designing communications toolkits for people to talk about federated social media; hell, we should be producing memes on centralised social media that push people over!

I like the concept of CitRel. Part of me suspects that the computer education I received as a child -- what is a file, what is a filesystem, what is a network connection, what is a program, etc -- is no longer given, instead relying on "intuitiveness" from major players. Perhaps starting User Groups back up is an option for establishing a more "competent computation baseline" for citizens.

#fediverse #fedi #PublicSquare #UserGroups

I’m posting this here to make sure PHP developers in the Minneapolis area are aware…

Tonight was the first meeting of the new PHP user group in Minneapolis!

Dave Hicking spoke, and @macbookandrew said it was a “great talk.”

I think @benholmen organizes it, so I’ll defer to him for more details.

If you’re in the area, you should check it out!

#PHP #Laravel #Minneapolis #PHPxMSP #UserGroups

On Speaking - User Groups vs Conferences.

There's a different feel between the two groups. #developer #conferences #usergroups #speaking

Hey User Group organizers & speakers!!!! 🎉🎉🎉

Season of AI - Season 2 is here!

1. Take a look at the 7 available talks/content/slides

2. Organize a local meetup on "Copilots"

3. Submit

4. Get Swag for you and your group!!

Details: https://github.com/microsoft/community-content/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#season-of-ai---season-2---copilots-oct-to-dec-2024

#dotnet #copilot #ai #usergroups

After a weekend spent mostly indoors to avoid temperatures that hit or neared triple digits Saturday and Sunday, I’m flying to Los Angeles Tuesday for a grab-bag of reasons that include trying out Waymo’s robotaxi service there (which may make me feel like I’m living in the future), covering VidCon Anaheim (which is all but assured to make me feel old).

Patreon readers got an extra post from me Friday: my thoughts on reading Siddharth Kara’s brutal report on cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, and then comparing that to Apple and Tesla’s supply-chain transparency reports.

6/18/2024: Google’s Third Beta of Android 15 Is Out, and It Has Some Handy New Security Features, PCMag

The fourth piece I’ve writen about the next version of Android had the least news about new features, because at this point in the development cycle Google is basically done announcing new features.

6/19/2024: Billionaire Frank McCourt Shares His Vision for a Decentralized, User-Owned TikTok, PCMag

I had thought this session could yield a good post, and it did not disappoint–even if McCourt’s answers onstage glossed over large parts of his “Project Liberty” proposal.

6/19/2024: What does AI mean for remote work?, Collision

My first panel at Collision–featuring Bhavin Shah, founder and CEO of Moveworks, and Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures–was the last one added to my schedule and featured the largest audience, thanks to its spot on the event’s center stage.

6/20/2024: 1Password Adds New Account Recovery and Device Addition Options, PCMag

I need to revise this post with some extra details about the new device-addition user experience that 1Password’s PR folks provided Friday afternoon.

6/20/2024: Robots and humans: Partners in progress, Collision

Clock management can be tricky with three other speakers on stage (Erik Nieves, CEO of Plus One Robotics; Tessa Lau, co-founder of Dusty Robotics; and Etienne Lacroix, founder and CEO of Vention), but I managed to end this thing within 10 seconds of schedule. My fellow speakers helped immensely by sharing some enlightening anecdotes (for instance, Lau noting that Dusty’s construction-site-markup robots often get nicknamed “WALL-E” by human co-workers) and not stepping on each other’s lines.

6/20/2024: Revolutionizing email collaboration, Collision

At 25 minutes, this session was unusually long by Web Summit standards. And Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra was unusually poised and on-message in his answers to my questions about this paid e-mail service’s new AI features.

6/21/2024: Ep 101 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Qualcomm, Surgeon General warning, Apple WWDC recap, TikTok, Mark Vena

I had just enough time after getting home from Dulles to get lunch and get in a nap before joining this podcast recording.

6/22/2024: Rob Pegoraro Visits Washington Apple Pi, Washington Apple Pi

I had expected this would be an in-person talk like the one I did last June, but instead I spoke to the members of this longtime computer user group via Zoom. That meant I could not give away any tech-event swag but did allow me to share links to the stories I mentioned in Zoom’s chat window.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/06/23/weekly-output-android-15-project-liberty-and-tiktok-ai-and-remote-work-1password-robots-and-humans-superhuman-e-mail-mark-vena-podcast-washington-apple-pi/

#1Password #Android15 #Collision #DustyRobotics #EverywhereVentures #FrankMcCourt #MarkVena #Moveworks #PlusOneRobotics #ProjectLiberty #remoteWork #Superhuman #TikTok #Toronto #userGroups #Vention #WAP #WashingtonApplePi #Waymo #WebSummit