Little Wins (all tech edition)

I haven't been posting much lately, because I've been crazy-busy. But I should pause for a moment before bed, and celebrate the little victories:

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On Sunday, we held the second ScalaBridge Boston. As the site says,

This workshop is intended to reach out to women, people of color or anyone who identifies as belonging to a group that is underrepresented in tech who is interested in learning Scala.

It's one of those opportunities to be nerdy and socially-helpful at the same time. We had about ten mentors (including me) and about forty students, and it felt like at least many of the students got something out of it. This was a wide range of folks (mostly but not entirely women), including long-time programmers who are trying to stay current with the industry, as well as folks who have never written a line of code in their lives but want to explore a mid-life career change. (I wound up doing a bit of impromptu career counseling in between nerding about programming.)

Overall, I thought it was great: upbeat, fun, collaborative, with just enough structure for the students to choose their path for the day, but allowing everyone to find their own lane. I think we really accomplished something, and I hope we continue doing this at least once a year.

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At the other end of the scale, tonight was the latest session of the Boston Area Scala Enthusiasts Meetup. This was an intermediate-level talk, aimed at folks who already know Scala well and want to up their game by getting into some current functional-programming techniques.

I've been in charge of the Meetup since the beginning of the year, and it's starting to feel like it's really working. It had fallen semi-moribund, and I've been slowly reviving it -- this time we got 63 RSVPs and 44 attendees, which is nice and solid for a slightly niche Meetup. Boston has a whole bunch of companies and organizations using Scala, mostly all by their lonesome; I think folks are enjoying getting out of their silos and realizing that there's a larger community out there.

(That said, I'm getting really annoyed with Meetup, which charges an obscene amount of money for a fairly crappy service. I'm increasingly thinking of building my own version in Querki, because seriously: there is nothing hard here. I suspect I can do about as well with about three hours' work, and better with a bit of time and thought.)

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Finally, let us light a candle and pray that the MacOS Catalina upgrade that got pushed today solves some of the horrible ways in which 10.15 broke my laptop. So far, it feels like Bluetooth is actually working again, which would be nice: both my keyboard and Magic Trackpad have been responding so slowly for the past few days that it's felt genuinely nightmarish...