Code BEAM was awesome. I should do a write-up. Some people I met said they read this thing. Thank you so much for being lovely and hanging out at the conference. And to the rest of you, consider going to a conference if you have the chance. The community is really great.

Also, Gleam crew has the most style and are great fun to hang with. What the hell? Unbalanced.

I posted a bunch on Mastodon and the others. So you can see some of what went on.

My failures

To put a very odd spin on the event I want to touch on things that went poorly. Not because I am filled with regret because I feel great about pretty much all of it. Rather because I don't like projecting too much success and there is always bad mixed in with the good.

The event prep in general was intense and impacted my evenings and spare time more than I like. This is a work/life balance issue exacerbated by concerns about cash flow having been tight. We burned a lot of our reserve due to the market shifting back in Q4 2023 and a dip here or there has been keenly felt. So I've been trying to keep my billable hours up even while I prep for the conference. Not usually how I prefer to operate but a trade-off we've made with open eyes for this quarter. November should be a bit better, December will be much calmer. I am okay with the trade-off but it is not a "good" state.

I take no responsibility for the swedish or german train systems both of which had failures and besides I had enough margin that it was fine. So a success on my part and disqualified from this list.

Nerves Workshop was a ton of fun, not nearly a failure as an event. My firmware for the devices and instruction prep. Kind of bad. Did it work out anyway. Yes. I knew I didn't have a ton of time to pour into the workshop contents but I made some choices that were less than ideal. I should have shipped Nerves Livebook instead probably. It did give me a chunk of useful things to fix about that firmware (it is the kiosk example for the ReTerminal DM). To be clear to everyone who attended, y'all were great. This is introspection and analysis :)

For my talk I feel mildly bad about over-running the timer by a couple of minutes. Thankfully Sasa set up super fast and was essentially ready on time. 5 minutes between is tight.

Otherwise on the talk I am completely unbothered that the RPi4 onboarding demo failed. I had come to realize the juggling of wifi connections and connectivity was just a bad time at the venue. And Jon Carstens trolled me as a glorious save by stealing my credentials from the slides and  onboarding his laptop onto NervesHub.

I am quite annoyed that I get a very dry mouth while speaking. Not something I think I can prep to get rid of unfortunately. I didn't feel nervous but my body does what it will with the tension of the situation. I think the headset in use was not the best for drinking from a water bottle. I think that was very noisy :D

I don't think I have any major regrets about how the talk went. Which is fantastic.

I am mildly annoyed that I was so fried after it that I just hallway tracked, I'm sure I missed some good presentations. But also I can't regret good hallway track conversations. Not really. I wasn't hiding in a corner.

Very annoyed about missing the newsletter. Which I realized during day two of the conference. Not fixable and I guess now the tension of having a streak is gone.

Ideally I would have liked to capture more of the event with small videos, interviews and so on for spreading and publishing later but I did alright in terms of pushing to socials and I know I have a hard time both attending a conference and producing things at it. I do want to practice that though so doing almost none of it aside from doing two takes with Maggie on a short video is not quite the level I want. I didn't bring any of the big camera gear this year because I had so much other junk.

I also returned with Raspberry Pi Zeros still in tow. That is a mild failure. Means I did not make enough people commit to trying Nerves I guess :P

All in all a very mild list of failures. I will try harder in that regard next time.

What have been your minor failures recently? You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.