Latest thoughts, if any, of Rachel Lawson...

Just chatting about cable cars, based on reading the good news that everyone rescued from the broken one in Pakistan. 
Decided they feel unnatural because the person in control doesn’t have “skin in the game” in the same way that a pilot does in an aeroplane. 
Then it occurred to us that the same applies to self-driving cars. Those in charge of, say, Tesla have no skin in the game if you crash. Think about that…

Some years ago, after a DrupalCon in the US, I received a direct message. It was kind of shocking and has been on my mind on and off ever since...

We are very lucky in the UK to have some great biking/adventure/travel related events take place in the Summer and I have been particularly lucky to attend a few of them so far.

And, surprise, surprise, that there Elon Musk has invited everybody’s least favourite uncle, Donald Trump, back onto Twitter.

What is it about polls that should never be called that causes them to end up at a 52:48% split of opinion? And then for some idiot to decide to take terrible decisions based upon it? 

Goodness me, if the decision to reintroduce Trump into Twitter turns out to be as terrible as Brexit, we can all expect the future of the platform to be dire indeed.

I’ve been thinking of giving Mastodon a try and created an account for myself. 

As Twitter continues to self-destruct, I’ll move over more and more to Mastodon. And here is how:

Whilst I may have ridden a fair few miles on Hedy, my KTM 790 Adventure R, I only really started to get the setup right recently.

Over the last few weeks, I have been continually making small adjustments to the suspension and feeling the changes, deciding if that’s actually how I want the bike to feel and if it is helping me ride better, especially on dirt.

The confidence a good setup creates in my riding is huge - I’m now no longer fearful in sand and bashing through it faster and faster. And I’m now happy making (little) jumps whenever I can. And it’s FUN!!!

I’m constantly amazed how happy the people I know in open source are willing to help out. I needed some open source people to each record a short interview where I asked them about their motivations for contributing to open source projects, what things in projects might be detractors and, finally, what they see as their reward.

Well, I put out a quick tweet asking if anyone might be able to take part and I had half a dozen volunteers in only a few minutes!

It has been interesting talking with colleagues about how we best record things like meetings in the project I’m now involved in, GovStack. 

To encourage contribution, volunteer contributors, especially but not exclusively, need to feel that the decision making in the project is clear and open - there should never be a difficulty in finding how decisions were made.

Once in a while, an opportunity comes along that is so interesting I simply cannot say no. Almost four years ago to the day, that opportunity was to join the Drupal Association as its first Community Liaison. Indeed, I even came up with the title whilst serving on the Drupal Community Working Group.

Working in the Drupal Association has been a wonderful experience, where I have had the pleasure to work with some of the most amazing people I have ever had as colleagues and friends.