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

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.

I had the absolute pleasure to talk at DrupalCamp Oslo about Core Contribution Mentoring, where we are and what we have learned over the last couple of years of unusual times.

If the slides are useful, you can find them attached. 

At the beginning of August, I did something I've been talking about for months – I bought a new motorbike that is actually built for the type of journeys I love to do.

Hedy, my fabulous new (to me) KTM 790 Adventure R, has already completed over 4000Km as we have travelled around – I already need new tyres – that must be a sign of approval??

My attention was brought to a whole bunch of "page not found" errors in the log of my website tonight. At first, I just thought it was just someone trying scripts to gain access so I sent an abuse report to Linode as they owned the IP address, 172.105.83.62.

Their reply was vaguely interesting, though. They said that they didn't regard it as abuse as it was a "security researcher" at work. Huh? On my website? Seriously? Wow - they need to set their sights higher!!! 

Let's first be honest; this isn't yet a post COVID-19 world and it won't be for some time yet. However, in-person events are beginning to happen and we need to consider what that means, practically.

How do we maintain reasonable levels of safety for those people who attend? What do we do about those who simply cannot attend, either through concerns over their health or the inability to travel? I might not even be allowed into events in the USA at the moment as the Astra Zeneca vaccine I had isn't recognised there.

It's time to say farewell to Idris, my BMW S1000XR. In the five years since I bought it, we have made a pretty good job of living up to the "adventure" category this bike supposedly falls into in the BMW Motorrad line-up. We have travelled across dozens of countries in two, nearly (!) three, continents and ventured off-road once or twice in that time. 

Well, Pride Month is over, we saved the gays.

It's truly amazing how changing a corporate logo for a month can have such an effect. Obviously, we don't need to actually do work to improve the lives of a marginalised group all year - that would be far too much like work - stick up a colourful logo for a month and maybe a few posters. That'll do!

I have even removed all the colour from my own website in support of this approach.