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

Whilst I fully appreciate I am no fan of Slack, for many reasons, not least who they seem to like to associate with, I do accept that not everyone shares my views and that Slack is at the heart of many open source communities.

Whilst I have really enjoyed building this little website, and slowly beginning to write a little more, one thing that has troubled me the whole time is how to facilitate conversation on the topics I bring up in a way that I can believe that the person making a comment is actually who they say they are. Or, at least, they are the same person I interact with on other platforms as that identity.

"Oh that's easy!", I hear you say, "Just use a tool that allows someone to login using their identity elsewhere - lots of ways to do that, such as OpenID."

I have been noticing people I know in Nigeria recently using the #EndSARS hashtag on Twitter for a little while now and I mistakenly assumed, given virus causing the pandemic known as COVID-19 is called SARS-CoV-2. It's not anything to do with COVID-19 at all, it is a purely human tragedy and it must be stopped.

I'm running the iOS public betas at the moment and something struck me - both iOS and iPadOS have very odd understandings of what browser tabs are. 
 

In iOS, we can open a new browser “sheet”, but the menu item says tab:

“Well, your consultant might insist you have the test, anyway” I hear from the nurse when I say that no, there is absolutely no possibility that I might be pregnant.

Whilst everything else about my stay in hospital this week was a delight, this particular question really got to me, yet again. It comes up every time I have had to have an invasive procedure and it somehow feels that I’m being told I’m not capable of knowing something as simple as whether I’m pregnant. 

Having had the joy of experiencing organised events etc from both sides of the coin, as a participant and as an organiser, I have had ample opportunity to notice one thing — people in open source communities can do one thing that makes the experience of organising so much more pleasant: commit early.

I see again and again organisers of conferences, from small meet-ups even up to DrupalCon itself, worrying whether people will buy the tickets they need for the event to be a success, right up until the last few weeks (and days!)

I need to have a little bit of surgery done on Monday. No big deal.

However, to have the surgery I need to have a COVID-19 test (exactly) 72 hours beforehand. No problem, I think. How wrong I was…

Having just called the 119 telephone number to book a test, I've just been told that there are two options:

For the last few years, I have made it a little tradition of mine to use the motorbike to get to as many DrupalCon events as possible, certainly all the European ones and I even had thoughts of how to do this for Minneapolis this year. 

Of course, 2020 came along and everything changed. Still, given DrupalCon is a "high intensity" time in Drupal Association staff's calendars, I knew spending a few days riding after DrupalCon Global 2020 was definitely a good idea.

The huge, huge advantage of using an off-the-shelf, soon-to-be-core theme is that the quality is high, like really high. 

Of course, there is always a possibility I would want to add something (and I have an idea for a little animation in the back of my mind) so I wanted to find a way to do that without making any changes to the actual theme.

When Lewis Nyman tweeted about a funky little way to add a "dark mode", I saw my opportunity...