This has been an interesting year for me, both as a technologist and an author. When I say year, I mean the past 12 months. I do my "new year" planning in October as this is my birth month. The great thing about setting those goals is reusing them each year as when I slide right past achieving them. But we will not talk about that now. I went to three technical conferences; two for Ruby on Rails and one on enterprise software platforms. Call the latter an occupational hazard. The Rails conferences were in Detroit and Toronto, and the last was in Vegas. As venue cities go, I liked Toronto, then Detroit. Vegas doesn't do it for me. I have one more conference (Author Nation) in November. Yes, that's "this year" in my frame of mind instead of "last year." Why are these conferences exciting to talk about? If you've read the earlier posts, this has been a year of technology renaissance for me. I've returned to Linux. I've started dabbling with Neovim (yes, the fingers still remember all those commands from 20 years ago!). Ruby on Rails released new capabilities focused on solopreneurs and small teams. As I get closer to retirement, I'm exploring what to do in the next phase. That includes looking for my tribe. I'm a creative who likes to give back to his tribe, so it helps to know who they are. With these conferences, I think I've found two of my three tribes. The last can only happen when we ultimately relocate. Rails World was the peak experience for me. I've met a lot of public figures and celebrities in my life; presidents,...

Over a thousand years ago, Vikings scoured Europe for spam. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE) A couple of weeks ago, I re-launched this blog with a custom-built application. Last week, I imported the dozen-odd subscribers from Hey World that I accumulated over the past few months. If you are receiving this via email, that is where you signed up from. (If you don't remember subscribing, you can opt out below!) The "from" email has changed, and will probably change again. But before I sent the first newsletter--which is this one--I accumulated 672 bot email subscriptions. I accounted for them and purged them out. But inspecting the other emails I noticed some that appears to be bogus. Email deliverability is all about not sending to the wrong people. I played with a few different approaches before choosing an email blacklist service that rightly noticed that a third of my remaining subscribers were bots (and Vikings) who responded to the confirmation notice. That leaves you and a handful of our fellow humans who asked to join my newsletter. If you wonder what I've been up to, the past five months have been a flurry of writing this website. But you probably aren't here for that. You're here to find out what I'm working on as a writer. And if you don't remember signing up for this blog/newsletter, I understand. Apart from my initial foray into a fantasy series, not much. Work stress cuts into the emotional energy I have for writing. Two beta readers have read the first two books of my alternative history series and liked it. There are a few minor grammar issues, and perhaps a character that people aren't too emotionally invested in....