May 2024 Update: Future of Coding mention, Working at Canonical, YouTube appearance

A small collection of updates from the last few months.

My name on a podcast#

I was name-dropped on the really excellent Future of Coding podcast. My post on using Arroost was mentioned briefly by one of the hosts — Lu Wilson — who also created Arroost. As a regular listener to the show it was weird to hear my name when I didn't expect it!

Episode 71: Elephant in the Room

Future of Coding is the only podcast about software that I have really enjoyed and I highly recommend it. Lu has recently joined as a host and is a wonderful addition.

New job at Canonical#

As I wrote about recently, I left a job in academia to become a technical author. I will be working on the Ubuntu Desktop team with a special focus on WSL. Ubuntu has been my main OS for years after initially starting with WSL.

I'm about a month into the job and have already learned a huge amount about software and documentation. Almost immediately after leaving the university I went on a two-week company sprint in Madrid. I met a lot of smart people and they even let me ramble on a YouTube stream.

YouTube appearance#

A few days into the Madrid sprint I was told that the technical authors would be live-streaming on YouTube. I fought the instinct that this was too-much-too-soon and ended up making my first YouTube appearance since awkwardly talking about my PhD over a decade ago.

What's really nice about the chat is all the different paths that were taken to the technical author role. There's people with backgrounds in literature, mathematics, linguistics and even food science. Everyone is really open about their own journey and it's great.

Lots of new music#

I'm making too much music to spam this site with regular updates. I posted about Rurality, Punctums and Newly Sincere. Since then I released Rosacea and Indirection. Indirection takes the best songs from pseudonymously-released music that I made at the end of last year. I've had to mostly abandon that pseudonym as I simply had too many static sites to manage once I started the new job. Rosacea is kind of atmospheric with a consistent mood while Indirection is an eclectic mix of nostalgic snippets. Almost nobody has listened to either but I really like them anyway!