Happy June! We just released the monthly challenge for our game Second Guessing, play online at www.secondguessing.net

Working on our second little web game. Lots to do on graphics and UI but we think we have the game rules sorted and we're showing it to people to play test. If I see you around do ask to see it!

Happy May! Our monthly second guessing challenge is up - after last months one maybe went a bit to challenging hopefully this one is just right. www.secondguessing.net

Beyond Big Tech: Building on Hetzner with Talos and Kubernetes, and a discussion about European Clouds Virtual tech event on Thu 28th May: www.teacaketech.scot/our-virtual-...

Hope you had a good April Fools day! I'm not fooling when I say this months Second Guessing challenge is the hardest yet. I hate it. Our tester hated it. We may have gone to far. Try the free web game .... can you count seconds? www.secondguessing.net

Happy March! (We like to get in early) New monthly challenge released for our game: www.secondguessing.net

@thisisgelb.bsky.social Hey, I'm trying to email you but getting "550 5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist." errors?

"The v4 tape in the Unix history repo" from Diomidis Spinellis at #FOSDEM Fun to see "Hello World" written on a 50 year old operating system. unixv4.dev And UNIX used to have a Spider Interface? Why did we scrap that?!

Happy February! (Coming soon, depending on your time zone) We just released the monthly challenge for our game Second Guessing, give it a try: www.secondguessing.net #SecondGuessing (Game now with TypeScript behind the scenes to help ensure everything works correctly)

That's day 1 of #FOSDEM remote viewing wrapping up. Thanks again to the speakers & volunteers who stream things so well and keep things to good time, makes it easy to hop round between rooms and talks.

"PyInfra: Because Your Infrastructure Deserves Real Code in Python, Not YAML Soup" at #FOSDEM I've never seen so many Rowan Atkinson images in a talk. I feel like it should have come with a quiz round of what film/tv each was afterwards. Good talk too, I'll have another look at PyInfra.

So wait, CodeBerg/Forgejo supports sha256 git hash format but GitHub doesn't? So if you have a repo you want to put online but don't want anyone to put on GitHub you should use sha256? #FOSDEM #Git

Morning, it's #FOSDEM weekend. I'll be watching along virtually. I made a schedule viewer that lets you browse in any time zone: virtuallyattend.teacaketech.scot/fosdem/2026/ I'll be updating that and bug fixing over the weekend too I'm sure 🙂 Let me know if you use it & what you think of it!

We’re back - Save the Date! In 2026 we Pedal on Parliament for a cycle-friendly Scotland, on Sat 30th May at 11.30am - Middle Meadow Walk to Holyrood, Edinburgh on closed roads. #ThisMachineFightsClimateChange #pop26

Last night we talked at a virtual tech event about our relaunch - thanks to the attendees for a great discussion afterwards. We've written up our talk here: blog.opentechcalendar.co.uk/2026/01/23/t... Happy to hear feedback from people!

@foundationsofthedigitalstate.com Email on www.teacaketech.scot/contact/ - happy to chat!

Just converted a site to my own static site builder and again found it really useful that the builder checked the output after it had built it. In this case, checking no internal links were broken highlighted a few errors. We test / lint our code with automated tools, why not our static sites too?

Finally getting my talk ready for Wed: www.teacaketech.scot/our-virtual-...

Tried to find where I can recycle bike inner tubes & found a website that lists places. First 2 places near me have closed permanently & there's no way for me to easily report that to the site. Community data projects are hard - reposting blog I wrote years ago: www.teacaketech.scot/blogs/2020-0...

Released a new version of my static site generator I use on a lot of projects. Now has better versioning of assets (Images, CSS, JS, etc) to support in-browser caching: docs.staticpipes.teacaketech.scot/stable/

re Last repost, reminded me I haven't said this news here yet: I've just left the worker's co-op I've been at for almost 8 years; thanks to everyone there who made it a great place to work and for all the interesting projects to work on.

The number one thing I've been hearing from people in tech lately is, basically, "How the hell am I supposed to work in this industry anymore?" Though most folks are kind of afraid to say it out loud. So I wrote about how to think about it: www.anildash.com/2026/01/05/a...

Having a look at Rust out of curiosity #rustlang Reading the book: doc.rust-lang.org/book/ Just did the first advent of code puzzle in Rust #adventofcode But just seen recommendation for rustlings.rust-lang.org which looks interesting too.

Happy New Year! We've just released a new monthly challenge for our game, #SecondGuessing We're proud of this one - our play tester's first comment was "woooooooow this is a bastard of a level i love it". www.secondguessing.net New art in this level, again by the great @patchworkbear.bsky.social

Today I threw together a web tool for people who want to attend FOSDEM virtually - the official site doesn't let you browse in your local timezone, which always seemed odd. So here's my first go: virtuallyattend.teacaketech.scot/fosdem/2026/ Comments welcome!

@histoftech.bsky.social Hello, hope you're doing well! I'm trying to get a project started and it seems like something you might approve of? Any chance of a boost if so? bsky.app/profile/open...

Yesterday in tech: Boosting Django/Apache VM server. Add mod_cache to Apache & cache-control/vary headers to Django & Apache's static files. Load testing shows server handles multiples more simultaneous traffic than before. Users browsers now cache assets, for snappy page loads as move around site.

Setting up prometheus.io for server, app and website monitoring today. Nice to see it progressing - when I first set it up if you wanted basic auth / SSL you had to proxy traffic throught something, now there are options built in: ruan.dev/blog/2021/10...

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Why is a flatbed lorry called a flatbed lorry? Does anyone ring up and go "I need a lorry but it has to have a wavy bed, don't send me any of that stinking flatbed type, had one last week, put things on it and they rolled right off"

👀Sneak peak of what I'm working on, do comment and add good virtual tech events! I'm looking forwards to launching properly after the holidays.

Also released a version of DataTig, my open source tool for people crowd sourcing data in a git repository: www.datatig.com This is to support launching my next big project, which uses DataTig

Happy December! We released a new monthly challenge for our game. www.secondguessing.net #SecondGuessing

What I'm working on: I've got Open Tech Calendar back, and I'm going to relaunch it to list virtual tech events that include community participation. Follow @opentechcalendar.co.uk now, tho I'm sure I'll mention it a few times when it launches.

For me "Person waiting for a friend to finish tying their shoes" is the clear winner

Happy November! We released a new monthly challenge for our game. www.secondguessing.net #SecondGuessing

If I saw this on some map data I was working on I'd be worried something had gone wrong. But no, I recently learnt that River Test, Test Road, Test Mews, Test Way, Test Valley and more are all actually real places. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_T...

Put our game on Itch yesterday: teacaketech.itch.io/second-guess... Interesting to see the tools they have and how it all works.

My fav bit of this is when they ask James Cameron (sorry, anonymous expert witness) a single question and he goes on for 2 and a half pages until: CAMERON: And then we -- if I'm going into too much detail, stop me. THEM: No. No, sir. It's great. (Link to full transcript in comments to quoted post)

Been making good progress on my next project. I won't be ready to release it for a month or two as I have some other stuff to sort out first. But if anyone sees me (in-person or virtually) please do ask, I'd like to show people and get feedback.

Got a lot of coding on my own stuff done this weekend - looking forward to unveiling this! Used Django's multiple database support for the first time - the flexible routing options are pretty nice docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.2/topic... Also getting back into Ansible after years working in salt.

It's October! (Yesterday, oops) We released a new monthly challenge for our completely free web game ... all you have to do is count seconds. #SecondGuessing www.secondguessing.net This one is a challenge tho, so try the normal levels first!

Well this is the oddest bunch of password requirements I've ever seen. No < > ? Are they scared people will HTML inject them through a password? They do one way hash these things right? AndNoSpaces?

It's September! We released a new monthly challenge for our totally free web game. #SecondGuessing www.secondguessing.net @patchworkbear.bsky.social

Just watched Python, An origin story: The documentary on YouTube. Interesting, tho definitely for people with some existing tech knowledge. Ironically the one advert YouTube kept interrupting me with was for an AI app builder tool :-)

Another benifit of virtual tech events ... Storm Floris can't touch us! Unless it knocks out our internet or power of course in which case it's totally postponed. Really shouldn't have said anything. That was just tempting fate wasn't it. On Open Data Tonight: www.teacaketech.scot/event/2025-0...

Happy August! We released a new monthly challenge for our game. #SecondGuessing www.secondguessing.net

Pulled together docs for a static website generator I've been working on in Python: docs.staticpipes.jmbtechnology.co.uk/latest/ Comments welcome... I'm sure I'll be working on the details, but does the general structure and type of information look like the kind of thing that would be useful?

Do you use Azure? You know reservations - the things that can give you big discounts if you commit to use a service for 1 or 3 years? Well .... do you know you can (under some conditions and up to a limit) **cancel** reservations? learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/...

I'm thinking about a new tech event listing site ... This one for virtual events, but emphasising a tagging system of what audience interaction there is. Would anyone be interested in using this? Know of any good virtual tech events? (Not just an excuse to market my own event, I am serious!)

Virtual tech event tonight: Announcements from recent Azure Build event, and a discussion about how we use Cloud services (from all providers). Free tickets at www.teacaketech.scot/event/2025-0...