Hi Sudoers:
I arrived for Hardware and SoftWEAR Hack Night / Fixit Clinic at 8PM
last week and there were a bunch of people waiting outside with repairs.
Can someone try to arrive early say, 7:30 or so to greet people and let
them into Sudoroom or the Media Lab and get them started on their projects?
Extra Credit: 1) confirm that the VOIP phone number 442-252-8386 is
working by dialing it 2) put out the sandwich sign on the sidewalk
Many thanks, -Peter
https://sudoroom.org/face-to-face-learning-with-rust/
Our RUST learning experiment started out well during the Women and Non
Binary night. People have been suggesting we try something unique, and
there are so many RUST enthusiasts around me, and so few “getting women
into RUST” workshops out there, that we decided to try it out. A big
potential stinker was that I wanted to learn with an offline mode on, as I
am suffering from a massive case of internet addiction. I want to use
technology effectively and for food, and the mass of information and
distractions is seriously getting in the way of me learning new stuff.
So for this meetup as part of the “Learning how to Learn” experiment, I
suggested we do this meetup with:
- *No* presentation slides
- *No* online videos
- *No *hybrid/remote element
- *No* laptops open (if possible) with people doing face to face
- People should be able to whiteboard what they learned
- No social media during the event
<https://sudoroom.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Rust-2.jpg>
I wasn’t sure what to expect, and wasn’t sure people would show up but
people did!
Nobody present was currently programming in RUST, but they knew a lot of
people who did. We went through printouts of a Gentle Introduction to RUST
and actually had fun comparing RUST to different programming languages.
One person worked a lot in C, another in python, and it was fun going over
the computer science concepts like memory management and garbage collection
as a way to get to know RUST.
Also, in a world where there’s a lot of pressure to mint programmers out to
make commercially viable products, it was fun just to look at a programming
language intellectually before making a commercially viable widget. It
feels like even in school people are being pressured to make monetizable
stuff without stopping to smell the flowers.
Working with paper printouts and no laptops worked out surprisingly well.
We used the internet sparingly, through a laptop only checked by one
person, and talked things out slowly before jumping online.
The chalkboard had a weird psychological effect of making things fun and
spontaneous for some reason. At this point in history it is completely
dissociated from work, school, or even in-person coding interviews. It’s
like doing leetcode with crayons on construction paper, and was very
freeing! Also, being forced to write the concepts and code on a chalkboard
forces you to really repeat and check if you understand what you’re
studying.
Of course there were also the people. We spent a lot of time talking about
our experiences in other programming languages, and describing horrific
concurrency bugs in other languages that would cause people to run
screaming and yelling to Rust. One girl had a lady friend who wrote a bash
script application that was really crazy large that existed just to catch
bugs in her original programming bash code. It was also a nice way to talk
about the importance of pointers, and understanding how they worked.
This series is going well and also enabled us to connect better with each
other in person. Sometimes when you’re in person or online, having that
laptop with all those infinite distractions keeps you away from the
mission. We look forward to continuing this focused and exciting session
going forward.
Since SudoRoom has such a hardware hackerspace focus, some people were even
investigating doing independent hacker projects of embedded RUST. It’s
looking good so far!
=============================
Romy Ilano
romy(a)snowyla.com
Hey all
A small group of us will be meeting to further explore laptops for all on Wednesday, starting at 8. All are invited but we are especially prioritizing this as time space for femme presenting and NB people.
-July
I am thinking about investigating wordpress for a forum.
I'm finding that going straight to Discord isn't ideal though, I have seen
how it both helps (in minimal ways) and hurts spaces like Noisebridge
(building community long term, prioritizing face to face to face, focusing
on people present instead of remote people interfering without
contributing).
=============================
Romy Ilano
romy(a)snowyla.com
I noticed a bunch of people had tried to sign up for this list, but hadn't
returned the verification email they got.
So I went ahead and manually added them. Welcome, new people, to the sudoroom
discuss email list!
-jake
someone just reached out in concern about a dream catcher in sudo room.
Someone said it was just left on the table, but even having it somewhere
haphazardly or randomly hung in SR would be disrespectful/appropriation.
Did someone indigenous bring it in? If not they should probably take it
home, or if they are then we should work to find a more intentional place
to put it.
Paige
Tonight's East Bay Bike Party starts at West Oakland BART and ends at
North Berkeley BART the route seems particularly Sudoroom friendly so if
you want to join (or just watch) tonight might be a good night.
This month's theme is "Storybook Characters and Fairytale Creatures" so
there will no doubt be some interesting costumes:
https://www.facebook.com/events/864540958840870
See the complete map here.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1KLlG8TXpkBi6X4Q8Yqk2pi2NEFxNh1g&g…
I've often thought these rides would be great places to recruit new
members for Sudoroom.
-Peter
Hi Sudoers:
Riffing off last night’s Sudoroom visioning meeting: what if part of
Sudoroom’s mission was to expand the number of software developers in
the area using AI this enabling a vision for "local software"?
Train people who are technically savvy and interested in solving
problems for themselves and people around them, but don't want to become
fully-fledged programmers.
See this medium post for background:
https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
-Peter
Hi Sudo Room and SMAC,
CCL gave us some rat traps and I set them up in the locations pictured.
They are somewhat close together, because those were areas where theres poo
evidence, but may make sense to pick different spot. I havent set up traps
before so dont know.
I can volunteer checking the traps on Mondays and Saturdays. But we need to
be checking every other day so more people will need to volunteer too.
Please let others know if you move traps or if you notice one is set off.
SMAC has some cats they bring in time to time downstairs (who are also
helping us with this issue), so we should keep basement door closed/ be
ready to disarm the traps temporarily as needed.
Paige
We used to have a regular event every week - years ago - called JavaScript
Thursdays!
Wouldn't it be neat if we had another regular weekly event? It doesn't have
to be focused on a particular type of activity but having a regular event for
a while really makes things happen.
anyone interested?
-jake
