‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾
Welcome to the
System Crafters Newsletter!
Issue #006 - February 1, 2024
by David Wilson
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== Contents ==
1. Introduction
2. Announcing the new System Crafters Forum!
3. Feedback Requested: System Crafters Community Guidelines
4. Crafter News
5. Friday's Stream - Craftable Terminal Sessions with Zellij
6. Closing
== Introduction ==
Welcome to the new issue of the System Crafters Newsletter!
Exciting times in System Crafters world with another new announcement this week
and a few more coming over the next few weeks!
2024 will be the year that many of my goals for System Crafters will start to
materialize and I'm more motivated than ever to create a ton of valuable tools
and learning material for you.
Your support and participation is what makes this possible, and also makes this
community great!
-----
Are you interested in writing a tip or news entry for the newsletter?
Feel free to send drafts or recommendations to [email protected]
== Announcing the new System Crafters Forum! ==
Today I'm excited to announce the launch of the new System Crafters Forum!
-> https://forum.systemcrafters.net
For years now, our community has lacked a good middle ground between the main
System Crafters website and the various chat channels we've used (Discord,
Matrix, IRC) to offer a more reliable environment for asking questions, finding
answers, and sharing the cool things we've made.
I recently started looking into Discourse as an option and was very impressed
with the capabilities that they provide. I feel confident that our new forum be
the ideal home for many of the community activities that I'm planning in the
near future like hackathons, mini-conferences, courses, mentoring groups, and
more!
With the introduction of the forum, the IRC chat will become more of a lounge
for the community where people can hang out and discuss topics of interest in a
more ephemeral way. Any time a question in the chat is more deep than just a
one-line answer, it should probably move to the forum so that others can find
the answer in the future!
To start things off, I've added categories for relevant topics like Emacs, Guix,
and Programming:
-> https://forum.systemcrafters.net/c/emacs
-> https://forum.systemcrafters.net/c/guix
-> https://forum.systemcrafters.net/c/programming
There's probably a lot more we'd like to discuss, so create a post and suggest
other categories we should add!
-> https://forum.systemcrafters.net/new-topic?&category=General
If you're interested to participate, head to the forum site, browse around, and
then sign up for an account. We look forward to seeing you there!
== Feedback Requested: System Crafters Community Guidelines ==
While setting up the new forum, I decided that it would be a good time to
formalize some guidelines to protect the positive vibe of the community and help
newcomers feel that this is a great place to spend their time.
Yesterday I wrote a a draft of what I think our official Community Guidelines
should be:
-> https://forum.systemcrafters.net/t/feedback-needed-system-crafters-community-guidelines/
This is my first time writing a set of community guidelines so I would really
love your help to read them and give me your honest feedback!
Let me know your thoughts in a reply on the forum thread or reply directly to
this e-mail if you would prefer to give your feedback privately.
== Crafter News ==
Here are some interesting news items in the broader sphere of system crafting:
* Guile Hoot 0.3.0 has been released!
In this exciting new release, Guile Hoot becomes even more powerful by
the addition of a partial module system implementation. This means that you
import R7RS-style modules in the `(scheme ...)` namespace in your code.
More of R7RS-small has also been implemented! This brings us even closer to
having a full Scheme implementation that can run in any environment that
supports WebAssembly.
There have also been some quality of life improvements like the addition of
hash tables and automatic loading of `reflect.wasm`, so the development
experience should be even more smooth now!
Check out the official news post about the release here:
-> https://spritely.institute/news/guile-hoot-v030-released.html
We'll be experimenting with the new Hoot release in this week's stream!
* Protesilaos is moving his projects away from Sourcehut
In an unexpected turn of events, Protesilaos Stavrou, also known as Prot to
the Emacs community, has decided to move away from Sourcehut as the primary
collaboration site for his projects.
The primary reasons being that Sourcehut's interface is not very user-friendly
and that the e-mail driven workflow can often be a burden both for contributors
and maintainers.
As much as I like the ethos of Sourcehut and what they're aiming for, I do
think that more care needs to be put into the user experience to make it a
welcoming and effective platform for everyone to collaborate. Prot's decision
here definitely makes sense to me, though I think he should consider moving to
Codeberg instead of going back to GitHub :)
Read more about Prot's rationale on his blog post here:
-> https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2024-01-27-sourcehut-no-more/
* Sacha Chua is live streaming more frequently on YouTube!
Emacs guru and community aggregator Sacha Chua has been streaming more
frequently on her YouTube channel. She usually covers topics of interest that
she finds while putting together Emacs News for the week as well as discussing
her own Emacs Lisp hacks.
Check out her most recent stream here:
-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc2kpqgg8pU
Support her renewed interest in streaming by subscribing to her channel and
joining her next stream!
-> https://www.youtube.com/@sachactube
-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj73DQT4dmA
== Friday's Stream - Craftable Terminal Sessions with Zellij ==
In this week's stream, we'll take a look at a tool called Zellij which provides
a rich "terminal multiplexer" environment enabling you to create advanced
workspace layouts in the terminal with persistable sessions. It also supports
plugins written with WebAssembly which means we might be able to use Guile Hoot
to extend it!
If you like using terminal apps with Tmux, you'll definitely want to check this
out.
The stream will go live at Friday, February 2nd at 6PM EET (UTC+2),
check your local time on this page: https://time.is/compare/1800_in_Athens
You can find the stream at these URLs:
-> https://youtube.com/live/xzm5xiQKJB8
-> https://twitch.tv/SystemCrafters
-> https://systemcrafters.net/live-streams/february-2-2023/
== Closing ==
I hope you enjoyed this issue of the System Crafters Newsletter! I always want
to improve and streamline the content as time goes on so please send me your
thoughts and feedback by replying directly to this e-mail!
Until next time, Happy Hacking!
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David Wilson
[email protected]