James Bell
@sarcainian.bsky.social
100 followers 520 following 21 posts
(he/him) @[email protected] (Mastodon) Web head, reader, cook, rubyist and all that.
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Reposted by James Bell
Reposted by James Bell
urgently need you guys to know that this French politician below 1) didn't know he'd been appointed as a minister until he saw it on TV 2) reacted by going: "bah pfff voilà"
Le nouveau ministre de la Ruralité, Michel Fournier, raconte avoir appris sa nomination à la télé

Le plus vieux ministre nommé sous la Ve République précise avoir discuté avec le Premier ministre «deux jours avant», sans que rien ne soit arrêté. «Comment j’ai réagi ? Bah pfff voilà», résume-t-il.
Le nouveau ministre de la Ruralité, Michel Fournier, raconte avoir appris sa nomination à la télé
Le plus vieux ministre nommé sous la Ve République a précisé avoir discuté avec le Premier ministre «deux jours avant», sans que rien ne soit arrêté.
www.liberation.fr
Reposted by James Bell
Having a day of extreme cognitive dissonance today. On the one hand, I'm going to Parliament for a Westminster Hall debate in honour of Ada Lovelace Day, a thing that I created in 2009 and that I'm very proud of.

Otoh, I'm broke.

By many measures, ALD was a huge success — people picked up the...
Reposted by James Bell
The Machine Learning stuff is excellent.
www.zoa.io is taking data from dozens of in-home sensors, across thousands of homes, with years of historic information - and creating a way to predict energy usage.

Beyond the LLM hypetrain, there's a quiet revolution.

#AIforTheRestOfUs
Reposted by James Bell
Windows 10 goes out of support today. My fave useless fact about w10 is that the iconic blue desktop background is a *photograph* - not CGI.

Tiny 'making of' vid here - youtu.be/_2RacX9DgWM...
Three images showing photographers in a studio, standing around a black curtained area with a projector and a 'Windows' logo etched onto a glass pane. The lower image shows a version of the iconic blue windows background, with blue lasers outlining and passing through an angled Windows logos against a dark background.
Reposted by James Bell
My team at Plane is hiring experienced full stack engineers. We use Rails, Postgres, Phlex, Vite, TypeScript and Svelte. I don’t have a full job description yet, but drop me a DM if you want to know more.
Reposted by James Bell
As usual, the weird thing about a newsletter is that subscribers generally come in at random, while un-subscribers tend to cluster right after you release a new newsletter, and some people go "why am I subscribed to that thing again?"

Anyway, subscribe at buttondown.com/noelrap
The Dynamic Rubyist
A newsletter about Ruby, Dynamic Languages, the tools you use for working in dynamic languages, dynamic programmers, and dynamic teams. From Noel Rappin, co-author of Programming Ruby 3.3 (the Pickaxe...
buttondown.com
Reposted by James Bell
Reposted by James Bell
Reposted by James Bell
You can't always trust your gut when you're just starting out, but if you've had at least one good job in your life, you know what it feels like. Trust that.

link: charity.wtf/2025/06/08/o...
Reposted by James Bell
Another option to upgrade from Windows 10 is Windows 95.
It's 85 versions ahead, it will blow your mind how advanced it is.
New installation of Windows 95 on a 1990s ThinkPad
Reposted by James Bell
🎙️ Phillip Campbell – “Sidekiq at Gusto” @ Gusto

- The real bottleneck: your database
- Build early-warning systems (SLA queues, kill switches)
- Maturity = dashboards, playbooks, telemetry

“A 0.0001% error still means thousands of failures daily.”
Reposted by James Bell
There's a lovely BBC Archive online about the 60th anniversary of the Asian Programming Unit. Which includes this lovely photo of my mum, Lalita Ahmed, (with script on far left) who presented Gharbar. Once she took me along and I watched from the gallery. canvas-story.bbcrewind.co.uk/asian60/
Reposted by James Bell
And here's a newsletter/blog post

noelrappin.com/blog/2025/10...

Part one of a likely two-part series about the languages that influenced Ruby.

This time, Perl, with all of its shortcuts and syntax quirks. The things Ruby took and the things Ruby left behind...
Reposted by James Bell
Want a full run down of the events?! Buckle up readers!
Edinburgh's Radical Book Fair is less than a month away!

4 Days of bookstalls from 50+ presses
20 events incl DragQueen Storytelling, Community Lunch & 2 Cabarets!

Full program is live, hybrid & either £5 or free!
5-9Nov: Join us!

tinyurl.com/RadicalBookF...
lighthousebookshop.com/events/edinb...
Reposted by James Bell
Reposted by James Bell
In 2019 I married a man. I won the British quiz championships. I was diagnosed with a degenerative illness. I relentlessly made the news in New Zealand. I fell apart on Taskmaster.

This memoir is the story of how a shy gay Bengali teenager primed for a medical career, changed direction.
Reposted by James Bell
CFP for #wrocloverb 2026 is already open!

⏲️ We aim for ~30 min talk
🗣️ First-time speakers are more than welcome!
🗓️ We are waiting for your submissions until January 13th
PaperCall.io - wroclove.rb 2026
www.papercall.io
Reposted by James Bell
🎶Whoa, Black Betty🎶
Reposted by James Bell
Tickets for #Rubycon are finally available, grab yours before it's too late! ti.to/rubycon/ruby...
Reposted by James Bell
I’ve been feeling grim about my apparent inability to manage dozens and dozens of comms channels by ~building more and better toolchains~ or w/e and idk I woke up at 5am 100% certain that this is actually all a weird lie 🤷🏻
I counted up the number of ways (platforms, accounts, apps) that people in my professional and personal lives plus healthcare systems and kid’s school are contacting me and uhh. This is objectively impossible.