Really looking forward to speaking at @kc_dc this week, seeing all my friends, and nerding out. I'll be talking about Reticulum and doing a classic workshop—Putting the D&D in TDD. I am not, however, looking forward to the drive. See ya in 600 miles!

White sage sounds like it would smell amazing. Not sure I want to smell un sabio blanco.

CORE—the Central Ohio Radio Enthusiasts—are meeting on September 1st. This month we have @marknoble KE8BZW presenting D-STAR: Digital Voice, Data, and Callsign Routing. Lot's of people have D-STAR-capable radios and have never used the digital features of them. Mark's life purpose is to change that. D-STAR—Digital Smart Technologies for Amateur Radio—is an open digital voice and data standard developed by the Japan Amateur Radio League. Rather than putting your voice on the air as analog FM, it sends a digital bitstream with a low-speed data channel riding alongside it, and it routes contacts by callsign instead of by frequency. Call another operator by their callsign and the network figures out which repeater to deliver you to. Mark will introduce D-STAR from the ground up: what it is, where it came from, and how it compares to analog FM and to the other digital modes you'll run into on the air. He'll cover what it takes to get started—a radio, a registration, and either a repeater in range or a hotspot of your own—along with what the internet-linked reflectors make possible once you're on. You should join us. The meeting is on Tuesday, September 1st. We're meeting at @CGI_Global's office in Westerville so props to them for letting us use their space well past business hours! Details are in the link and please RSVP so we can make sure we buy enough pizza. Link: core.radio

I'm available. Yep. Like so many others, I was a casualty of the "reduction in force" that Redis executed a couple of weeks ago. We just call them "layoffs" where I come from, but language is gonna inflate. George Carlin would be proud. I'm not angry, although I was a bit shell-shocked when it happened. This is the first time in my career that I have been let go for any reason. It's been a new experience for me and has taken some time to process. It shattered an illusion of certainty that I had—that the job would only end when I left it and the paychecks would always come. Of course, I always knew logically this was false, but things aren't really real until they are. I'm glad to have had this illusion shattered. I think this is called "growth". And this shattering has led to an epiphany. I've spent my entire career as an employee. Beholden to companies big and small to help make their lines go up. Coding and speaking and teaching in exchange for a salary to pay for the mortgage and the bills and a retirement. I have been very blessed, and I am very grateful. I have a retirement account and an iPhone and a place to call home. I love the coding and speaking and teaching that have funded these wonderful things. I love to help people in their efforts to make their lines go up. But I've always wanted to work for myself. To help people more directly. So I'm gonna give it a shot. I'm going independent. Perhaps you need some help? I can help you build applications—AI-powered or not. I can reach, teach, and engage developer communities and get your solution in front of them. I can embed with your teams and teach them AI-assisted development and Agile engineering practices like TDD and pair programming. And if you're thinking about using Redis, I can help with that too. I'm available. Connect with me here on X, send a message, or check out my website at guy.dev.

CORE, the Central Ohio Radio Enthusiasts, are meeting next week. This month we have Tom Graham presenting Going Vertical: Signals from the Sky. It's a talk about launching weather and pico balloons and tracking their movement around the globe. I saw it at CodeMash and there are tons of fascinating things in it. You should join us. It's Tuesday, August 4th. Details are in the link and please RSVP so we can make sure we buy enough pizza. And special thanks to @CGI_Global for providing the meeting space. Link: core.radio/

This is who runs this account.

Folks seem to like my technical talks. @jalakoo and I sat down the other day and talked about how I build them—the strategy, the structure, the thought process. The beard helps, but there's more to it than that. Check out the video. youtube.com/watch?v=8ZLssdV3…

Fine-tuning is the new stored procedure. Logic pushed into the wrong layer. It's fast, of course. No remote lookups. It's as close to the model as you can possibly get. But it's a serious pain to version, to test, or to understand six months later.

The monthly meeting of the Central Ohio Radio Enthusiasts is on this coming Tuesday. This month, I'll be speaking about #Reticulum. Don't know what Reticulum is? Not a problem. I'll explain what it is, how it works, and how to write software for it. But it's not just a talk this time, we're getting hands on and building an ad hoc Reticulum network right there in the room. And by we, I really mean we. Bring your #LoRa boards, your laptop, your Raspberry Pis, cables, hubs, switches, and whatever networking gear you think might be fun to try to get on the network. Most of it will work. Details, as always, are on the website. Please go there and RSVP so we can get a head count. Doors open at 6:00 pm. Talk starts at 6:30. The address is: 570 Polaris Pkwy Suite 200 Westerville, Ohio 43082 Second floor, at the end of the hallway Our gracious host, as always, is @CGI_USA. Thanks for giving us a place to be the nerds that we are! core.radio/

MCP is the WSDL of the AI world.

I'm going live with @code on YouTube today at 9am PT. Gonna do some Redis Agent Memory, some VS Code Copilot, and a little bit of ham radio! Live coding and AI will be involved so it could be brilliant or it could end in fire and tears. Watch to find out! youtube.com/watch?v=DyAxSCk-…

My beard has opinions, apparently.

I built an agentic thing for an upcoming livestream that I'll be on. While building that agentic thing, I learned a lesson. I already knew the lesson. But I didn't know that I knew the lesson. Pretty sure this is called an epiphany. You probably know it too and might benefit from the epiphany. So, I'm gonna share it and then shamelessly plug the livestream. The thing I built is called Earshot. Earshot consists of three agents: two listeners—one on a microphone, one on my ham radio—that transcribe whatever they hear, decide if it needs any correction, and write it down. And a chatbot that reads what they wrote and lets you, well, chat about it. That's the whole app. Here's the cool bit. These three agents never talk to each other. The listeners don't know the chatbot exists. The chatbot doesn't know the listeners exist. They just read and write the same shared memory. Ain't nobody wired to anybody. If that sounds familiar, it should. It's decoupling. The same decoupling we've done with message queues and shared databases and job tables for decades—producers on one side, consumers on the other, some sort of store in the middle. Neither end holding a reference to the other. I reached for it intuitively without realizing I was implementing the same distributed-systems pattern I've used scores of times in the past. And since this isn't really new, the tradeoffs are the same. No delivery guarantees, no ordering. Things happen when they happen if they happen. Decoupling buys you flexibility at the cost of certainty, same as ever. But that flexibility is so, so nice. It lets you scale and it lets you extend. Since nothing is wired together, you can add more listeners and more types of listeners, more chatbots and more types of chatbots. Potentially a lot more if your shared state can scale with them. In Earshot, I used Redis for the shared state, specifically Redis Agent Memory. It was easy to use and gives me scaling, scaling that my toy agents don't really need. But your agents, which do real work for real users, will totally need it. Probably sooner than you think. I built all of this in VS Code and used GitHub Copilot to assist. In particular, I used Redis' set of agent skills so that Copilot would know how, and more importantly when, to use Redis Agent Memory's APIs. I plan to demo it all on VS Code Live this Thursday, June 4 at 9am PT. Join @ReynaldAdolphe and me as we take a chatbot that starts with no memory and, one capability at a time, learns to listen to what is in earshot. Livestream: youtube.com/watch?v=DyAxSCk-… GitHub repo with the demo: github.com/redis-developer/r… Redis Agent Skills: github.com/redis/agent-skill… Redis Agent Memory & Redis Iris: redis.io/agent-memory/ redis.io/iris/ @Redisinc @code @GitHubCopilot

Hey folks. The Central Ohio Radio Enthusiasts is meeting tomorrow night at @CGI_Global in Westerville. The topic is DMR, or digital mobile radio, and Alex Barbur will be showing us how to use it, not only for voice communications, but as an IP transport. If you're interested, all the details are in the link. And, please RSVP so we know how much pizza to get! core.radio/#meetings