Bulletin 2025 Week 4 · Monday January 20th

The pace of events across the tech community is really increasing. This week we have social events from Rust and Friends and EdinburghJS, plus several online webinars on data topics. Rust and Friends have two meetups this week, one evening pub meetup and one daytime coffee. It’s great to see provision for folks who might not be able or inclined to make an evening event.

I’ve added channels for #rust and #python in the community discord for the respective meetup groups. In building out the Scottish Technology Club community I’m keen to provide a place for people to grow their own groups. Meetups can ask for a new channel on our server, and when they outgrow a single channel they can move to their own server. My philosophy for community building is that a network is stronger than a single node!

In content from the Scottish community:

• Ljupche posted a video on why choosing the correct data structure is important
• Michael posted about EV Infrastruture on the AddJam blog.
• Jedidiah posted a Game of Life Web Component on his blog. If you are interested in coding cellular automata and creative coding you might want to check out Patrick Nasralla’s talk at EdinburghJS from June 2023.
• Kelsie Murphy has given his personal website a refresh. You can find a link to his GlasgowJS talk on green software via his about page.
• Daniel (previous GlasgowJS speaker) posted his word of the year on his blog.

I missed these when they were posted in December:

• Rachael posted on How to map vehicle meeting points using ArcGIS Maps SDK for Flutter. You can also watch Rachael’s talk on mapping at EdinburghJS in November 2023.
• Rory posted a gist to visualise your git commits in your terminal. You can watch Rory’s EdinburghJS talk on d3 data viz that he gave in September 2022 (second talk).

I have started a Patreon account for folks who attend the meetups and want to support the Scottish Technology Club. There is no obligation to become a supporter: the meetups are free to attend and supporting doesn’t get you any special benefits over regular attendees. We have catering costs of between £200-300 per event for the JavaScript meetups, and a few other subscription costs to keep things running smoothly. The subscriptions might be useful for people who could convince their employers to support at a ~£50 per month level, but couldn’t stretch to a full sponsorship of £300 per event. I want to put the community on a sustainable footing with a wide variety of funding methods (corporate, personal and grant funding). This is an experiment to see what works, and I welcome questions, feedback and further ideas. Scottish Technology Club and the Edinburgh and Glasgow JavaScript events are run by me, Jamie McHale, via my company Telaco Ltd.