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Farewell Facebook (and Meta)
I've made the decision to delete my Facebook account, and indeed all of my Meta accounts (eg. Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram).
I think I joined Facebook back in 2007, and yes Facebook has been a great way to keep in touch with family and friends, particularly those further away, so this is not something I've done lightly.
For a while I've had an uneasy feeling about Facebook and its parent company Meta having a decidedly seedier/unpleasant/questionable side. Recent political events in the USA and how Meta has positioned itself in relation to those were the last straw. This also follows my decision last year to delete my Twitter account for similar reasons.
I think there's a bit of a balancing act between being aware of current affairs and the political situation both locally and overseas, and trying to cope with what can seem like an endless stream of awful news. Those recent events in the USA really precipitated this, but they haven't had the monopoly on greedy, selfish, largely very rich people wanting to feather their own nests at the expense of the most vulnerable. There are many ways to express my disapproval or opposition to this. Deleting my account is a tiny, insignificant action on its own. But if it turns out to be part of something bigger, then maybe those people and companies might at least take note, if not change their behaviour.
I have now downloaded all my available data from Facebook (no idea if I'll ever refer to it, but better to get a copy before I go). Note that depending on what data you request, it can take up to 14 days for them to make it available. Weird that it can take that long - maybe there's a lowly work experience kid that is running around restoring data from dusty backup tapes for this!.
I am not leaving social media completely. I'm still on the following:
The Fediverse/Mastdodon
https://mastodon.online/@DavidRGardiner
This is probably my favourite, and I like the 'federated' way it works. So there's not just a single site/server, but you can choose one but still connect with folks on others. Think of it a bit like email - you can have your email hosted on Gmail but still correspond with someone who is using Hotmail.
Bluesky
https://bsky.app/profile/david.gardiner.net.au
The newer kid on the block. An alternative to the Fediverse, and probably because the UI looks so close to old Twitter, a lot of folks who are leaving Twitter are ending up here.
LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidrgardiner/
This is for work and professional content sharing and connections.
Be aware - I'm fussy about who I connect with on LinkedIn. If I haven't ever met you first or know who you are, I'm almost certainly going to decline your invitation.
Signal
A free and privacy focused instance messaging system. I am here, but tend to keep it private. I will suggest using this to the few people I have chatting with Messenger or WhatsApp.
Email
It's still a great way to keep in touch. Replace the first dot in my blog's address and you've figured out my email address! On the other hand, if you're a nasty spammer then ignore that suggestion.
Blogging
I've been blogging here for almost 20 years! I don't plan to stop, so if you want to keep up with what's got my attention (mostly technical, but sometimes less so) feel free to check back here regularly.
Real life
So catch up with me online using one of those methods, or go 'old school' and the next time you bump into me in real life, we'll have lots to talk about 😀
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4 years at SixPivot
Another year has passed, and today I clock up 4 years at SixPivot!
Looking back at last year's post, I must say it has been a consistent story.
I'm still enjoying working from home (and my heart goes out to those unfortunate to work for organisations with short-sighted management who are forcing a return to office for no good reasons other than a) they feel lonely in office themselves, b) they're looking at how much they're paying for empty offices or c) they don't trust their employees and figure if they can't see them in the office then how do they know that they're actually working? (To be clear, I think there are some valid reasons to work in an office, but these are not three of them).
I'm still enjoying the flexibility of a morning walk/bike ride/water the garden/pick blackberries/etc before I kick of the work day.
I even more value my SixPivot colleagues. The breadth of experience and opinions is so good. It was great to see them all at our SixPivot Summit last year, and I will again come this July. Plus we have our 'PPP' professional development day coming up in late March where we'll gather in two locations (Brisbane and Melbourne) for a day of technical training and knowledge sharing. (Think a mini 'DDD Conference' but just for Pivots!)
And it's always nice to get 'good vibes' points for my 'workversary'! 4 years means 400 points are mine to spend in the SixPivot rewards shop. Do I buy some gift cards, put them towards my next laptop, phone, a donation to charity or open source, a new SixPivot polo shirt, or maybe all of the above?
I'll be wrapping up my involvement with my current client at the end of February, so I'm looking forward to some new and challenging client engagements soon.
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Passing arguments to npm in PowerShell
This just caught me out. I was following the tutorial for the Astro web framework and it contains instructions to run this command:
npm create astro@latest -- --template minimal
The tutorial suggested you would then be prompted to enter a target directory.
Except I wasn't - I was seeing an interactive menu asking me to choose a template. This seemed weird as it kind of looks like the arguments above are telling it which template to use.
After a bit of experimenting I narrowed down the problem to running the command from PowerShell! (The command works fine in Bash or CMD). There's something in that line that PowerShell must be interpreting rather than just passing through to npm.
The solution that worked for me was to escape the dash. eg.
npm create astro@latest `-- --template minimal
With that, npm seems to see the correct arguments and runs as per the tutorial instructions.
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