Avris
Last night we were inches away from the Eurovision Song Contest dying a tragic death… I was privileged to be able to fulfil my long time dream and be in the live audience for this amazing event that unites dozen of countries on a continent that used to be torn by constant wars. It was an extraordinary experience, by far the best couple of shows I've ever attended. And yet, coming back home from it felt like the whole crowd has just been punch in a gut. After all I've seen, I don't believe for a second that the apparent support for Israel was genuine and organic. They've used one of our favourite things in the world as a propaganda tool for genocide, and I'm fucking disgusted.
(~7 min read)
As a software developer I can't help but look at all the issues plaguing social media and think that surely they can be fixed with code somehow – we just need a cool distributed protocol or something, right? But the thing is, no amount of techy magic is going to help here, because the problems are not technical – they're policy issues.
(~3 min read)
i took this picture exactly 12 years ago, early in the morning, at lake garda in italy.
it's a very special photo for me – it marks a day i now consider the first day of my new life 
️
(~5 min read)
A big chunk of my free time in the last week has been consumed by work on restoring a bunch of my projects after my hosting provider, OVH, completely removed my server and backups. Here's what happened.
(~14 min read)
There's a song that stole my heart and has been living in my head rent-free for the last few weeks. Before hearing it, the thought “enbies should pick their anthem” had never really occurred to me – but now I can't think of a better contender to that title than “The Code” by Nemo.
(~3 min read)
Nobody likes ads, obviously. But what came as a painful surprise for me is that they don't just annoy people who see them – but also those who try to monetise their projects. It's not just a matter of putting a few tags on your page and waiting for a big fat wire transfer.
The process is exhausting and I feel the need to rant about it, as well as maybe warn people who might be embarking on a similar journey… so here we go.
(~6 min read)
Alejandra Caraballo posted a video of a powerful testimony by Lola Smith, a 12-year-old nonbinary person forced to beg for their rights in front of the Florida Medical Board. This video is both terrifying and empowering. Indeed, everyone should see it.
But transphobes transphobing and trans people being forced to defend their dignity is just a part of the struggle. Another one is how our “allies” are pretending to ally…
(~3 min read)
DWH Delft organised a letter writing campaign to advocate for the passage of the trans ID bill in the Netherlands.
As much as I'd personally prefer to remove gender markers from official documents entirely, I believe that if it has to be there, it should at least be reasonably easy for trans people to make it reflect their real gender. So here's my letter:
(~4 min read)
A user suggested adding a timezone field to Pronouns.page. This website lets people, among other things, create a card with info about how they want to be referred – their pronouns, names, etc. But it also has some generic fields, like age or links, so the team was onboard with the idea of adding some more basic info: not just timezone, but while we're at it, why not also a location?
Well, adding a location is not as easy as it seems…
(~7 min read)
When it comes to DevOps, I'm just the “dev”.
I write code, but I'd rather have someone else worry about making sure it keeps running as intended.
I manage my personal VPS, I manage some servers at work, but I wouldn't call myself an expert in that area at all.
So I'm super proud of myself and how well it went when I migrated a big project to a new machine 
The downtime was just 15 minutes! Here's the story, if you're interested.
(~6 min read)
Hello. My name is Andrea Vos.
But arriving at that name was quite a journey, so I figured I might write the story down.
(~4 min read)