My company has just announced that there will be a round of layoffs soon. They just laid off a bunch of C-levels. They're giving us the opportunity to "opt in" to "workforce reduction" with a promise of three months severance.

It's been pretty tumultuous here, lately, to be honest, and I'm considering it.

But, I've got a wife and four kids to take care of, and I've never willingly left a job when I didn't have another one already lined up. And we've got good benefits (healthcare and dental) right now, so I really don't want to give that up.

Maybe if I had something lined up with similar pay and benefits, I could do it.

So, I'm looking for any recommendations. I'm a developer (of roughly twenty years), who has been doing a lot of for the past year, and I've gotten very proficient at that as well.

I'm looking for a US-based company, and a Principal/Staff/Senior Developer role.

Anybody have any good leads? My website is at https://danielrayjones.com, and I can be emailed at [email protected].

Dan Jones danielrayjones.com

My six-year-old has expressed an interest in learning how to program. I'm not really sure where to start. He definitely has the right kind of inquisitive mindset for it, though.

I taught a high school class for a little while, but that had a specific, very set curriculum.

And I taught myself when I was just a few years older than he is now. But that was with a Commodore 64 in BASIC. So I don't really want to start him there.

Anybody have any experience teaching young kids programming? I do know of the MIT Scratch language, but aside from that?

I'm starting to learn Go. At work we're splitting out some parts of our architecture into a few microservices, and our Chief Architect decided we should write them in Go, instead of our usual PHP.

I've been enjoying learning it. It's been a long time since I've really tried to learn a completely new thing (as opposed to a new framework or whatever).

As a project to get myself into this, I've been thinking about building my own Fediverse server in go. Architecturally, I want it to be a lot like microblogpub, which I currently use. I actually want to be able to have a clear migration from one to the other.

Like microblogpub, my new project (which I'm tentatively calling gopub) will be a single user instance, intended to be easily hosted on your own computer, with a fairly simple sqlite database, and focused on broad ActivityPub and IndieWeb compatibility.

But I've got some ideas for a few features that I haven't seen elsewhere.

For example, I was thinking it might be cool to have alternate handles for a single user, to only follow certain things. E.g., if I'm [email protected], and somebody wants to follow me, but not see any boosts from others, instead of following [email protected], maybe they instead follow [email protected]. Or, if they only want to follow my posts that include a particular hashtag, they can follow [email protected].

Similarly, a single user with multiple handles would be nice. I think Friendica has this, but I'm considering including it in my project as well.

And one thing I really want to add is location check-in. Basically, the Fediverse equivalent of Foursquare. ActivityPub already has the vocabulary for this, but I haven't seen it implemented anywhere.

I'm still at the very, very early stages. Who knows if I'll ever get it in a usable state. And I'm working on it during my extremely limited free time. But I'm excited to start a new project.