Image: from https://www.gocadmium.com/resources/5-conference-speaking-tips-for-association-professionals

Software development conference CfPs (Calls for Papers, Presentations, Participation, etc.) closing in the coming 30 days include:

• Python conferences in Austria, Estonia, and Poland
• Ruby conferences in Bulgaria and the UK
• An Erlang/Elixir/BEAM conf in Sweden
• Tech-agnostic conferences in several European countries and states of the USA, plus Australia and Mauritius
• And more!

For more details, see:

https://www.codosaur.us/speaking/cfps-ending-soon

These are my definite speaking engagements in the future.  There is also a Likely Speaking Engagements page, for ones that are not yet definite.

Also, I will probably not be doing much speaking in 2026, at least until about October.  Until sometime around July, I will be very busy prepping for the move to Portugal.  After that, I can only leave Portugal and come back in once, until I receive my residency card, which could take a couple/few months.  So, I can’t commit to anything in July, August, probably September, and maybe even October.

You can always get the latest version of this list here.

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      \__\\ © 1987-2026  \_\\  @= |_____### _|_

You may have seen my blog post announcing WWWizzzard.  You may have toyed with it, and found that many webpages have frequent irrelevant tiny changes, such as a carousel, or a list in random order or made from a random selection.  I have now added a feature to help ignore those changes.

As of recently, WWWizzzard will accept two blocks of text in each site description.  Each one is treated as a list of strings.  For the first one, WWWizzzard will ignore all lines containing any of those strings.  (This is done case-insensitively.)  For the second one, WWWizzzard will ignore all DOM elements matching any of those CSS selectors.  (If you don’t know what DOM elements and CSS selectors are, just leave it blank, and it won’t change anything.)

Once I figure out a decent UI for it, I may add a feature to ignore blocks of text, from some starting string to some ending string.  That will help ignore such pieces on pages that don’t use semantic classes or IDs on their elements.  :-(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTMOFAYMg8E

My keynote, “ACRUMEN: What IS Software Quality Anyway?!” is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyFhs9YMpmo and my other session, “Kill All Mutants! (Intro to Mutation Testing” is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahfhOCrG1z4.

You may have seen my announcements about conferences looking for speakers.  You may have wondered how I keep an eye on so many.  The answer is mostly that I use a tool I wrote, to check web pages for changes.  That tool operates from the command-line, but I’ve been in the process of making a web version . . . that is now online!

WWWizzzard.com (“it checks the WWW while you ZZZ!”) lets you specify what web pages you want it to check, how often, and a few other options.  A basic level of usage is free, and more will be available for a reasonable price in the near future.

Please try it out, and let me know any problems you have with it, any further features you think would be useful for your use-case (but please see the Plans page first), and what that use-case is.

Thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9jmHE4HULc

This is a prediction I have made verbally many times over the past several years, but recently had occasion to write down, so I figured I may as well record it here for posterity.

===8<—cut-here—

Within a few decades, for most individuals, a “computer” will be a small box that could fit easily in a pocket or be worn like a watch or pendant.  Even most of that thing’s size will be physical protection, battery, a medium for personalization (the surface), and just making it big enough not to be lost so easily.  The actual computer itself will be a single smallish chip, or a few of them on a very small motherboard.  This will include at least the RAM, CPU, mass storage, and some communication as below.  (Not sure about GPU; that may be delegated to the various form factors as below.)

Now you may be wondering, how would we use such a tiny thing?  Their watch, phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop, and possibly further things such as VR glasses, brain implants, plus things we have yet to imagine, will be basically nothing but docking stations for the same “computer”, to allow for various sizes and types of human interface.  (Including possibly taking over GPU duties.)

Said chip won’t even have to be physically inserted or attached, but communicate over something basically equivalent to high speed very short range Bluetooth.  (Of course options would exist for use-cases where it would be further from the user, akin to today’s Bluetooth speakers.)  We’ll be back to having one “computer” per person, though maybe additional ones issued by work, and of course we nerds would still want to play with different kinds.  There will still be different kinds (or OSes) better suited to different tasks, but most people will still stick with one.

They’ll be cheap enough that you don’t need to do something like install Linux on an old one to make it affordable (versus the ones from Apple, with MacOS installed, or one that can run Windows reasonably performantly), though of course Open Source enthusiasts will still do so.  Within a few more decades they’ll be cheap enough that your kids might get them for free in their breakfast cereal.

(Servers are a different matter.  Just as with today’s machines, one of these may be enough for a small company’s shared-IT needs, while larger companies may need multiple, or something beefier, and there will be more and more “data centers” and VM providers.  This will NOT shrink them, as demand will grow to match or exceed supply.)

===8<—cut-here—

(Note, this is not including any breakthroughs in quantum computing.  I don’t foresee much happening there that would affect this much very soon.  There may be helpful breakthroughs in room-temperature superconductivity, but thermal noise remains a very thorny issue, never mind larger physical vibrations.)

So what do you think?  Write your thoughts below!