WEBVTT captioned by andrea
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Hello, welcome to my talk, the Emacs Buddy Initiative.
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Who am I?
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I'm Andrea. I work as a Clojure Software Engineer
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somewhere in the middle of the UK.
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And I started with Emacs during my PhD,
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thanks to my PhD supervisor
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that introduced me to this tool.
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And from now and from then,
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I am basically using it for everything.
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You can find more about this everything
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at ag91.github.io, that is my blog.
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So let's get into the talk.
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Why Emacs Buddy?
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Emacs Buddy is an initiative to bring us together.
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And the reason is because Emacs is a limitless tool.
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So you can keep learning about it,
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you can keep expanding it,
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and also takes time to get up to speed.
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So you may actually extend Emacs
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or you may actually get introduced,
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start using Emacs,
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but you could fall into all the traps
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or all the wasted times that other users have already gone through.
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And so, since there are a lot of amazing people
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in the Emacs community,
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why do every time redo the same error?
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So let's bring us together.
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And it would be amazing to get a one-to-one relation.
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So I have somebody that actually knows what you want to do,
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what you want to achieve with Emacs,
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and supports you because they have done a similar path to yours.
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And so they can remove some of the obstacles for you.
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So what can you expect?
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The main thing is guidance on your Emacs journey,
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because the Emacs journey is infinite, it doesn't really end.
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But the farther you go,
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the more value you get from this amazing tool.
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And that helps you save time.
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And at the same time, you can meet like-minded people.
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And so you can learn about Emacs or about your context,
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if they are in, for example, if you are a physicist,
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they are physicists or they are interested in the field.
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You may not only learn about Emacs,
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but you can learn also something about the field.
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And anyway, the idea is that you can move forward together.
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Somebody asked, why not just mailing lists or Reddit?
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Well, the point is that mailing list is many people
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can help you solve one issue that you have.
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And that naturally doesn't become a discussion
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of where you are from, what are you trying to achieve,
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and where you want to move forward with using this editor
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or using this tool.
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Instead, here, we want something more personal,
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something more like you tell your story.
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And if I can help you achieve what you need,
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I am also interested in your story as a buddy.
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So given that, how do you get in touch with a buddy?
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Well, the thing is easy.
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Just ping me at this email, andrea-dev@hotmail.com.
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And I can put you in touch with one of the buddies
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that are available.
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Or you can contact them personally, directly,
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because on the web page, on the Emacs Buddy web page,
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there are links to their material or their websites.
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And sometimes you can find the contact yourself.
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Anyway, I am a facilitator.
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So if you contact me, I will find the contact for the person
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that you want to get in touch.
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You can also get in touch with me.
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I'm a buddy myself.
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How did it go so far?
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Well, from when I started the initiative,
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more or less we had 10 buddies.
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We had 10 buddies that are available to help you
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with your Emacs journey.
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And I buddyed myself, or I got in touch
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with people that wanted a buddy, about eight people.
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Each of these conversations was quite interesting.
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I decided to paraphrase one.
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I had this user that got in touch and said:
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"I used Emacs for 10 years.
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I'm curious about the initiative,
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and here is my GitHub that I started writing recently,
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Elisp projects", projects in Elisp to extend Emacs.
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I looked at their code.
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I suggested, "Oh, why don't you use dash?
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It's something that I'm familiar with.
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Maybe you may like it as well."
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And then I started asking, "Oh, what do you do with Emacs?
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Have you tried a note taking tool like Org Roam?"
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And then the conversation started.
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So "yeah, I tried Org Roam version one.
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I use my own thing.
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But what is it...
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I'm curious about version two.
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Did you use it?
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Do you know about Luhmann?"
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That is the inspiration of Org Roam
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and the backlinking and stuff.
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And then I started the conversation about that.
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And we discussed about functional programming.
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We discussed a bit about philosophy and went on.
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And then this conversation is not currently going.
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So we arrived to a point in which it sort of died out.
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But if I want or if they want, they can ping me back.
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I can ping them.
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So it's sort of a reference of this person exists
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and is an interesting person to chat with when I have something
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to say to them.
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And what if you want to be a buddy?
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Well, if you want to be a buddy, it's easy as well.
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So basically, just open a PR on the Emacs buddy repository.
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That is something that I am maintaining at the moment.
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Or simply send me the information.
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Somebody just sent me an email with the information.
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I have created the commit to make it public available.
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The information is just your name, a summary,
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what kind of user you are so that you can attract
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the right people to you, and a link to your material
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so that if they are curious about your summary or about you,
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they can actually go and check and even contact you directly.
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If they contact via me, I will know your email anyway
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from the PR you open.
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So that is all.
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There are ideas to maybe... if... this is basically
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an advertisement for this initiative
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so that we can get people that want to be helped
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or people that want to help.
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It's building up organically, so no rush
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to make this thing grow, escalate enormously.
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But for example, there are ideas to join this with the meetup
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talk that is being happening in the conference.
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So for example, if you find out something very interesting,
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you can bring the discussion that you have with your buddy
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into a meetup so that the group with which you speak is bigger.
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There are ideas like that.
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But first of all, just get in touch if you want to find
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like-minded people that want to help you with your Emacs
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journey or if you want to help others.
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Thank you very much.
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Enjoy the rest of the talks and chat to you soon.