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