September — volunteer stuff, coding, and more dust biting

First:
On September 29, we lost another member of the extended family. This should explain why this instalment is somewhat late — the ceremony was last Monday.

So, what else transpired?

As I said in the last instalment, I was working on a Windows service to automate the handling of subscription requests from the blog site (the stuff that happens if you hit the Subscribe To Updates button above). I wanted the service to be capable of, asynchronously, handling monitoring multiple blog sites. Over the last 18 months, I had already refreshed my knowledge on asynchronous programming, which paid off.
The new service has now been up and running for almost a month, servicing two WordPress sites, and it has successfully processed valid requests as well as successfully refused to process invalid requests (and log this, and dump them in an error container while doing so).

So, I think I’ll call that a win. Afyter almost a year of hardly ever starting the IDE, and definitely after not coding anything new, I’m still capable of figuring out from scratch how to write a service using the .NET 8 worker service model for the first time, writing asynchronous code in that context, using a library I had never seen before, and make it work.
I was expecting to, after a month, see a sizable number of red dots in the app event log, was well as seeing a service having been stopped, but no such thing.
So I guess I’ll do a last code review, update the version number, and call it production code.

In the process, I have experimented with Github Copilot (which is now free, so I don’t miss my employer’s subscription anymore), and I’ve found the current free version to be just as good as what I was used to a year ago: yes, it is surprisingly good, and yes, it is also surprisingly stupid — so one still needs to treat its code as if it was written by a freshly educated developer with little to no domain knowledge.
Which is just how I like it. It takes a lot of typing out of the equation, and it still requires a good grasp of what you’re doing.
I like it that way — after all, I do this to have fun now.

September was also the month in which I seriously picked up some volunteer work.
We have a village team that acts as a link and a communications channel between our village and the municipality it belongs to. I joined their meeting in July, and in the September meeting, they decided that they were happy to make me chairman.
So I guess I’m toast, but it keeps me off the street. We’ll see how that goes.

I also volunteered to function as a ‘chat pal’ for people who are new to this country, in order to practice Dutch with them, and I was assigned my first newcomer, a Palestine guy who ended up in Syria, and then, when the shit done hit the fan there as well, fled to The Netherlands. He has his own barber shop, which he tells me is going well, but he still struggles speaking Dutch.

The idea of a ‘chat pal’ is to give newcomers an opportunity to speak Dutch without having to be afraid to fail.

We’ve now had two sessions of about an hour. The first one we focused on the practical stuff and getting to know each other, and the second session I concentrated on mainly having him listen as I described some of the photos that I made, trying to engage him in the conversation. Next session, he’ll be telling about vacation photos he made. That’ll be interesting!

There is not much in the way of photography to show you — up to now, our autumn colours are somewhat disappointing. Hopefully next month!