Firstly, hi everyone & I hope you are all looking forward to this month and the fun that it will bring as I know I am. It’s gonna be an amazing if not interesting month I know that for sure.
I’m Ryan (@kilasuit here & Xbox @kilasuit90 on YouTube @ryanyates1990 on Twitter/X ryanyates90 on LinkedIn @blog.kilasuit.org on BlueSky & more elsewhere) and I build and help in the maintainence of a number of different projects, some very new, some very old, some basically not used and some that are well used, like PowerShell/PowerShell where I am a collaborator and member of 3 of their working groups.
However, some of the things that I do maintain, some fully privately atm, and others partially privately include my Mental Health Affects Someone Like Me community site & community which has been a project with delays since 2019 when I started it and presented about it aT Ignite on Tour In London before presenting about Mental Health at Ignite in 2019. I maintain a brilliant js redirect for https://ignite.mhasl.me in this repo & the comments for that site are partially set up in this one & whilst I have more planned this month for this site and community, I have another big project in progress atm & I NEED YOUR HELP with it, especially as I would love to speak to maintainers Around The World (Daft Punk rules) about thier Mental Health management practices this month & also get more of us publishing content here there and everywhere about Mental Health as a maintainer as Our work is never over until we decide we are ready to be FIN & ideally write up 1 or more FinalInteractionNotes to hand over or close down a project properly.
I already started recently the DocTypes repo and am also spending time on that and the associated repos too. Which as I meantion in that repo all of this is in line with my personal & professional development plan, to ultimately end up being a trained multi-specialism therapist alongside IT Consulting & more.
One of the areas, in the for MHASL.ME (@mhasl_me on twitter & @mhasl.me on Bluesky) that I will be focusing on in the 2nd half of the month is opening the site up to contributors by making it a public repo and then starting the fun of designing a web store for it too.
Whilst, Yes Mental Health Does Affect Someone Like Me, I have great management practices for it, and whilst right now things aren’t great they aren’t like how bad they had been after homelessness, losing my dad to cancer and suffering burnout multiple times over the years.
I’ve been out of (paid) work & legally at this time I am on UK’s Universal Credit benefit which needs replacing and barely scraping by, with on the 1st of each & every month my Overdraft fees take me over my overdraft & I’m hoping banks like Monzo will change this practice and be more flexible in future whether or not they are politely asked to by government or not.
I don’t expect people to help out but I am always pleased when they do & do as much as I can to do the same & share some joy, music and knowledge, to do my bit to make things better bit by bit each day.
You don’t know how much I would love to get back to when I had a consistent supplies (& could afford a Pizza delivery on days like today) so that I can get on with all of my planned work, whist doing more cooking (like roast dinners) & baking (cakes and brownies and more) and to get all the stuff I have in this amazon giftlist bought which contains a mix of tech, books, kitchen stuff and random other stuff too. Feel free to use that as inspiration for gifting to others. I have it in my todo list to blog about why gifiting is so hard sometimes, whether it’s to others, or more often than not to ourselves.
I’m running a number of different events this month, starting first with an event on what would have been my dad’s birthday if he were still here.
This is a 39hour event on May 10th for Global Azure & PowerShell.org.uk where I am looking to raise funds for the hospice my dad was at in his final days, as well as towards replacing aging tech equipment & subscriptions and other things like DNS renewals etc - check that link for links to the fundrasiers as well as the Sessionize for submitting content for the event.
As part of that I want to try and get 1000 bits of content, whether that be full sessions, a repository that you want to share, a quick interview with you as a maintainer, where we can cover your projects and discuss all manner of things, and about how mental health affects us as maintainers, a open session to chat about Mental Health and much more. Bonus points if its Azure & PowerShell related, but I’m more looking for those stories like “This thing in Azure or this module in PowerShell inspired me to do this in AWS/GCP or Python/Ruby/Go/Rust etc” and vice versa.
Whilst my events will primarlly focus on the Microsoft stack of technologies, like Azure, M365, PowerShell & Windows Client/Server(& how we need WinPhone to come back) there’s plenty of wriggle room here to help me meet that 1000 items of content that I want to hit.
I so easily could cheat here and hack my requirements by doing a data scrape myself & then build some mechanism to auto-publish some IINs or Initial Interaction Notes as they are called, but that wouldn’t be as fun or inclusive & wouldn’t allow me to get to know more maintainers.
I am also thoughout all of May looking for as much feedback as I can via a number of different methods, including in my repos & via this catch-all form which is something I recommend you set up something similar yourself. I likely will rebuild this into a web app in the future as part of my c# learning journey.
So whilst this may seem like I’m in both the “asking a lot” & “doing a lot” modes, there are reasons for this, partly to make up for the downtime I’ve had, and becuase nothing shows your abilities than pushing yourself.
However, my goals in doing all this is to do the following
- Have Fun & learn more, whilst getting to meet new people & learn for/from/with them, because every day is a school day.
- Raise Awareness of Advanced Project Mangement juggling skills using any #AssistiveTech tool including AI Agents, Automation tooling, Accessibility tools & Project/Process management toolign
- Raise Awareness of Mental Health even more than I have already with MHASL.ME
- Get the MHASL.ME Shop up and running
- Start documenting & writing more blogs thanks to all research into DocTypes & more
- Actually Start Vlogging on my youtube channel and not just post some Guitar Hero Content
- Finish rebuilding of my slides
- Start work planning other events whether in-person or remote.
- Start the planning around my eventual thesis or 3
- Get my butt in gear and get the bits I need done to start being able to offer consulting services properly & legally
- Rejig my health in the process
- Stablise finances again
- Learn from this all and help my friends
- Give back to the community (my local one and the one we have as maintainers of software) with additional pay it forward mechanisms
So yeah, May is a heavy Manic Month, but it’s one I’m so looking forward to showing the world just how capable I am & being inspired by all that you do, and all the things that you show off this month.
Feel free to follow me on any of the socials & my repos, and I look forward to any conversations that happen from this.
(As Maintainers in this community you are getting this post first, before I take it to my blog and publish to the world on Sunday)
Lets have fun and build build build, share share share.
Catch yall somewhere soon.
Leave your events, repos etc for others to see as a comment - kThnxByeForNow 👋🏻