Rae Knowler

This February, I was lucky enough to go to the very first DevOpsDays Geneva. DevOpsDays is a conference series taking place all around the world. There have been two events in Zürich so far (and another one is coming up in May) but this was the first in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

I read a lot, both on paper and on an e-reader, and recently I've been using Calibre to organise and tag my ebooks. Calibre is free and open-source software and I love it! What would be even cooler, though, is having access to my meticulously organised collection on the go, so I could look up novels whose titles are on the tip of my tongue, easily download something new to read on my phone, or send books to friends who would appreciate them when I think of it, instead of waiting till later and probably forgetting. (Where legally appropriate, of course.) That's where the Calibre Content Server comes in.

This January, I volunteered to help out at the Zürich Swiss Game Jam/Global Game Jam location. In between setting up the room (a huge art space filled with various strange displays), making coffee and slicing pizza, I had about 24 hours to make a game. It was pretty good, but now I've added a lot more content and Numbers is finally what I hoped it would be. What's more, David Stark made a whole soundtrack for it!

About me, my work and where else I can be found on the web

This April, I travelled to Florence for the eighth PyCon Italia, to give my talk about Python, Unicode and Localisation. I ended up making friends at one of the most memorable conferences I've enjoyed so far.

In March 2017, I went to PyCon Slovakia, held in Bratislava at the Slovak University of Technology. This was only the second time PyCon had been held in Slovakia, and I found out about it by accident: while searching for how to do something in Python, I saw a Google ad for early-bird tickets to the conference and was intrigued. It's rare and surprising, but it turns out advertising can work!

This February I went to the Swiss Python Summit at Rapperswil Hochschule für Technik, a one-day conference now in its second year. I love that there's a Python conference so close to me, and that it's grown significantly since the first iteration.

In February 2015 I gave a Liiptalk to my colleagues, introducing the open data portal platform CKAN.

In September 2016, I spoke at PyCon UK on Python, Locales and Writing Systems.

Details of talks I've given, with relevant links and videos.

Chromium, like Chrome, runs Google's A-B trials (or Field Trials) on users' computers. This is what happened when one of those locked up my machine without warning.

... so far! This is one that Michelle Sanver and I ran into the other day while we were pair programming, and I'm sorry to report that we still haven't figured out exactly what was going on.

I am nonbinary and use non-gendered pronouns. I wrote this short page to explain what I mean by that.

In June 2015, I spoke at DjangoCon Europe on Hypothesis, randomised testing for Django.

This Friday and Saturday, Opendata.ch, together with the ETH Zürich and the FORS in Lausanne, held the Open Research Data Hackdays. The Hackdays marked the launch of the Open Research Data Platform Switzerland. It was an opportunity for programmers, researchers, and the interested public to get together and turn new eyes onto real data.

This blogpost about Chinese and Japanese typefaces was originally published a few years ago on an old blog. It was recently posted to Hacker News, where it spawned an interesting comment thread, so I've decided to repost it here.

Blogs and websites I read frequently and recommend