I went to the EdinburghJS meetup for the first time last night. Although I've done lots of web development, including making live-updating 3D smart city maps with WebGL I don't think I'd class myself as a "Javascript developer" (Please go away, imposter syndrome) so I was a bit nervous. It turns out to have been a nice event; everyone was very friendly so I needn't have worried.

I heard of the event through the IndieWebForum and the idea was to work on our own personal websites. The around-the-free-pizza conversations were so very interesting that I didn't actually get round to working on my website.

Personal mapping

I've been experimenting writing software which breaks down silos between "apps" and related to this we talked about "Personal mapping". What does this mean? Maybe making maps of things that are important to you could be fun. Why shouldn't you be able to view your address book as a map and see where your friends are? Maybe you could map where some important events in your life have happened, linking to photos of the event.

I recently showed Cicely LeafletJS and she used this to make a tune map of "Some tunes I learned in Iain Fraser's Scots Music Group fiddle class in 2025". It's in a very early stage but we thought this could be an interesting way to link to some of the blog posts she intends to write. It's fun to make little experiments like this and think about what personal websites could be.

GeoRSS is an interesting thing (It's an existing RSS feed but augmented with points and shapes so you can link things to a map) so I'd like to make a GeoRSS feed aggregator/mapper at some point. Wikidata has lots of local information, and thinking about local browsers for this is interesting.

Making kinder software

Reading the news in 2026 hasn't been fun for me. I'm unlikely to be able to influence certain people, but I decided that one thing that I can do is to try to make small, but positive differences in our local community.

So from this our little discussion group wondered "How can we make kinder software?" and this question really appealed to me. James had an idea of software which tried to connect smaller groups of people locally rather than large scale, global software. We didn't really know how this would work but posing the question is the first step.

Science finding: Free pizza makes you sink

The group headed off to the pub after, but I'd promised we would go swimming so I headed off. It turns out that while paid for pizza floats, free pizza is very dense and sinks. So I'm not sure swimming after pizza was wise, but at least it's a dubious finding for science. (My labrador dog like hoovering up of a last, cold slice before it went in the bin might be a consideration here but let's not go into that).

I'm glad I went to the event - it was nice to meet some new people - and I must keep up to date with the Scottish technology club calendar. Thank you to Jamie for organising, and to Perk for the pizza.