Our time aligns on strange axes, sometimes. Last palindrome day, 11/11/11, found me walking the streets of Gothenburg with Werner Koch, the GPG maintainer. Werner said that in Germany, the carnival season opens on the 11th of November, at 11:11:11 in the morning. Today, 21022012, closes the carnival week here in Catalunya.

I was in Gothenburg for FSCONS. It so happens that the videos for the talk I gave there, Guile: Free Software Means of Production, just came out last week. So, as another point along that carnival axis, I offer in <video> form:

Click to watch

Alternately you can download the video directly (~112MB, 50 minutes). There are notes too, a superset of the slides from the talk.

As I said back then, this one was aimed at folks that didn't necessarily know very much about Guile. It was also different from other talks in that it emphasized Guile as a general programming environment, not as an extension language. Guile is both things, and as the general-purpose side gets a lot less publicity, I wanted to emphasize it in this talk.

In the last 20 minutes or so, we did a live-hack. Inspired by a tweet by mattmight, we built Bitter, a one-bit Twitter. I tried to convey what it's like to hack in Guile, with some success I think. Source code for the live-hack, such as it is, is linked to at the end of the page.