Our lovely countryside venue: https://www.miltonoxfordshire.co.uk
Tickets are first-come, first-served, so book yours before we sell out!
We organise this conference in the open, and you're very welcome to chat with the organisers to help, ask questions, give feedback, or simply to watch. You can reach us on the #ev_socratesuk slack channel (https://slack.softwarecrafters.org/), on mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky, or by commenting on this post.
We've confirmed the following six trainers already, with more to come in the new year:
* @lisihocke - Secure development lifecycle
* @claresudbery - Using TDD to get better results from LLMs/AI
* Jon Jagger - Practising TDD with Cyber-dojo
* Duncan McGregor - Extreme refactoring
* @natpryce - Extreme refactoring
* Tim Ottinger - Value stream mapping (tbc) (@tottinge)
Register: https://socratesuk.org/training_day.html
Have you made any plans for 2026 yet? How about giving yourself or a friend something to look forward to...
...because we have exciting news before the winter break: Registration is now open for SoCraTes UK 2026!
We're meeting 18th to 21st June at Milton Hill House in Oxfordshire, and are delighted to announce the training day is back 👩🏻🏫. It'll be followed by our legendary open space event, with sessions from all participants.
More details and registration form: https://socratesuk.org/tickets.html
Did you know: you can avoid the need for backups by failing to do anything worth saving a copy of
Follow me for more computing lifehacks
RE: https://mastodon.social/@brouhaha/115704677678583236
Perfection
Wired headphones are working again after a good resoldering. Just added a coat of gorilla glue to replace the load-bearing melted plastic sleeve that I had to tear off.
The absolute worst letter-of-recommendation portals are the ones that force you to create an account to upload a letter
Cornell, you are on my shit list
Shredded cheese with your home made chili?
Oh god.
Someone has given me the tools to debug a problem in my house.
The rabbit hole calls… I will resist… for now
Chat, I don't think this is something to be proud of
the last step of my glasses cleaning regimen is a banger: test cleanliness by placing thumb and forefinger on both sides of a lens. you'll know how well you cleaned them by how much the fingerprints stand out.
brb, writing an OS in Lean
At any rate, I don't think Mary is going to get premium pricing on the next trump branded golden calf idol sale.
Holy fucking shitbags. I'm not that Mary, (I'm not any Mary) but I think there was a Mary who had this phone number before me, though I've had my phone number for about 20 years now, so it's been a while... but it appears the GOP is absolutely done with Mary not returning their survey from my phone number, cause this sure looks like a motherfucking threat.
Are you rich with accelerators this holiday season? Learn how to get the most from them in our latest blog:
"Microarchitectural Modeling in the Era of Accelerator-Rich Systems and Computing at Scale"
by Prof Dimitris Gizopoulos
https://www.sigarch.org/microarchitectural-modeling-in-the-era-of-accelerator-rich-systems-and-computing-at-scale/
Call for contributions: 18th Workshop on General Purpose Processing with GPU (GPGPU 2026)
co-located ASPLOS’26
Pittsburgh, USA
March 22/23, 2026
https://www.sigarch.org/call-contributions/gpgpu-asplos-2026/
With IPv6 turning 30 this month(!) it seemed like a good time to talk about second system syndrome: https://systemsapproach.org/2025/12/15/second-system-syndrome/
setting up monitoring infrastructure for a social media tool SaaS written in OCaml only through AI agents (until we take a deep dive into the codebase after Christmas, to see how bad it really is)
twitch.tv/sabine_sh
Neo, a query optimizer powered by deep RL, is my first paper to hit 600 citations! While the cites are great, I'm most proud of the impact Neo had on the QO research community.
I wrote a short retrospective on Neo, including how lessons learned led us to our next system, Bao: https://rmarcus.info/blog/2025/12/15/neo600.html
Hey! Pretty good even if it is just my mastodon people and it’s self reported. https://discuss.systems/@irene/115707981632189492
Pro tip: If your institutionally mandated email verification system has a 15 minute timeout, try to avoid institutionally mandating an email service with a 20 minute latency...