Unicode’s 2025 edition of the Unicode Technology Workshop went well in November. Bigger, better, and we added tutorials to UTW for the first time (like we used to have with the Unicode Conference). Organizing was a smoother ride, although not without some hitches, most notable was Mark Davis having to miss out at the last minute. Everything was a team effort. Including the tutorial for ICU that I did, with Markus’ help, by picking up the virtual baton from Steven L and Craig and Shane:
I’m hoping to have time to make this even better for UTW 2026, and hey, that’ll be in Nancy, France this year. Hope to see you there!
Also a year ago, soon after my interview with Hilary, I joined Steven Loomis and Bridget Chase to talk with Eddie Arrieta, editor of the MultiLingual magazine, for an interview about Unicode, the volunteers behind the organization. Check it out!
Check out my interview with Hilary about the basics of Unicode, the Unicode Consortium, internationalization, and all the things that enable the things you use every day to be translated / localized and work seamlessly in multiple languages:
For the non-techies: “a rollback” or “rolling back” is undoing an addition to the codebase that you made. Engineers know how to easily do that because it requires engineering tooling that they use on a daily basis. Managers? That’s not in their skillset.
A year ago, I talked to the UMd students who are a part of the on-campus student-run startup incubator, Startup Shell. It was nice to be invited. I had to check with the organizers that what I had to say would be useful because, um… my solo startup wasn’t “lucratively successful”… okay, so no revenue at all. (The first feedback that I got from someone was really positive, but it was a month after I completely stopped…) The organizers said the topic was good, and the reception I got from the students was pretty positive.