Today I want to give you a quick update on what I’ve been doing – maybe a little bit as an excuse for why you haven’t been getting the usual amount of content from me. Apart from having lots of work to do, I did two talks at the (all-online) TeXUsersGroup Annual Meeting #TUG2020. And, of course, the two proceedings papers to go with it, appearing in the next issue of TUGboat. Stay tuned for that and consider joining your local TeX users group if you aren’t a member already!

A Ninja and Noob revival

Together with our friend the noob, we did a talk as a follow up to the initial guest post and our TUGboat contribution. It was about how folkx from the Humanities and non-technical backgrounds can be motivated and empowered into becoming part of the #TeXLaTeX community.

A talk on didactical reduction versus references

In one of my first covid lockdown blogposts, I mentioned that I was posting said post instead of giving a talk at DANTE (the German TeX Users Group Meeting) 2020 in Lübeck. I was happy to be able to give this talk as a pre-recorded video at TUG2020 now. It was me taking up the subject of didactical reduction once again.

Watch the videos and read the papers!

By the way, the videos for the talks will both be shared online (here for the Ninja on Didactical reduction and here for Ninja&Noob on Empowerment of newbies). I will also link you the TUGboat contributions here. As not to bore you with repeating the same thing multiple times, the video talks and the TUGboat papers aren’t exactly the same and I also won’t go into the details/contents here to encourage you to use the other materials.

Conclusion

I was really happy to be able to connect with the #TeXLaTeX community even despite the covid pandemic. I thought the organization was really well done, especially given that all the different time zones needed to be accomodated and all. Thanks a lot to the great teams of organizers and contributors! But I was particularly greatful for the discussions after my talks. I have saved as much of them as possible to come back later and answer some of the questions which were still open in an upcoming blogpost.

I also want to highlight some of my favourite other talks and contributions – but I will only add those links once they’re available!

That’s it for now! Take care and read you soon,

the Ninja