In yesterday's post I mentioned that I was having trouble remembering the specifics of a talk from years ago.

Somewhat ironically, this was in the context of a conversation about chat apps where we touched on the usefulness (or not) of old chat logs. I was asked, “When do you find yourself going back to old chat logs?”

To find those specifics, I found myself going back to old chat logs!

Here was my process:

• When was the talk? November 2nd, 2016.
• Where would I have posted about this? The chat community I had set up.
• Check the chat logs near that date. Bingo.

Experiences like this only encourage me to double down on SLOPI, the idea that for open source there's value in having communication in the open and having it archived and searchable.

It's funny. I was partially inspired to start being more open and public in my communication (including chat) by a blog post entitled Maximizing The Value of Your Keystrokes, but the author of that post, Jeff Atwood, is very much against keeping chat around for very long. For now, I plan to keep on maximizing those keystrokes.

2023-01-28 update: This morning I woke up to a conversation where an answer may be locked up in a free Slack workspace and the knowledge is inaccessible. Frustrating. 😡