After finally having booked my incoming flight for Hacker Beach #7, which is going to take place on the Phillippines in January, I'm getting genuinely excited about it.

Aside from every single one of the past 6 editions having been amazing in their own way, I'm mostly looking forward to clearing my schedule of for-profit work, and yet again spending most of January on developing and contributing to free and open-source software.

The things I'll be hacking on will include many pieces of software from both the remoteStorage ecosystem as well as the wider Kosmos project. But I'm also planning to spend some time on improving my IndieWeb setup, and experimenting more with Lightning Network.

I'm also looking forward, as always, to doing these things together with old and new friends, and exchanging knowledge and experience, while escaping the cold Northern winter together. Just for one example, I think I would've never switched to Linux a few years ago, and learned so much about it since then, without the privilege of having had bkero explain to me a thousand things in the past.

So, in the spirit of p2p learning, I'm hereby offering free mentorship for anyone wanting to get involved with contributing to the projects (or wider areas of software) that I mentioned above!

For outdoor activities, while others might be more excited about the excellent diving around Coron, personally, I'm more keen on the mountain-biking. In fact, I'm planning to bring a bike this year, including bike packing bags, so I'll be able to explore not just Busuanga island, but potentially more of the Phillippines, on two wheels before and/or after Hacker Beach.

---

If you're interested in joining us this coming January, and you haven't had the pleasure to catch a Hacker Beach in the past: you can get in touch with people in #hackerbeach on Freenode IRC, and you can also follow and talk to us on the fediverse (Mastodon, GNUSocial, Pleroma, etc.), and if need be on Twitter.