It may seem as if I've been absent from posts, but behind the scenes, I've been continuing the consolidation of my past Internet wanderings.

In late 2017, I came up with a domain name off the top of my head: botsandbeer.com. I was heavily into chatbot development… and more than a little into the craft beer scene. I wasn't sure what to do with the domain, but I bought it anyway. At the time, I was working hard on the Codepunk project, and a lot of my non-work programming activity was centered on maintaining my Microsoft MVP status. Newsletters were all the rage (and I guess might still be),so I decided to create the Bots and Beer newsletter to focus on chatbot and artificial intelligence news and ideas—with a final section dedicated to recently consumed craft beer.

I had a few disparate email lists from past projects, so I rolled them into one, signed up for a MailChimp account, and began pushing out monthly newsletters. Each newsletter began with a volume prefix, so volume one might be "0" as in "0x01" for the first issue, while volume two would be "1x01," etc.

The newsletter evolved from being several stories pulled from the headlines with some running commentary to eventually being long-form essays in themselves. The latter prompted me to place all the newsletters online so they were searchable, which eventually led me to a crisis of managing content on multiple sites, causing me to merge the Bots and Beer newsletter into Codepunk to become the Codepunk newsletter.

Eventually I became disenchanted) with the newsletter as a walled garden. I ceased publication just to focus on blog posts for Codepunk.

Recently, I moved all of the Bots and Beer newsletter issues over here. I then created the link in the last sentence (also available under projects) to have a single page for exploration.

Looking back at the newsletter, there were certainly some rough issues—especially early on when I really was just giving commentary on news stories and trying to find my footing. Eventually, it turned into a pretty solid newsletter with well thought out pieces, but I started to spend so much time on crafting quality newsletter content that I wasn't creating enough quality Codepunk content. That's why the newsletter only lasted a few years. I decided that Codepunk needed to be the priority, so the newsletter became a Codepunk newsletter and the posts were included on the web site as blog posts.

Still, despite the short shelf life, it was a fun time, and I still love the name and the idea.