Diolch Dee, for everything you do supporting SSIW, Welsh in general and people in general! You are clearly one of those multiply-wonderful people who make the world a better place! I hope we’ll meet one of these days…
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I have gone through several emotions reading this comments - from bursting out laughing at @hewrop’s comment on the Twister game (I never realised how much it stuck in your mind!), to feeling a bit teary and embarrassed at some of the other comments.
I also laughed reading @aran’s comment on Danielle’s internal mail at the BBC which I’d totally forgotten about. I can’t remember exactly how it came about now, but she was couchsurfing in my Cardiff flat at the time so she had no choice but to hear me practising my SSiW lessons in the evening and she did pick up a few words herself.
I seem to have been born with a love of languages and other cultures, so it was something very natural to me to immerse myself in the Welsh language and culture since I arrived here. I couldn’t imagine living here and not doing so. I was just ever so glad to find SSiW and be able to make my dream of becoming a Welsh speaker a reality. I know I would have got there in the end, as I am a determined sort of person underneath, but it would have been so much slower, and nowhere near as much fun! Getting to know the Fab Four, plus loads of SSiWers, has made my life in Wales even more special.
So thank you for all the comments. It’s lovely to know that you appreciate things like the newsletter and the Online Eisteddfod, and if they in any way contribute to your enjoyment of your Welsh learning, then it’s all really worthwhile.
And I hope to meet as many of you as possible, either on bootcamp, at the SSiW birthday party, at a National Eisteddfod sometime, or to welcome you to Llandysul if you’d like to stay with me through AirBnB and have a holiday speaking Welsh.
Diolch yn fawr!
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@Deborah-SSi was the person I thanked in the “Diolch” thread this week (link to Diolch thread) so I won’t repeat it all here, except to say that Dee totally deserves to be Seren yr Wythnos! Thanks again for all you do, Dee!
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Although I have only met Dee briefly, I must echo the sentiments about her enthusiasm and general loveliness. And thank you, Dee for all those reminders about updating the forum about meetups - organisation was never my strong suit and without a doubt, you have kept the Cacen meetups in the public eye. Thank you Dee.
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I’d like to thank everyone who has a hand in the running of SSIW for their dedication to the Welsh language and Welsh culture and for offering the opportunity to people around the world to share their obvious joy in simply being Welsh. Your work should be recognised at a national level at least.
Diolch yn fawr i chi.
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Well done - you’ve got through another week! It’s Friday! 
Seren yr Wythnos #5
Spenny
Spenny (or @ianspencer as he’s more properly and less commonly known) isn’t on the forum all that often these days - which makes him a particularly good example of how I’d like this thread to recognise all the people in the SSiW ecosystem - especially the ones you might otherwise not have known about their contributions.
Now, it would be easy to choose Spenny as Seren yr Wythnos for his courage in facing up to the very first ever Bootcamp with only about 10 sessions under his belt - and for surviving the week by miming ‘sunny’ and ‘hat’ any time he wanted to say ‘syniad da’…
Or we could choose him for his long-standing friendliness and consistent, calm support and advice - Catrin and I have always enjoyed catching up with Spenny when he’s over in Gwynedd, and it was an absolute delight to see him again recently at the Llandrindod reunion of The Magnificent Saith (our first Bootcampers).
But, no, it’s going to have to be Seren yr Wythnos to Spenny for…
Actually Making SSiW Possible
Yes, I’ll explain.
Back in the day, when we had about one or two thousand learners, and Course 1 and the beginning of Course 2, all of which were free, we also had quite a few people telling us we ought to be charging for the course.
Spenny was one of the clearest of those voices (I’ll never forget his ‘banging head against wall in despair’ tone when I told him we were going to charge £95 for the week for our first Bootcamp!).
But we had a problem.
We didn’t like the idea of charging lots of money for SSiW - it was clear it was working, but we want to help build a successful future for the Welsh language, and that doesn’t mean turning people away because they can’t afford to learn.
So the only pattern that looked okay to us was a very low monthly subscription - but then surely that meant people would subscribe, download the Course 2 lessons, and then realise that they were subscribing for nothing, feel a bit silly, and cancel the subscription?
We needed something that would be new and valuable every month, or every week.
And then I got an email from Spenny.
It went something like this:
‘These recordings you make. Would you like me to build a tool that would put them all into a database, so that you could take less time stitching them up into lessons? And then you’d be able to pull bits of them out at random for revision purposes…’
And that was the beginning of the Spennyware - a gigantically brilliant software tool which is the base of everything we’ve done - donated, for free, by a superb software engineer (the guy who literally wrote the book on C++) just to say ‘thank you’.
It made the daily practice sessions possible - and that made the subscription approach possible - and that lead a few years later to the point where Ifan and I are full-time, and the Spennyware has grown via the Jennyware (more later) into the SSiBorg, and started moving online, and opening up all sorts of interesting new possibilities (more later!).
If I had to choose one moment when the fate of SSiW genuinely rested in the balance, I think I’d choose the moment Spenny sent me that email, and landed himself with a moderately enormous software project on the side.
Heaven alone knows how much we would have needed to find if we’d tried to get something like that done on the open market - far, far more than we could ever have afforded.
So, you lovely folks of SSiW - if you’ve ever used any of our lessons (and not entirely hated the process!) now would be a good time to say thank you to Spenny…
Iestyn ap Dafydd
Catrin Lliar Jones
Cat Dafydd
Dee McCarney
Spenny
Jeff Lewis
Ifan Baines
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@ianspencer Diolch yn fawr iawn!
(In addition to saying thank you, It’s fun learning some of the SSiW backstory and details from these Seren yr Wythnos posts!)
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Ooh, a new star - I’m going to have to try and remember that one! 
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Diolch yn fawr iawn @ianspencer from one of the many people who have benefited/are benefitting from what you helped make possible
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I’m always happy to take a pat on the back but my software involvement came before that though. Aran had his own webserver - I think it was one of his many bright ideas. There was some complicated backstory to that too. Anyway, it was creakier than a creaky thing and just as Aran was getting the forum going and it was turning into something special, it fell into a sad heap of nothingness and Aran couldn’t get it sorted.
There then followed a mad afternoon of “let’s do something” (sort of Let’s Make a Musical! without the music or entertainment value). I was working at home at the time, so decided to get stuck in. Aran had come across the cloud server system he still uses (good choice but a “brave” early adopter decision) and we grabbed the old forum, rebuilt it and went back live in about 3 hours. I think Aran has erased that painful day from his memory - I don’t blame him. If I recall correctly, it was easier for me to do it because I had broadband as opposed to a Welsh piece of twine purporting to be a network connection. I don’t think we really knew each other then, not sure we had met at that point (the first time we did meet he still didn’t trust me enough to reveal he lived in a pig sty!).
I remember a bit more about the charging. There was quite a lively debate behind the scenes (mainly Aran trying to work out how to extract money from the project to support a family without anyone having to pay anything to anybody), but the idea of a voluntary subscription in part came out of an experience I had had with Radio Paradise(https://www.radioparadise.com/) - an early American Internet radio station which I enjoyed listening to. We had a similar debate there, and as I was very anti-advertising, I encouraged looking at other ideas, and the guy who ran it gave the voluntary subscription a punt. He’s still going. Also from the software world, back in the 90s I was involved in forums (on CompuServe, before the Internet was a twinkle in most people’s eye) and there I worked with Borland. I learnt that the people who came onto the forum could be very heated and yet with the right approach you could get them off the ceiling, and the key to that was getting the community to do the policing and create a positive atmosphere. The other thing I learnt from the American community I was involved in was the concept of “don’t return the favour, pass it on.” I think that is the ethos that has permeated SSiW - the people who need help are not the people who have helped you, but the next generation.
Yes, the money for the bootcamp. “Er, Aran, so that covers the room and accommodation. What about the travel expenses to get there?” (Quizzical look then dawning realisation)." What about something for you and Iestyn’s time" (ditto!). I guess it was at that point it dawned on Aran that Bootcamps might be a real thing rather than a fraudulent misrepresentation of his educational abilities.
I am proud of doing my bit for SSiW, and though I’ve moved on in many different ways, I feel I’ve already had my reward from the warmth I still feel from my good friends I’ve made here.
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Oh, yes, I kind of conflated the ease of movement from Spennyware->Jennyware->SSiBorg!
Must be a memory thing…
[Add to Seren yr Wythnos post: Spenny saved our hides more times than I can remember (apparently) when actual stuff like servers needed to be working].
Happy days, weren’t they?! Looking forward to see you (plural!) up here some time…
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Oh, there was another reason for the software. Aran had all the lessons recorded and digitised in one long file which took about 20 minutes to load up into Audacity (panad amser) and then all you had was a waveform squiggle to guess where on earth the mistake to be corrected might be. Then there was creating the replacement, and trying to slip it in without destroying the whole lesson, export out to MP3, upload and so on. A single edit could take an hour or more if Aran could remember what he was doing when he started. Impractical and unmaintainable. All that and dealing with forum requests to clarify what the response to something was because the dogs were having a fight in the background on the recording or the chickens were on the move again (frightened by Catrin’s sneezing probably). Still, Aran didn’t worry about this as Iestyn & Cat were doing it sitting in the sink of a campervan while on a grand European tour so he had the easy bit.
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Oh, God, yes.
I had genuinely forgotten about that.
I kind of remember ‘the time before Spennyware’ as a permanent dance in fire and brimstone, but the actual details of the pain have happily faded…
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Hi, Spenny! Nice to see you (figuratively speaking). Thank you for being who you are and at the right time and place to help make SSiW what it is now!
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Amazing amazing story!!! I barely managed to sign up to the newsletter, so how you did that I doubt I’ll ever understand!!! Diolch yn fawr!!!
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It was after meeting Spenny at the first bootcamp that I became really aware of his software genius. That was when I joined the ranks of those who crunched the raw voice files of the Fab Four into the lessons we all got to know and love. Despite a life-long involvement with IT, I was a little intimidated by Spennyware at first. I had to follow a detailed induction before I was set free on the actual voice files. Like all powerful software, its complexity demanded a fair bit of operator skill but once I’d mastered it, I became quite slick. 
I was really impressed by how efficiently it worked. I had some insight later into how it formed the basis of “Jennyware” or Spennyware 2.1 as it might systematically be called (but that might become clear later).
It was great to meet Spenny again and his wife-to-be-now-wife, Anna at our Mag 7 reunion a few weeks ago.
Diolch yn fawr, cyfaill.
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You weren’t going to learn a lot about me at Bootcamp when all I usually said was “Dwy’n meddol…” and never got any further.
Sum total of my Bootcamp experience:
Pam 
?*
*The first ever Bootcamp joke, thanks, Dee!
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You’ve beaten me on this one, @aran . I can’t go within my style here so what I’ll do instead … I’ll say
(Image created especially for you for this occassion just about 10 (or so) minutes ago. Hope you like it.)
So, the first person who I actually would have to give my thank you (in another thread) is you @ianspencer1. You’ve enabled one poor soul from the part of this prety Earth where there’s no Cymraeg even near to be heard (OK, was for that matter) who desperately wanted and kind of needed to learn the language to actually being able to learn it! If there wouldn’t be you doing magnificent stuff for SSiW, there wouldn’t be me speaking Welsh either! Thank you thousand times!
Oh, and I’m prety aware what a nightmare editing long files in Audacity can be … edited quite some by myself (some also for my Welsh learning purpose before I found SSiW, too). You can spoil the file in a split of second and you don’t know what actually has happened (or better where has happened) .
Thank you for the URL to that Paradise radio which I’m listening to just right now (how coincidently they are playing something about Paradise. ) . OK, guys, it’s not Welsh though but this is NON STOP MUSIC where moderator gives his voice only to show he’s sttill there and alive what suits so well to me!
Top notch Visual C++! My son really loves it. He says it’s efficient and simple enough yet quite powerful! (yah, I have one of those techy kids in the house ).
So, out of curiousity: is this the right book you’re the (co)author of?
And thank you for bein one of those Magnificent 7 because of who the bootcamps came to reality and we can enjoy them today! If there wouldn’t be you (and the other pioneers) I’d never be to Cymru and to lovely Tresaith speaking Cymraeg, walking around and drinking beer in the tafarn in the evenings! Oh, and of course, I’d never meet Magnificent (legendary) four! And, for that matter, I’d never meet all of you, lovely people who I owe so much and so all together we owe to Ian a lot …
Diolch, diolch, diolch!
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