Posts

As regular readers know, I have long questioned the value of social media and I have struggled with the question of how involved I should be with it. This morning I decided to quit Bluesky permanently because the bulk of the community there seems hellbent on ostracizing and ejecting anybody who doesn’t fully subscribe to their specific brand of group think. I wish there was a kinder way to put it. But there isn’t. When I first arrived on Bluesky back on June the 1st, I was pretty hopeful about it’s prospects. It was elite (due to being invite only), largely liberal and seemed like a relatively decent enough place at first glance. As is often the case in life, the first look was deceiving. ...

If you’ve worked in tech and have any degree of actual talent, you have run into the following scenario: You are on a team and that team has at least one member that isn’t pulling their weight. The reasons why generally range from a lack of work ethic to a lack of talent. Regardless that person can’t seem to get themselves fired. Why is that? UPDATE 8/9/2023: Lutz, in this particular case, has now been fired. Nobody misses him. ...

So over the last few weeks, I have been re-watching one of my favorite television shows of all time, The Wire. If you haven’t seen it, you should probably rectify that oversight. That being what it is, I’m currently making my way through Season 3 and I had a revelation of sorts: I might be a McNulty. Yeah okay, so for those of you not familiar with the show, you have no idea what that means. To put it somewhat briefly, Jimmy McNulty is a police detective on the show, who is basically all about the case. He wants to see justice done, no matter what the cost. He is all about “the work”. Needless to say that his narrow minded quest tends to alienate virtually everybody he works with… on a long enough timeline anyway. ...

This post is the culmination of years of accumulated professional frustration. It will not be well received by some. That’s okay. If you make it to the 25 year point of your dev career and you spent most of that time writing custom software for clients and you still disagree, feel free to write your own take and send it along to me. I will afford it my due consideration. ...

So this morning I was listening to one of the Linux related podcasts, Coder Radio and the hosts read feedback from a listener who claimed that he was “bored” with PHP and ready to try something else. Now to be fair, in this particular case, the writer outlined some circumstances that made me sympathize with him. Long story short is that parts of the PHP based stack he was relying on for some of his software had changed significantly. In order to update his software to a currently supported version of PHP, he basically now has to rewrite it from scratch. So yeah, that sucks. ...

I’ve been a Linux fan for almost 30 years, yet in all of that time, I never actually attended a Linux event (ignoring a handful of local Linux User Group (LUG) events here and there). That is, until this past weekend when I attended SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) 2023 in Charlotte, NC. So what took so long? Well frankly, traditionally I have avoided socializing with others. COVID and age have both helped to shift my position on this a bit. ...

As of late it has become rather fashionable for established tech orgs running established platforms to attempt to make their platforms profitable. While the exact underlying reasons for this in each case varies, the end result is the same: Whatever the secret sauce was, the org manages to forever taint the platform with the changes they end up making. Who are we talking about? Today we’ll be discussing Reddit, Twitch, StackOverflow and Twitter. ...

Back in 2016, a younger and mildly more optimistic Jay heard about a Kickstarter Campaign for a remake of the classic title, System Shock. Young Jay had fond memories of the original and immediately pledged $30 to help turn the dream into reality. Expected delivery was in December of 2017. Actual delivery for some was yesterday: May 30th, 2023. UPDATE 6/1/23: After logging onto the Discord server for Nightdive Studio and making a support request, I was able to finally exchange my PS4 version for an actual Steam key. The provided key seems to work so at least I have finally gotten what I paid for! Nevertheless, this post will remain as it serves as a word of warning when it comes to crowdfunding. Go into it expecting nothing but disappointment otherwise you will be let down ;) ...

Everybody knows I got a big mouth. That’s why I have a domain for my name and I’ve been posting tripe to it for over two decades now. The surprising part is that every once in awhile I say something that resonates with other people. That happened last week and I’m happy to report that my website handled it wonderfully. For starters, if you haven’t read my post “Low Code Software Development Is A Lie”, you should give it a go. The internet seemed to enjoy reading it for the most part. I generally don’t do any self-promotion of posts short of directly sending links to a few friends over Discord that I think might be interested in the topic. So at least one of my few dedicated readers (who presumably use the RSS feed to keep tabs on my content), posted it to Reddit and YCombinator. A riveting discussion was had by all. Note: I did not participate in any of the discussions as I had already spoken my piece on this topic. I just enjoyed reading what others had to say about it. ...

I’ve been writing custom software for a long time and one of the things that annoys me most is when a client adopts the position that there is a silver bullet which will reduce or remove the inherent complexity of this task. This happens more often than you’d think and guess what? They are almost always wrong. Perhaps I’m getting a bit too old and loose lipped for my own good, but the truth is that creating software for other people is exceedingly difficult. Contrary to the opinions of non-practitioners (aka non-coders), this difficulty is not the fault of coding languages, tools and paradigms. It is actually the result of clients and developers not taking the time to understand the root causes of the problems they want to solve and not designing a solution around the conclusions you’d draw from that process. ...