Posts

This week I’m going to delve into a question which occasionally rears its ugly head even for me: Why doesn’t bad tech ever seem to go away? It is worth noting up front that while this includes computer based tech, it covers all kinds of tech. For example, we still have people who insist on photocopying and faxing things. Why do people still photocopy things? I really don’t understand it myself. But then again, printing things is already incredibly offensive and wasteful from my point of view so I’m willing to assume that the opportunity to photocopy things is less common for me largely as a consequence of that. A similar reasoning could be applied to faxing things, but in all honesty one can fax documents without relying upon actual paper. There are a variety of ways to fax things electronically nowadays. ...

Chances are that if you’ve worked in tech long enough, you can probably rattle off a list of tech fads you were forced to suffer through. But you know what my secret is? I have yet to fall for the siren song of any tech fad. But rather than just laughing at a few older fads, I’d like to try and provide some instruction on how one can tell the difference between tech fads and legitimate tech trends. ...

This week I’ve decided to tackle a topic which has been in the back burner of my mind for awhile: Whether or not development teams are a help or a hindrance. Why now? I was asked some questions which revolved around this as part of a job interview I had this week and wanted to provide a more fleshed out answer here than I was able to there. The reality is that when it comes to developers/engineers there are really only three kinds that matter in the context of this discussion: ...

So over the last year, something on the Internet has been really pissing me off. That thing is Google reCAPTCHA. This thing has been driving me bonkers for over a year and I’m pretty much at the end of my rope. So let’s start with a bit of background. Over a year ago I began to fundamentally change the way that I accessed the Internet on a daily basis. Prior to this change, reCAPTCHA was just a minor annoyance. So what did I change? I started to browse the Internet through an always on VPN connection that I setup using some extra hardware, pfSense and PIA. This box is setup with an always on connection to PIA and acts a dedicated optional gateway on my network that I can point any of my devices at to enable them to access the Internet exclusively via a VPN connection. ...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably have already heard the big tech news of the week: Microsoft is buying GitHub for 7.5 billion dollars. Wow. That’s a lot of pennies. Rumors of this began swirling on the Internet last weekend and the official announcement was made on Monday morning. As you may or may not know Github, despite the closed source nature of their software and services, actually provides a lot of free services to the FOSS community in the form of hosted git repositories and the associated web accessible functionality required to work with those repositories in a reasonably efficient manner. In addition you probably need to know that I myself am I paying user of Github as I host client source code in private repositories on the Github platform. ...

This morning a young man knocked on my door with the goal of selling me on a Vivint Smart Home System. Needless to say that if you know me at all, you know I put the kibosh on that in a hurry. My opposition to this idea springs from more than my fear of the cloud, though that is a factor to be sure. For starters I believe most of these mechanisms are over-engineered and consequently less reliable. In addition I just don’t trust these companies. Finally, I’m a cheap bastard. ...

Over the course of my career, while my standards may have changed, I have always prided myself on the idea that the code I wrote was “solid” when judged by the standards of the day. Due to a recent job change, I found myself with yet another opportunity to validate this particular belief. Sadly, in this particular case, it appears to be a mixed bag at best. Now let’s be clear: This application works reasonably well. The bulk of the code was written about eight years ago. The application hasn’t received any updates in over five years when I started working on it again last week. Despite this, it was still in service and providing value to my employer. That is a victory which brings a smile to my face. ...

Everybody knows that I love to play RPGs (Role Playing Games). In fact I love them so much that over the last few years I mostly stopped playing games from every other genre. Despite that, my love for RPGs has begun to wane a bit in recent years. While I do still love getting immersed in wonderfully complex multi-layered lore and tweaking my stats and skills to best maximize my chances for victory, somewhere along the way the thrill of that began to fade. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve played hundreds or even thousands of these games and after awhile they all start to blur together. Or perhaps it’s the fact that the infamous RPG grind really can wear you down if you spend too much time grappling with it. ...

For those of you who don’t know, I spent most of this past week at a conference in Chicago put on by my employer. This was a bit awkward as I was working out the second week of my three week notice with them. Nevertheless I went and a good time was had by all. During this trip I received a lot of unsolicited feedback from various co-workers most of which was positive and very much appreciated. Somewhere along the way, while discussing my impending departure for the umpteenth time, I reached an important conclusion: I am obsolete. ...

As I’m sure many of you know, an important part of being a remote worker is maintaining lines of communication with your co-workers. At work we use a variety of tools to accomplish that but one of the most important tools is one called Zoom. It is a screen sharing, audio and video conferencing tool that can accommodate hundreds of people at once and this tends to make it very useful. ...