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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. ...

So I’ve been spending a lot of time in the midst of a situation that leaves me feeling very angry. Today I got more angry than usual and since that is becoming a more common occurrence I thought it might behoove me to delve into why. I’m going to start off explaining why I am angry. The core issue is that I am expected to accomplish a task that is by all rights impossible to accomplish. My roadblock isn’t a technological one but rather a cultural and organizational one. I want to change the world in which I live for the better. My mandate is to provide the tools that will enable us to do exactly that. But with each passing day it becomes clear that the tools aren’t enough. Tooling can’t combat apathy. ...

So in an effort to diversify my hobbies a bit I’ve recently decided to spend some time getting to know Chess a bit better. While I have casually played Chess all of my life, the reality is that outside of knowing how the pieces move and the conditions under which a game is completed, I didn’t know much else. While this might come as a shock since I was part of the Chess Club throughout high school, the harsh reality is that there were no clubs oriented towards my primary interest (any and all things computer related). Thankfully I was not the only person who joined Chess Club as a last resort. In that most of us had something in common. ...

This week we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled tech related posts/rants to delve into a subject that is near and dear to my heart: Absinthe. Anybody who knows me, knows I like to indulge myself with a snort of liquor now and again. Though I tend to stick mostly to whiskey (all kinds, no whiskey is beneath me), I do enjoy other things as well. Chief among that group is a little thing known as absinthe. ...

Anybody who has ever bothered to read my resume has probably thought to themselves: “This guy sure likes to switch jobs.” Well I can’t fault them for making that observation as it is at least half true. While I do switch jobs fairly often, the painful truth is that I don’t like doing it. Interviewing as a developer is an intensely painful process rife with reciting answers obtained via rote memorization and concocting inventive answers to cute but ultimately pointless logic problems. Despite those misgivings, I still change it up every few years. Full disclosure: I’m thinking about what my next position will be as I write this. Ping me if you want to chat about that. ...