For years, every backend software engineering team I worked with struggled with one unavoidable bottleneck: turning working local code into live production reality. Running and debugging your code in the cloud was always slow, brittle, complex, and confusing. Often, it required total code rewrites into sophisticated frameworks to get the code to even run at … Continue reading PX: from laptop to cloud cluster within seconds
One of my favorite old Linux jokes is, “Linux is free… if your time is worthless.” This quote is possibly adapted from a jwz interview dating back to 1998. In it, he said: I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to [major operating systems], and because, of all the operating … Continue reading Linux is free and your mind is valuable
In 2017, CrashPlan was one of the most popular full-computer offsite/cloud backup tools for consumers. It had millions of paid users, usually paying around $10/month for a few terabytes of offsite storage. But then… “On August 22, 2017, Code42 announced they were shutting down CrashPlan for Home, effective in October 2018. They were not accepting … Continue reading Linux backup workflow for hackers with restic, rclone, Backblaze B2
I recently upgraded from a Google Pixel 7 to a Pixel 8 phone. Nothing earth shattering about this upgrade. Incremental. “Performance smartphones,” as the DOJ recently called iPhones and high end Androids, have leveled off in core functionality. The Pixel 8 is slightly smaller than the Pixel 7, which makes me happy, as I treat … Continue reading The smartphone app audit
The film The Big Chill came out a bit before I was born, over 40 years ago, in 1983. The plot focuses on a group of middle-aged friends, perhaps in their late 30s and early 40s, who had attended the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor together. They reunite after 15 years, brought together by … Continue reading The Blog Chill
Sam Altman once said: “Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap pile up.” In programming, there is a technique called … Continue reading Dependency rejection
When I turned 27, I wrote the following in my birthday post: I don’t need stuff. I just need time. Of course, that’s the bittersweet part of one’s birthday. That even as you come to realize the importance of time, the day acts as a reminder of how our time on this earth is limited. … Continue reading Turning n/2 + 1
In 2009, I quit my first programming job after college to work on a startup. That startup eventually became Parse.ly. I’ve written about Parse.ly’s startup beginnings and evolution elsewhere on this blog, including: “The Startup Diet” “What One Does” “Startups: Not for the faint of heart” “Why Startups Die” “Shipping the Second System” It is … Continue reading Parse.ly, Automattic: the long view
I’m always surprised to learn that a friend who has used Linux for a long time, in both server and desktop contexts, might not have heard of GNU parallel. If you use GNU parallel together with pv (pipe viewer), UNIX shell pipelines, and Python fileinput module, you get a pretty powerful parallel job running framework … Continue reading GNU parallel is underrated
Frederick Brooks once wrote: The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. In his classic essay, “No Silver Bullet”, he also wrote about software’s “essential” complexity: The complexity of software is an essential property […] Hence, descriptions … Continue reading Managing software teams: the definitive reading list
