Author: michaelgat

Jan 18

How I became “glue”

As has often been the case in my life, I was in a category of people who were not supposed to exist. I was that “Type II misfit.” How I got there is the story.

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Apr 18

It’s not coming back

In 1945, some still expected the world to go back to familiar pre-crisis reality. They would be disappointed, as will those who are waiting for “the good old days” today.

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Feb 5

Software is hard

A horribly embarrassing software disaster happened on Monday. It was caused by a bad certificate, which is a mechanism used to verify and authenticate a software service. As big as it was, I doubt anybody will lose their job over the Microsoft Teams outage even though it had an impact on millions of paying customers….

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Jan 7

Wrapping up 2019

In January, I packed up and shipped everything I wanted to keep, got in the car with Flash, and drove to Seattle. I arrived on January 19th, checked in to my temporary apartment, and started work on the 21st.

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Nov 12

Well, that took a while

When I wrapped up 2018 just ahead of my move, I had a notion that it might be a while before I posted again. I didn’t think it would be this long. Multiple things got in the way. My hosting service became a mess. I tried playing with AWS Lightsail, only to find that using…

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Oct 23

Lightning talks, and not…

Lightning talks seem scary, but are in fact one of the best ways to introduce yourself to public speaking in general. Once you can do one of these, you can easily relax some of the rules for longer presentations.

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