Broadly vs. Locally-useful skills

Early on, I programmed on mainframes in COBOL… I’m sure I could do it again. But I’d be tossing away some highly valuable, broadly-applicable and current AWS skills. Want me to to that? As a spiritual pilgrim once said to a penguin: “cough up some dough, mac.”

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To Optimize, or Not?

You should be forced to write efficient code and know how to do it in situations where it matters. You should also be able to recognize when it’s more important to optimize for readability, maintainability and clarity.

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Low-level understanding matters

If you haven’t figured out how to get the most out of what you already have, don’t ask me for more RAM/disk/CPU or anything else. Buy a Pi Zero and use it’s limitations to force yourself to write tight code.

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The horrors of open source!

It’s possible to simplify the “normal” things for normal users while still providing source code and repositories that allow us strange creatures to continue experimenting, testing, and yes, struggling with inevitable incompatibilities all night long.

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Promo for my SCaLE 16x talk

A promo video for my SCaLE 16x talk. This one features Mr. Spock and Flash the Linux Cat. As noted in my comments, pretty much all you need to know is that I named my cats Floppy and Flash.

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2017 Wrapup: Top Reads

I’ve been curating my social media, as I do at the end of every year. By “curating” I mostly mean “deleting annoying rants” but also a whole lot of stuff that was timely when posted but irrelevant a week later. As I re-read things, some of them stand out, and are worth calling attention to.

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