In the last two weeks I have travelled without a laptop. In that same two weeks, even while at home, my laptop has been on for a sum total of 5 minutes. It could have been zero minutes, but I had forgotten that a couple of my development projects (including my web site’s code) hadn’t …
It has been an interesting week. On Monday I thought I had made a serious mistake. That was rescued by Android’s excellent support of an external keyboard. However, Android is not without its warts. I spent several hours configuring things on Android to get everything to work the way I expected. The last problem was …
When the new Macbook Air was announced a few months ago I gave it a serious look. I have been on a 2-year refresh cycle for many years. It was the right time to be looking for a replacement for my 2-year-old Macbook Air, yet I was having a hard time convincing myself of a …
By one form of reckoning, this is my third attempt at living 100% in the cloud. I made mention of a first and second attempt several years ago. In reality, though, it’s consistent evolution of the same attempt. Within the past several months I moved the last couple holdout documents out of desktop apps into …
I have recently begun the process of attempting to disentangle myself from Apple’s boa constrictor of an ecosystem. The first step: get rid of all iOS devices. Foolishly, I assumed this would be straightforward: I bought a Galaxy Note for my phone and a Nexus 7 for my tablet, both of which I am …
The book “Out of Control” by Kevin Kelly made a major impact on the way I view systems of all kinds: economies, cultures, networks, code designs. One of the things that I latched on to was the concept of “living things will find a way.” As I evaluate systems, I increasingly think of them as …
Riffing on Jeff Foxworthy’s “…you might be a redneck”, I present “…it’s not a Unit Test”: If it requires manual setup… it’s not a Unit Test. If it requires manual intervention… it’s not a Unit Test. If it requires a network connection… it’s not a Unit Test. If it requires a container… it’s not a …
The Cascades are a very photogenic mountain range: a choice location for a first backpacking trip (you can see full resolution versions of these photos and more here). I have done plenty of camping and hiking in my lifetime, but until several weeks ago I had never combined the two. It’s something I’ve always wanted …
I love the counterintuitive. Fortunately software development provides many opportunities to observe the phenomena. Of course it can be frustrating at times, but it is fascinating once you realize what is really going on. A while ago I blogged about Jerry Weinberg’s Pickle Principle. The very next section of his book containing that anecdote tells the …
A new colleague and friend of mine, Cosmin and I were talking at lunch the other day about EC2. He has been playing with AWS and EC2 for longer than I have and had some great suggestions. One of them was to prefer automating EC2 Instance creation and setup with shell scripts over using Instance …