I still remember the first CD I ever bought myself: 311’s self-titled album, purchased in the 4th grade with my own hard-earned birthday money at the recommendation of a friend who I’m pretty sure based his entire musical taste on the presence Parental Advisory sticker.
A few Saturdays ago—the singular calm day I got between the chaos of Thanksgiving and the subsequent eternity two weeks of my entire family getting every seasonal illness under the sun—we went to a local holiday market (its first year back after being shut down by the pandemic). While it’s...
I’ve never been good at expressing gratitude. It’s not so much that I’m ungrateful, because I’m incredibly thankful for my life and the people in it, but showing that gratitude hasn’t typically come naturally for me.
I’ve done some writing before on sustainability as it pertains to technology, and some of my efforts to keep my own tech (and some salvaged tech) alive and useful for as long as possible. The amount of e-waste we generate is staggering, and as technology becomes obsolete, the throwing-away of...
I’m not exactly what one would call “handy.”
I was never a Boy Scout.
In case you are unaware, the US is currently experience a critical shortage of blood. That means that, at any moment, someone who needs a blood transfusion to survive is at risk of not receiving one. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that person could be...
A short while ago, my grandfather took a spill and wound up in the hospital.
I’m attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon this week, and while the conference itself has been excellent, I have discovered that I have completely forgotten how to be a competent packer. Silly me, I spent a ton of timing making sure I was packed appropriately for the weather, but forgot to consider...
I’m attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon this week—a technology conference focused on the free software that powers the world—and while there has been more to experience than any one person could possibly take in, there is one category of events that I’ve found to be both necessary and rewarding: Wellness.
It could probably go without saying, but I read a lot of books.
I’ve been thinking a lot about identity lately. Not in the existential sense, but the literal one: my name, my face, my contact information; all of the things that don’t tell you who I am, but still sort of tell you who I am.
I’m at Denver Comic Con Fan Expo this weekend. Actually… I’m sitting in my hotel room across the street right now, writing this post (which, despite how lame it might sound, sitting at a hotel desk at seven in the morning is turning out to be one of my favorite...
About a month back, I subscribed to Dave Rupert’s RSS feed and noticed that there were a handful of posts that didn’t exist on his website. Turns out, Dave has created something called RSS Club that provides RSS-only content. In his words:
I have two kids and, if I’m being honest, I’m tired all the time.
I hate interviewing.
This site doesn’t have a favicon, and it likely never will.
I came of age on The Internet at a time when images and the web went hand-in-hand. The proliferation of the animated GIF in the personal web page scene was an aesthetic that defines the web in the time of Y2K (and one that I used to great effect on...
When I was a kid, I loved exploring the World Wide Web. There was just so much to discover, and I was on a mission to find it all. Unlike the homogeneity of the modern web, back then everything was unique.
Remember when using The Internet was a chore? You had to wait for hours before the one family computer was free, and when you finally did get on it, everything was so damn slow you had no choice but to exercise a degree of patience no child should be capable...
I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t usually contribute to open source as a way of giving back to the community for everything it has given me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great side effect, but the reason that I do it is because it makes me feel...
Heroku’s been taking it on the chin lately for their response to what looks to be a pretty-damn-serious security incident—and for good reason, because their communication about the whole event has been abysmal.
I love Laravel.
I’ve written a bit before about how my relationship with technology has changed over the years, but one thing that has become abundantly clear to me is that the ubiquity of smartphones in our world has now made it impossible to live without one.
Sometime near the end of this year, every Apple computer in my home will be rendered obsolete and insecure. To be more accurate, every Apple computer released prior to 2013 will suffer the same fate, thanks to the impending death of macOS Catalina.
What is it about smartphones that make them the most useful technology ever
created, while at the same time being the single-largest source of brain drain
and anxiety in existence?
Let’s face it: the internet is broken. It feels like so much of the web is composed of clickbait, ads, popups, and a toxic amount of JavaScript that you need a modern computer just to get any value out of it. Remember when low-power computers were created for people who...
You know what I like? Arbitrary challenges.
A common post I’ve seen floating around the interwebs lately is the “I Don’t Track You” statement, wherein the author assures the reader that they don’t employ any privacy-invasive analytics methods.
A few days ago, I found my old HP TC1100 tablet computer in storage and decided to see how it held up in the decade and a half since I last used it.
It’s an odd quirk of life that the older you get, the less you feel like you know. A decade ago, you wouldn’t have been able to convince me that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was, but now you’d have a hard time convincing me of the...
A postmortem is the analysis of an event after it occurs. When an issue is encountered in a production environment, a postmortem is an important process that lets us reflect on and learn from our mistakes so we can improve our process and prevent them from happening again in the...
Welcome to my 2021 retrospective!