Chaos Server

The moment when everything falls apart is not in the explosion, it’s in the quiet right after. - Lily (How to Trap a Tiger) I entered the tech workforce right as the dot-com bubble was inflating to its limits. My very first job out of the gate was providing 24x7 support for one of the largest e-commerce sites of the era. To say it was a trial by fire would be a massive understatement. The systems crashed. They crashed constantly. They crashed all the time. I would go to sleep at night clutching a pager in my hand so the vibration would wake me up without waking up my roommates (NOT A JOKE!). It was my job to keep the digital lights on, keep the servers upright, and somehow spin gold out of straw by writing actionable bug reports so the engineering team could actually fix the underlying infrastructure. You know what engineers love to do? Close bugs as “not reproducible.” The catch? “Back in my day,” there were no IDEs hooked up to production. There were no real-time debuggers or sl...

The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good. - Stanley Kubrick The "No-Code" revolution has been coming for years, and I have been watching the shifting landscape of development. I’m still of the opinion that hand-crafted, artisanal code written by an expert will outperform AI-generated code. A hand-painted sign by an artist is more beautiful and performs better than a print-and-cut vinyl sign. Today, most signs are print-and-cut vinyl because it’s faster, cheaper, and gets the job done well enough. We have hit the point in development where the difference between hand-crafted code and generated-code doesn’t matter for a huge amount of development. Applications are going to be prompt-and-generate developed because it’s faster, cheaper, and gets the job done well enough. I had an introductory subscription to a workout app I’ve been using the last few months and really enjoying, but my trial pricing was ending ...

Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. - Professor Playfair (Babel by R.F. Kuang) A few years ago, I was gifted a Kindle. That, plus a Libby account tied to my local library, re-opened a world for me. I do my best to keep up with my local book club, but when I can’t, I look at the Hugo/Nebula winners and work through my queue. I read some great books this past year, and here are a few that stood out. Babel by R.F. Kuang (Nebula 2022) - By a landslide, this was my favorite book of the year. It’s a magical historical fiction centered on linguistic-based magic. The premise? You engrave words from two different languages into silver, and whatever meaning is "lost in translation" manifests as a magical force. I'm sold. While the magic is fascinating, it’s only one layer of the story. The primary theme is imperial exploitation, how children from poorer parts of the world who are fluent in foreign l...

When you get good at fixing things, you worry less about breaking them. - Alex Lindsay It is the 1980s. I am in grade school. Math consists of memorizing multiplication tables and performing long division. I wonder why I am asked to do this. I have a calculator. My watch is a calculator. It stores up to twenty phone numbers. The teacher informs me this is important because I cannot always depend on having a calculator with me. Yet, even in the 1980s, I already do. It is the 2020s. Everyone carries a far more advanced calculator in their pocket, embedded within a phone. The teacher was wrong. It is the 1990s. I am in high school. I have a TI-81 graphing calculator, though to me, it is not for graphing. It is for programming. In Pre-Calculus, I write a program that, given three points, determines the equation of the circle that passes through them. I show my teacher. She tells me using it on tests and homework is cheating. I write many more programs. I show her none of them. The nex...

Discrimination is no longer about harming people who are different, it is about withholding help. - Mahzarin Banagi How would you like more work and responsibility for the same pay? The basic concept behind this is called the "dry promotion" and most employees have gone through the experience of this. Unofficially, this naturally happens in every job, because the reward for a task well done is another more difficult task. If an employee is talented at their job and has a good work ethic, responsibilities will grow over time because they will volunteer for them and the company will trust them enough to give them more. As a manager, I would avoid giving a dry promotion at all costs. The deal you are making with an employee is that in lieu of compensating them what they are worth, you are going to titularly designate they ARE worth a higher value and make them more marketable to find a different organization that is willing to compensate them at that rate. You should expect ...

I suggest you gentlemen invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole. Rapidly. - Gene Kranz (Apollo 13) I have been a systems integrator for a quarter of a century. I spend my time staring at one product's square peg and another product's round hole and trying to decide what to do. There is the amazing scene in the movie Apollo 13 where the literally need to put a square CO2 scrubber into a round receptacle. I love the engineer, "we've got a find a way to make this, fit into the hole for this, using nothing but that." That, right there, that has been my career. This week, sort of out of the blue, I realized that over that my twenty-five year career there has been a philosophy change in how systems integration should work. Protocol technology has marched forward from Remote Method Invocation (RMI) to SOAP to REST with JSON, but there has been a large philosophical difference. In the beginning of days of systems integration, the philosophy was "if I bui...