The Abstracted Unreliability Anti-pattern

I don’t know if it’s genuinely on the uptick, or just coincidence, or merely runaway pattern recognition on my part, but I keep seeing the same logical fallacy applied over and over again: if I add more layers to a system it will become more reliable. A recent example: this set of services have poor … Read more

People vs Products

I’ve experienced an interesting arc over my twenty or so years (thus far) of software development. I started out as a one-person shop, doing my own things, selling shareware. I had no manager nor technical lead. I had to make all my own decisions, in all aspects, without guidance or assistance. Subsequently, during my four … Read more

Swift on Raspberry Pi

After the horrible experience just acquiring, installing, & configuring a basic Raspberry Pi, I was anticipating much effort – likely ending in failure – to get Swift working. I was pleasantly surprised. There are multiple ways to do it, apparently. One would think that there’d be the correct & working packages already available through apt, … Read more

The dumpster fire that is the Raspberry Pi

For a couple of little home projects I need an always-on computer. In an ideal world, perhaps, this would be something like a Mac Mini. Powerful [enough], easy to install & maintain, runs anything & everything (including anything Linux through Docker or at worst a straight VM). Unfortunately, Mac Minis are surprisingly expensive – even … Read more

The Myth of The Web

The recent kerfuffle with Microsoft Edge vs YouTube was particularly interesting since while I have no specific knowledge of that instance, I certainly do have some cultural insight from nearly eight years working inside the so-called Chocolate Factory – though not on any web stuff, to be clear, so my experience is in the broadest … Read more

iOS 7 first impressions

I found this post in the ‘Drafts’ folder from 2013 – evidently I started writing, got distracted, and forgot about it. It’s interesting to me even now because the aesthetics of iOS have been stuck in iOS 7 ever since.  I still don’t like the look, the design language, how many things operate – the … Read more