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

Why I wanted to intern at Apple

I just found this while reviewing some very old backups. Like most things of this ancient era, I’d completely forgotten about it, so it’s been fascinating to look back – as if in the 3rd person – at my younger, far away self. I don’t recall why exactly, but evidently I had to write some … 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

iCloud ‘Optimize Mac Storage’ breaks the Mojave installer

Yet another example of a really bizarre macOS bug that’s pretty inexcusable as a test escape, given it occurs with the default installation settings on a completely clean OS install. In short, the Mojave update installer does not work (on High Sierra at least) if you have ‘Optimize Mac Storage’ enabled for iCloud Drive (System … Read more