Twenty years ago today – the Ides of March, 2002 – I enlisted in the Army National Guard. Unlike most of the young men and women going through in-processing that day in Boston, I was already a college graduate, I was already married, and I wasn't exactly young. I was twenty-eight years old. Had a full-time job as a software engineer, had a mortgage. What motivated me to join was a sense that I could be doing more to serve others. It was just after 9/11 and I felt like it was something I could do.
When I was in high school, I had a fast food job in the local shopping mall. I was in Danbury, CT, which was close enough to New York City to attract a lot of business from urbanites looking for a change of scenery on the weekends. This made for very busy weekend shifts, and absolutely insane holiday rushes. Each day as Christmas of my senior year approached, hungry shoppers would be stacked up in twisting lines, five people deep, in front of every restaurant in the food court.
My hunt for a shiny new laptop always starts with the best of intentions, but well-intentioned laptops usually don’t come with gaming-ready GPUs. What do I mean by a “well-intentioned” laptop? I have a lot of respect for [System76][1] and [Star Labs][2] for their lovely Linux-first systems, and particular respect for [Purism][3]‘s holistic approach to the union of open source hardware and privacy. But I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that my ideal laptop is just as capable of running triple-A video games as it is of running Linux-based workloads...
In October of 2018, I got my annual physical and came face-to-face with the reality of my current weight and fitness levels. I was at 30 [BMI][1] and at my lowest amount of regular physical activity in years. The trend was not good.
Starting back in September I published a series of articles for the Red Hat Developer Blog under the series title “That App You Love”. I’m psyched to announce that “That App You Wrote”, my followup presentation, has been accepted as a talk at DevConf.cz this month! Didn’t read the original series? You can follow along here...
We lost Mia today. I’ve always read posts like this with some amount of indifference because in the back of my head I am thinking “this is just an animal” and “this is not a person”. And so I forgive you for feeling the same way. I understand that response.
This stream of thoughts is really for me, and it is also for my wife and kids and anyone else who feels the loss of our “just a cat” as acutely as I am feeling it right now. But maybe you’ve been here, too, with your pets, at the end of a chapter in your own life. Here is a rememberance for us.
In Decemeber of 2014 I transitioned from fifteen years of being a developer into being one of the people managers on a really amazing team here at [Red Hat][1]. All told, my first year in this role has been a tremendous learning experience for me. If you are interested in becoming a part of a team like this one, here is some advice for you based on the dozens of interviews I have conducted over my first 15 months.
My primary workhorse right now is an [HP Omen][1] running Fedora 22. Thinking and talking about how to restore my work environment from a total failure, I came to the conclusion that there are three primary things that need to be preserved...
I almost feel like a traitor, which is a weird way to feel about consumer electronics. But my next laptop is not going to be a MacBook. Our current development work on [OpenShift][1] requires easy access to a docker service, and [Boot2docker][2] just doesn’t cut it...