Nov 17, 2022 ∞

Supporting Grief

A few weeks back, one of my coworkers (we’ll call him Adam) had a major health scare and was hospitalized for a while. Another of my coworkers (we’ll call her Betty) pulled together notes of well-wishing from our team and prepared them in a really thoughtful way, adding “get well soon” messages and images to the document before sending it along. Adam is out of the hospital now, which is a huge relief for everyone.

This week, in a completely unrelated incident, Betty’s father passed away after a heart attack. This time around, the task of collecting people’s messages of support has fallen to me. And wow, am I bad at this. At Adam’s suggestion, I am following the same playbook that Betty used. But it feels highly ironic to be using this format for her, when just weeks ago she was doing this for someone else.

More generally, this has me thinking about how to offer sympathies in a genuine way. Sharing people’s joy is easy. Acknowledging people’s pain seems harder - not just because the occasions are sad, but because grief manifests in so many unpredictable ways. What kind of support does someone want during this time?

I think a number of the folks who’ve left messages of support for Betty have it right. Their wishes for her and her family revolve around the notion of having the space to feel. Simply being able to sit with the feelings of grief and loss and not put them aside. I personally get a little uncomfortable with “thoughts and prayers”, but wishing people space to feel seems like a meaningful and universal gesture.

There are people close to me who are in ill health, and I genuinely hope none of my coworkers has to put notes of sympathy together for me and my family any time soon. But the takeaway for me here is pretty clear: pushing through a big loss is not the healthy option. If you are grieving, or suffering any other difficult occasion, seek out the space to feel. It will hurt, but shoving it aside for later can only make things worse.

Nov 7, 2022 ∞

N7 Day

I’m a big fan of the Mass Effect video game franchise. I’ve played the main trilogy through so many times that I could talk you through the whole plot and the big decision points without loading up the games.

Nov 1, 2022 ∞

Meta Problems

I’ve always used Instagram to promote my DJ hobby stuff. I know it is owned by (and integrated with) Facebook, which I actively dislike, but I always viewed IG as “Evil Adjacent” rather than “Pure Evil”. But at some point along the way, FB has now “streamlined” some things between the two platforms. The result is that if you want to use a scheduling app (like Buffer or Later) to queue your IG posts ahead of time, you need an IG Business Account that must be connected to a Facebook Page. You can’t just have an IG Creator account anymore, you must also have an FB account.

So where does this leave folks who have no desire to be on Facebook?

Answer: “no post scheduling for you”. And I know, if you are a casual user this is no big deal. If you are a content creator who has limited time to try and maintain a social media presence (which I am super bad at even with a scheduler), then this is a massive blocker. FB wants you all the way in.

Many folks have thrown in the towel and grudgingly set up their Facebook account. I get it. The fear that creators feel is that they will not be discovered and appreciated if they aren’t where the eyeballs are. And yes, many of their livelihoods depend on it. But I am increasingly becoming convinced that the big social media platforms always take more than they give.

My DJ teacher wisely observed the the best way to gain a following is to start a mailing list. Plenty of services out there will help you manage your mailing lists, but the beauty of email is that you can always take that list with you. No matter what happens to the platforms you use, the mailing list is yours. I think about that a lot these days, and in the meantime, I’ve been slowly reducing my footprint on Meta.

“But I’m sure going to miss all of the ads…” – Nobody, Ever.

Oct 22, 2022 ∞

Projects

Coding Projects

I’m nhr on GitHub. Here are some of my more interesting projects:

Shiftzilla

While I was part of the OpenShift team, I was responsible for managing several consecutive product releases. Understanding our progress against bug counts was critical to staying on top of our quarterly release cadence. I wrote Shiftzilla to start capturing Bugzilla-based info and offering us a way to analyze long-time trends on a per-release and per-development-team basis.

AsciiBinder

Another problem we had to solve for OpenShift was managing documentation for several different versions of the product at once. The fantastic AsciiDoctor tool could handle converting markdown pages (specifically, AsciiDoc pages) to HTML, but there was no utility at the time that could compile a bunch of AsciiDoctor-generated pages into a single website. I created AsciiBinder to solve that problem.

The SWN Sector Generator

Totally not work-related, but very relevant to one of my hobbies. I took the open-sourced rules for a role playing game called Stars Without Number and created this galaxy generator that has been running almost continuously since 2010.

Non-Coding Projects

Totally Normal Dance Mix

My DJ persona is DJ Harrison Ripps. Starting in April of 2020 I started live streaming a DJ set every Friday night. This was the birth of a listening party / Zoom hangout that has come to be known as the Quarantine Dance Mix. We all thought the pandemic would be behind us after a few months, and I thought the same thing about my DJ sets. I went weekly for a full calendar year! Now that things have opened up a bit, I’m livestreaming on the first Friday of every month.

Blogging and Creative Writing

My on-again-off-again hobby for many years. In an alternate universe I’m a professional writer. Some day I may be one here, too. In the meantime, there’s this blog.

Oct 22, 2022 ∞

About Me

I’m a career technologist, writer, and hobbyist dj with about a dozen other hobbies as well.

If you want to connect professionally, reach out on LinkedIn.
If you are into social media, the only place I’m really active is mastodon.

Mar 15, 2022 ∞

The Ides of March

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.

Feb 8, 2022 ∞

Fast Food

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.

Dec 18, 2019 ∞

Fedora 31 on the Razer Stealth GTX (Late 2019)

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…

Nov 12, 2019 ∞

2019: Year of the Spartan

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.

Apr 20, 2018 ∞

TGIF

Here at The Internet Shipyards, Friday night is cocktail night. Today’s special guest: the Rusty Nail, also known as the World’s Simplest Cocktail.

Dec 6, 2016 ∞

That App You Love – Headed to DevConf.cz!

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…

Mar 18, 2016 ∞

A Sunbeam for Mia

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.

Feb 18, 2016 ∞

Advice From an Open-Source Hiring Manager

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.

Aug 13, 2015 ∞

Comments on Backing Up a Linux Laptop

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…

Jun 10, 2015 ∞

New Challenges, New Tools

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…

Oct 20, 2014 ∞

iCloud “Family Sharing”: Great Feature Unless You Use iTunes Match

Family Sharing provides users with a way to share purchases from their iCloud/iTunes account with up to five other people. Additionally, this feature enables you to create iCloud accounts for children, and to manage the purchases and content available to those accounts.

iTunes has been around a lot longer than this feature, and so for years now, people have had to a different means to share app purchases across multiple users. The most common solution is pretty straightforward; create one iTunes account that is shared by multiple people. Apple supports this approach, too: on any Mac or iOS device, you can use one account for your iCloud stuff and a separate one for your iTunes stuff…

Oct 11, 2014 ∞

Where to Post? Finding Yourself Amongst Ello, Facebook, and the Glut of Social Media

[Ello][1] is a social platform that has been the subject of some buzz recently. Either by design or by accident, Ello is squarely positioned as the anti-Facebook, which immediately places it in a similar space in people’s minds. That’s a great deal for Ello, because feature-wise they have a long way to go before the can really throw down: no mobile app, no OAuth, no API. Ello claims to be built on a Freemium model that will sustain the company without them resorting to selling user info; but only time will tell.

Sep 12, 2014 ∞

TL;DR: Stop Expecting Achievements to Make You Happy

A moment of clarity from the folks at HuffPo…

Here’s the best part: When you detach happiness from achievement, these five things that happen are the key ingredients to success. Disconnecting happiness from achievement is the best way to achieve anything…

Aug 26, 2014 ∞

OS X to Fedora 20: The User Experience, Pt. 2

Just tuning in? Have a look at [Part 1][1] to find out how I installed Fedora 20 on a MacBook Air and why I am so interested in trying to duplicate or even surpass the user experience that I previously enjoyed with OS X.

Aug 18, 2014 ∞

OS X to Fedora 20: The User Experience, Pt. 1

A little background here: I have been a Mac enthusiast for a number of years now. I would not say that I am religious about OS X, but if the OS X user experience is a philosophical application of “[opinionated][1] [software][2]”, then I find myself in agreement with most of the opinions that the Apple UX team has expressed.

However, I am also an open source developer. I’d like to believe that it is possible to create a similar and possibly even superior experience with a Linux-based desktop environment. And lo, this is what lead me, a few weeks ago, to get Fedora 20 running on a MacBook Air. If you’re interested in trying the same thing, check out Matt Hicks’ [invaluable blog post][3] on setting things up.

Over a series of blog posts I am digging into my impressions of the Fedora 20 user experience as I work through this total switch-over.