Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
It’s a sad week and what promises to be an extremely dark time in our nations history. Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand — and who’d blame you — I’m talking about the Orange Nightmare winning the Presidential election. It’s so depressing to see that 70+ million Americans decided to choose cruelty over compassion. If, like me, you have a sense of complete sadness and dread you’re not alone. Plenty of us feel this way. I’ve been through the sadness and disappointment period and I’m ready to push back against tyranny any way I can. Black and brown people, LGBTQ+, and women will need our support and help. I stand ready.
Hillel Italie • Associated Press
Quincy Jones, the multitalented music titan whose vast legacy ranged from producing Michael Jackson’s historic “Thriller” album to writing prize-winning film and television scores and collaborating with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and hundreds of other recording artists, has died at 91.
RIP 🪦
You personally? Sure, you might have cared enough, but it turns out a lot of those we thought were on our side, those we thought would stand up for their own rights, just … didn’t. Not only didn’t, but they appear to have thrown their lot in with Trump and are willing to let Elon Musk, Laura Loomer, RFK Jr, and the local Preacher Man run their lives. A lot of those women I saw in line yesterday?
Such a well written piece. It’s long but captures the rage, sadness, and confusion many of us feel post election of a complete moron, rapist, criminal to the highest office in the land.
What is a Staff Engineer? I get this question quite frequently. Sometimes from engineers looking to elevate their roles. At other times, team members reach out looking to learn how they could get the most value from Staff Engineers on the teams. It is a complicated question because a lot of ambiguity exists in the role. Different engineers have distinct interpretations, so you may get a significantly different answer depending on who you ask.
Excellent piece by Nish. If you’re a software developer give it a read. Staff Engineer is a weird job. They are the glue that binds us together. The player who can fill any position on a team. They’ve usually experienced a lot and have deep skills in a subject but are adaptable.
When I was an Engineering Director I kind of hated my job, I can admit that now. Moving to a Staff Engineer position was one of the best career moves I’ve ever made.
I feel like a hype man sometimes — it’s my personality — and I love doing odd jobs as often as I can. I do it so younger developers can do the fun work. The work that will stretch them and teach them how the platform they’re working on works in real world applications. Then I get to be there when they struggle to help them over the hump. I find it extremely rewarding. Nish’s experience may be completely opposite of mine — he’s a Principal Engineer (I think?), that’s the highest level in our Engineering organization. Regardless, Nish is the complete package. He’s good at everything. ❤️
Alex Henderson, AlterNet • RawStory
“On November 5,” Dalton writes, “the American people did the unthinkable — they elected a convicted felon president. Judge Juan Merchan should now do what was once unthinkable — force a president-elect to take the oath of office in a jail cell.
Boy-o-boy would I love to see that (yeah, it’s petty of me, so what?) I’m hoping there is another option. Can they postpone his sentence until he’s left office, if he leaves office? That way they can nail him properly.
Of course the risk of waiting means the addled old man may die in office and we get no Justice except for the fact he’d be out of office.
John Braydon • Golden Hill Software
While the best websites provide RSS feeds with full article content, some feeds contain only summaries or previews of article content. Without the webpage text feature an article from such a feed would look something like this in Unread
Mr. John Brayton is an excellent developer and his work shows it. He’s Unread’s only developer. That means he toils over iOS, Mac, and server code to make Unread the amazing product it is.
Yes, at one level John and I are competitors, but John’s work is undeniably so much more advanced than mine and that’s ok. I admire him and his work. Yes software developers can also be fans of other developers and their software.
John and I chat on occasion and he’s an amazing human being.
Go support him by taking Unread for iOS and Mac for a spin. You may fall in love with it.
Susie Madrak • Crooks and Liars
David Frum left the Republican Party following Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election. “De-registered as a Republican today,” Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, wrote on the social platform X on Wednesday.
I may not agree with a lot of David Frum’s views on policy as a “normal” Republican but I’ve always respected him and I love reading his writing.
Well, the man has finally had enough and left the GOP. Trump and Trumpism has really formed a new party. I wished they’d just give it an official name — perhaps MAGA — and let the GOP have their party back.
So when the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI announced they were doubling down on their efforts to persuade software manufacturers to abandon “memory-unsafe” programming languages such as C and C++, it came as no surprise.
Yes, it’s going to be extremely difficult to replace existing C and C++ software with a memory safe language, but folks should start now. Rust seems to be gaining real ground as a cross platform development language, even being used in Windows and Linux development. Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich has declared all new system level code should be written in Rust. That’s a big darned deal.
Of course you won’t see Apple do that but guess what! Apple has Swift! Swift was written to be highly performant and the syntax would be more familiar to C and C++ developers than is Rust. Yeah, yeah, I’m most likely a bit biased. 😃
Houston residents report receiving text messages telling them they’ve been selected to ‘pick cotton’
And so it begins. One day after the election the hate monger racists emerge from their pits to start their campaign against people who don’t look exactly like them. A lot of young white men voted us into this mess. It’s shameful.
Again, we must fight this tooth and nail to save the rotting soul of this great nation.
An effort to bring a broader news ecosystem to the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is now in the hands of the social magazine app Flipboard. Press.coop, a service that created mirrored accounts of top news publishers (including Reuters, AP, WSJ, NYT, BBC, CNN, and even yours truly), has transferred its collection of nearly 100 accounts to Flipboard, the companies announced Thursday.
Flipboard is a for profit company but I do like this move because I’m hoping it’ll get the big news outlets to finally abandon Space Karen’s social platform for Mastodon.
I know that’s asking a lot but folks have been fleeing his platform in greater numbers recently.
In light of Trump winning the 2024 presidential election over Vice President Kamala Harris, calls for Sotomayor to retire so that President Joe Biden, with support from a Democrat-majority Senate, would have enough time to appoint a new justice have recirculated on social media.
I’m really not overly thrilled with this idea. Justice Sotomayor is only 70 and should be able to make it through the next four years, unless the Dems calling for her retirement know something we don’t?
I know Democrats are in charge of the Senate but after McConnell’s bullshit with Garland then applying a different set of rules for Amy Coney Barrett I’m a bit gun shy.
However, if they did decide to replace her how about Merrick Garland or Kamala Harris?
I know folks feel like Garland let us down with Trump. I’m pissed off about it too but I still believe Garland is an excellent candidate because he is so measured when it comes to the law, and dammit, the man deserves to be a Justice.
If not Garland how about Kamala Harris? She knows the law and has been in politics more than long enough to play any games she needs to play.
Another petty thing I’d love to see is Biden retiring so Kamala can become the 47th President of the United States and screw up Orange Man’s swag offerings. 😈
Yes, I’m that petty when it comes to that man.
Here’s hoping he leaves office in four years.
