Rob Fahrni

It seems Kolby hasn’t figured out the concept of sleeping in on the weekend, no sir. We had the discussion again this morning at 4:45AM. Goofy dog. 😂

I managed to fall back to sleep on the couch until 6. Coffee time! ☕️

CNN

Forceful flooding that washed away roads and sent residents across parts of northern and central California fleeing their homes is expected to continue Saturday and through the weekend as more rain arrives.

This is crazy to watch. Drought for years and years and now flooding.

Platformer

Twitter’s decline is paving the way for other platforms to build next-generation replacements. And now the biggest player in the game is getting involved: Meta is in the early stages of building a dedicated app for people to post text-based updates.

Oh, sure, now Meta wants to get in on the action with their own decentralized network offering. 🤣

Just put up a Mastodon instance and call it a day.

NetNewsWire Blog

If you see a page offering a download of NetNewsWire for Android, please remember that it’s a scam and you should definitely not install it.

I wonder what kind of recourse Brent has to stop this sort of thing?

Jalopnik

Lewis Hamilton’s car was not its best last year, when Hamilton finished in sixth place for the championship, and Mercedes finished third in the Constructor’s Championship, both results below their standards.

I got into F1 a few years back and don’t watch it super closely but perhaps it’s just time for another team to be on top for a while?

Krzysztof Kowalczyk

SumatraPDF is an open-source document reader for Windows. It started as a PDF reader, hence the name, but over time I’ve added for e-book formats (epub, mobi), comic books (cbz, cbr), DjVu, XPS, image formats etc. It’s about 127k lines of C++ (not counting libraries written by others).

It’s nice to see a traditional Win32 application live on. Makes me want to work on it. That, of course, will never happen.

The New Republic

The Tennessee House of Representatives has passed a bill that would allow people to refuse to perform a marriage if they disagree with it.

Can someone please stop the GOP? They really want a society run by old white men with all kinds of weird hang ups?

The Verge

Spotify is redesigning the core homescreen of its app, trying to make it easier for users to find new stuff to listen to — and watch. The new design goes heavy on imagery and vertical scrolling, turning your homescreen from a set of album covers into a feed that much more closely resembles TikTok and Instagram.

I’m sure this is controversial but I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Folks will get used to it and it’ll feel natural after a while.

Medium

A few weeks ago, we announced that Medium is embracing short-form writing by launching our very own Mastodon server at me.dm. Starting today, we’re opening up me.dm access for our member community. If you’re a Medium member, you can create an account on me.dm.

Another controversial thing but I don’t have a problem with Medium running their own instance.

NBC News

Elon Musk took aim at a disabled Twitter employee Monday who tagged him in a tweet to ask if he’d been laid off.

BBC

A Twitter employee has appealed to Elon Musk on the platform to ask whether he had been sacked.

Sure, let’s pick on the guy in a wheel chair, Space Karen.

Stay classy, ass hole.

[Platformer](<https://open.substack.com/pub/platformer/p/how-a-single-engineer-brought-down)

Twitter’s website is breaking in novel new ways — and while the company managed to recover from its latest outage within a couple hours, the story behind how it broke suggests there are likely to be similar problems in the near future.

I feel like Twitter will survive, but not because of Musk “magic.” It will continue because it will slowly lose users and the folks who remain will be able to apply more duct tape, bailing wire, and bubble gum to it to keep it going.

Rewrites are not really an option. You can swap out pieces — slowly — but that takes time. Declaring it needs a rewrite is a very lofty ideal. Best of luck with that.

Why not just pack it in and use Mastodon? 🐘

The Daily Beast

A Twitter engineer identified only as Sam told BBC News: “Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards—very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom.” He said the constant use of bodyguards suggested that Musk, who has sacked a huge number of Twitter staff including coders, does not trust his remaining staff at Twitter HQ in San Francisco.

He should be paranoid of some angry geek handing him his ass one day.

BBC

Twitter insiders have told the BBC that the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under owner Elon Musk.

Fascists gonna fascist.

Couple of random shots of my sticker decorated water bottle.

The first one is the sticker I received for backing the Phoenix project. Phoenix was the update to Twitterrific for Mac a number of years back.

The second is my company logo and all the Stream icons as a hero shot.

Kolby decided it was time to get up at 5:45 this morning and since our granddaughter is visiting it was best not to try and convince him to go back to bed. 😂

Bring on all the coffee! ☕️

Harpers

In 2006, when DeSantis was there, it was one of the worst times at Guantánamo. The administration, the guards, all of them were the worst.

DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump. He had a higher IQ and he’s managed to single handedly turn Florida into the absolute worst state in the nation.

How do these folks get into politics? 👹

TechCrunch

Bluesky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has hit the App Store and more testers are gaining access. Though the app is still only available as an invite-only beta, its App Store arrival signals that a public launch could be nearing.

From the screenshots in the article it looks a lot like Mastodon to me, but the account names are slightly different. On a Bluesky server my handle would be @fahrni.curmudgeon.cafe instead of @fahrni@curmudgeon .cafe. It’s a matter of a single character.

More importantly it’s just like Mastodon in that here is no single authority or silo controlled by a corporation, as is the case with Twitter.

Are they late to the party? Perhaps. 🤷🏻‍♂️

New York Times

The drugmaker Eli Lilly and Company said on Wednesday that it would significantly reduce the sticker prices of several of its lifesaving insulin products that are used by diabetes patients and whose prices Lilly has repeatedly increased in the past.

It’s about time. Shame on them for taking advantage of folks who need this medication to survive.

Bloomberg

Apple Inc. has abruptly shut down one of its retail stores in Charlotte, North Carolina, after the mall where it’s located suffered at least three shootings in recent months.

This is kind of scary. Three shootings at a mall in recent months. Who can blame them for closing it down?

We are a uniquely violent nation. Violent with lots of guns. 🔫

Formula 1

American automotive giants Ford have confirmed their intention to make a Formula 1 comeback when new engine regulations are introduced in 2026, meaning another chapter will be added to the American organisation’s rich history in the sport.

This makes me extremely happy! I wish Haas was using Ford engines since they’re an American team, but you can’t go wrong with the hottest team on the grid. 🏎️

Associated Press

Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams experienced possibly the biggest repercussion of his recent comments about race when distributor Andrews McMeel Universal announced Sunday it would no longer work with the cartoonist.

Flat out racist! He should be shunned but he has a friend in Elon Musk and I’m sure the white supremacist wing of the GOP loves him. 👎

9 to 5 Mac

Now, Kuo reports that Apple has restarted iPhone SE 4 development, which will be the first iPhone to include Apple’s in-house 5G modem.

I wonder if Apple is considerering this a replacement for the iPhone Mini?

It looks like it’ll be a really nice phone.

Business Insider

Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of Musk’s automation ambition came in early February when Mercedes-Benz received the first-ever certification for Level 3 driving automation — designed to require human intervention only in severe conditions — on public roads in the US.

Musk seems to have too much on his plate. He’s destroying Twitter and neglecting Tesla. 🚗

MSNBC

Ukrainian soldiers astonished the world last year by stopping Russia’s assault on Kyiv, liberating over half of the territory once held by Russian occupiers, and thwarting Putin’s attempt to overthrow President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s democracy. By providing weapons and economic aid, the U.S., NATO and other democracies have played a critical role in helping Ukrainians achieve these victories.

I hope we continue to support Ukraine and they defeat Russia and Putin once and for all.

Associated Press

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed a bill that gives him control of Walt Disney World’s self-governing district, punishing the company over its opposition to the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law.

More of this guy. He’s wrecking Florida.🐊

I had a very vivid dream last night the moon was extremely close to Earth and you could see other planets behind it in the distance. The sky was always dark but you could see the stars. On the opposite side of the moons orbit around Earth was a clump of asteroids, or whatever the proper term is for a collection of rocks traveling in a pack. When the collection of rocks was passing by a number of them would fall from the sky, crashing into Earth. We all knew it was the end of our planet because the moon was going to eventually crash into us and there was nothing we could do.

It’s so difficult to describe. It’s like something you’d see in a sci-fi movie. It was both beautiful and terrifying.

Good morning!

I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, I just did it for the first time ever. I just made a full pot of coffee, like I normally do, but this time I forgot to put in the coffee grounds! That’s right, my coffee starved brain made a pot of hot water.😳🤣

I hope your pot is full of piping hot coffee. Enjoy the links. ☕️

CNN

Former US President Jimmy Carter will begin receiving hospice care, according to a statement from The Carter Center on Saturday.

I know he’s considered a failed President but he was a wonderful human being who helped so many after he left the Presidency. A true humanitarian. A man who gives you hope for our future as a nation and a species.

When the time is right, God speed, Mr. President.

CNN

An onset of severe weather across the West Coast has spawned unfamiliar wintry conditions at higher elevations, particularly over mountainous areas of Los Angeles and Ventura counties, where up to a foot of snow may pair with 80 mph winds, the National Weather Service said.

I’m sure we’ll hear the final outcome of this event soon enough but I lived in California most of my life and I never saw anything close to this.

Need to check with my brothers in the San Joaquin Valley this morning. 🥶

New York Times

President Biden made a surprise trip to the capital of embattled Ukraine on Monday, traveling under a cloak of secrecy into a war zone to demonstrate what he called America’s “unwavering support” for the effort to beat back Russian forces nearly a year after they invaded the country.

I’m happy to know we’ve reaffirmed our commitment to Ukraine.

Слава Україні. 🇺🇦

Live Science

Astronomers have spotted a runaway supermassive black hole, seemingly ejected from its home galaxy and racing through space with a chain of stars trailing in its wake.

I mentioned this earlier in the week on Mastodon. My mind was completely blown away by the thought of a massive black hole zooming across the galaxy dragging stars along with it for the ride. Stars. 🤯

Brent Simmons

From time to time a NetNewsWire user lets me know that they’d be happy to pay for the app or add to a tip jar. The answer is always the same: we don’t take money, but here’s how to support NetNewsWire.

Brent is one of my Mac heroes. He’s done it his way his entire career. And now with a small group of volunteer developers they’ve made the best NetNewsWire ever, and it’s completely free. Like really free. Not free as in beer. Free as in I won’t take your money even if you insist.

I may get a few comments saying “But Rob, that’s a competitor!” It’s not. Stream comes nowhere near it.

Thanks NetNewsWire team. You’re amazing! ❤️

Fox Sports

There is no amount of logic than can explain why Eric Bieniemy is here, moving on to another offensive coordinator job instead of being a head coach. Nothing can make sense of why he’d want to leave, or feel he’d have to leave, the Kansas City Chiefs and quarterback Patrick Mahomes for the instability of the Washington Commanders and their quarterback uncertainty.

I thought for sure Eric Bieniemy was going to land a head coaching job after another amazing run with the Chiefs.

The only thing I can come up with is he’s been promised the Commanders Head Coach position after next season and the Commanders are playing it close to the vest.

That’s all I got. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Thomas Ricouard

This is the first article in what I hope will be a long series of stories about the making of the [Ice Cubes](github.com/Dimillian…] app. This article will focus on what the app is, the general story behind it, and an overview of the codebase.

Another really amazing open source project and fantastic Mastodon client. It runs on iOS, iPadOS, and Apple Silicon based Macs. I’m hoping we’ll see a focused effort on the Mac in the future, but if we don’t, that’s fine.

Go check out this opening piece of multiple pieces on the app and its codebase.

Oh, and it’s all SwiftUI, which makes for a great proving ground of the language because of typical needs of a social media app. 🧊

CNBC

Adobe shares fell as much as 5% in extended trading following a report that said the U.S. Justice Department is planning a lawsuit to block the company’s $20 billion acquisition of startup Figma.

So many folks were concerned with this acquisition early on. The typical fears of every acquisition of your favorite software by a gigantor corporation. Fear of them screwing it up.

So what happens to Figma if the deal falls through? What kind of harm will be done to them?

So many designers at WillowTree use Figma, it’s an extremely important part of their daily workflows. 👩🏽‍💻

Los Angeles Times

There simply won’t be enough water to sustain present irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley.

The sad news for our nations food supply continues. I’d imagine the price of our favorite fruits and vegetable will sky rocket and less and less are produced.

As they say in the San Joaquin Valley [“Food grows where water flows.”(<www.farmwater.org> 🍊

NBC News

WASHINGTON — Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called for the U.S. to be separated by red and blue states and for a shrinking of the federal government in a tweet on President’s Day, the latest in a string of controversial statements from the two-term congresswoman.

Ugh. This gal is just begging for Civil War. Hey, GOP, get her under control or you’re going to burn our nation to the ground.

Who needs to import terrorists from Al-Qaidah when we have home grown terrorists like Green. 💣

WillowTree Engineering

WillowTree is an organization that has absolutely exploded with growth over the last 7 years, since I started here as an intern in 2016. At the time, we were at about 150 people in the entire company, and now we’re eclipsing 1,300.

We have grown by leaps and bounds, even while the pandemic was in full swing. This piece by Paul Klauser and Andrew Carter is an interesting look at their new roles and the need to create an entire new job category at the company.

Both are seasoned software engineers, down in the trenches, Senior Staff Software Engineers at WillowTree. Paul on Android and Andrew on iOS.

I’ve worked directly with Andrew and he is hands down one of the best developers I’ve ever worked with and the best iOS developer I’ve ever worked with. He’s also a mean banjo and fiddle player. 🪕

Anywho, check it out!

Jalopnik

The train derailment just outside East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3 is a continuing nightmare not just for folks in the community but for all of the communities which share water systems down stream. Like most industrial incidents, employees on the ground issued constant warnings that something like the disastrous derailment would happen, only to be ignored.

What a mess. A bonafide disaster that will affect folks in the region for years and years to come.

Be prepared for cancer clusters to pop up.

I really hope the government puts pre-Trump restrictions and regulations back in place and we get better infrastructure and train technology to prevent future disasters. 🚂

Washington Post

Dozens of companies there took part in the world’s largest trial of the four-day workweek — and a majority of supervisors and employees liked it so much they’ve decided to keep the arrangement. In fact, 15 percent of the employees who participated said “no amount of money” would convince them to go back to working five days a week.

Yes, I want a four day work week. I’d love to have that third day to focus on Stream. How selfish of me!

But, seriously, I’ve started to talk with folks at work about how I’d like to semi retire at some point by moving to a three or four day work week. I don’t see that happening for a number of years, but we don’t have anything in place at WillowTree to accommodate part time work for folks who would normally “age out” and retire but want to continue working. I’d like to keep my brain challenged with work, make a little money, have more freedom, and retire from working at around 70. 🤞🏼

You can always like and subscribe by leaving a tip in Stream or Ko-fi, if you’re so inclined! No pressure! ❤️

What would be a good name for a blog editing tool? Just for writing, editing, and publishing. Native iOS and Mac. A companion to Stream, as it were.

Would a combined blogging and feed reader app be appealing?

Before doing Stream I was originally doing a blogging tool. I did Stream because a feed reader was easier than doing a blog editor. 🤣

It’s unfortunate I waste so much time thinking about these things but I want them for myself. I figure others might want them too.

Twitter is doing just fine! 🤣

Platformer

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Vox

The broken Twitter everyone warned us about is finally here.

Business Insider

Twitter suffered another outage during Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show Sunday, despite Elon Musk’s efforts to make the platform as stable as possible.

Forbes

An attorney who says she represents approximately one-third of all Twitter employees that were fired since Elon Musk bought the company late last year, told a federal court in a new filing that the company is not serious in its attempts to resolve worker disputes through private arbitration and is asking the court to halt that process.

HuffPost

Elon Musk made an announcement Friday morning that could make Twitter users with legacy blue checks feel blue: He wants to take away the social media status symbol.

Platformer

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Rolling Stone

Late yesterday — the day after firing the engineer who theorized that he might not be as interesting or popular as he believes — Musk announced that Twitter’s recommendation algorithm would be “fixed” by today. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing a lot more of him in your feed.

TechCrunch

Twitter claims it is “committed to keeping people safe and secure on Twitter.” This is not true. Instead, you’re looking at one of the stupidest security decisions made by a company playing out in real-time.

This is Kim’s flag choice for January and February. I meant to get a picture of it in January but finally captured it a couple days back.

As I’m getting started it’s a nice crisp 27F outside just before 8AM EST. The sun is out and will be all day. We’ve had a very mild winter this year, with the exception of that polar blast around Christmas, and I don’t expect us to get any snow.🌞

My coffee is in hand, time to get started. Hope you enjoy the links. ☕️

Reuters

A gunman opened fire on Monday night on the main campus of Michigan State University, killing three people and injuring five, before an hours-long manhunt for the suspect ended with his death, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot, police said.

It’s the guns. I don’t know what else to say. Over and over and over again we see this and do nothing. A truly American thing and not one to be proud of. 😞

Chicago Tribune

Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl for the 2nd time in 4 years, beating the Philadelphia Eagles 38-35 on a FG with 8 seconds left

I’m happy for the Chiefs and their fans. It was a great Super Bowl, a nail biter, not a blowout. Oh, and the Mahomes to Kelce connection is without a doubt the best in football and one of the best ever. If Patrick Mahomes can stay healthy and have a 20-year run he’ll break all kinds of records and win some more rings.

Macworld

Just short of the 10th anniversary of that first Mac Pro misstep, Apple is now late in concluding its processor transition by shipping the first Apple silicon-based Mac Pro. What’s worse, reports from Bloomberg suggest that the company has ditched the next Mac Pro’s highest-end processor, calling the computer’s entire purpose into question.

Given Apple’s new chip architecture with memory and processor built into the chip I have a difficult time defining what a pro machine should or would be. Maybe you have to accept a new definition? Maybe it doesn’t mean a flexible and expandable architecture?

What I’d like to see is Apple give the Professional computing world a way to use their current investment in Mac Pro a way to replace the x86 based Xeon chips with Apple Silicon. Of course Apple would never do such a thing because money. 💸

Linode

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 15, 2022 – Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the world’s most trusted solution to power and protect digital experiences, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Linode, one of the easiest-to-use and most trusted infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform providers.

I follow a number of indie software developers and they tend to use Linode for their service backends. Two that come to mind are Micro.blog, the system I use for publishing my blog, and Overcast, the indie podcast app for iOS. I’m sure there are many more out there I don’t know about. I’ve never done any large scale backend work for my indie endeavors but if I did I’d most likely choose Linode because they’re inexpensive, reliable, and have great customer service.

Hopefully they don’t start hiking prices, laying off people, and becoming a terrible place to host. 🤞🏼

Semafor

Spotify’s podcast push began in earnest in 2016, when Ek invited audio executives including higher ups at Gimlet to the company’s headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden to explain the emerging American podcast market.

Spotify calls their recorded audio podcasting. It’s not. Podcasting is the audio plus a delivery mechanism in the form of RSS. Yes, you can have a podcast as I’ve defined it behind a paywall. They just want to lock you into their app with their advertising and try to upsell you on other things. That’s fine. It’s their business but don’t call them podcasts. Ok, off the soap box. 📦

I was listening to the Pivot Podcast last night and Scott Galloway point out that very few podcasts make a profit. That’s true of what he defines as a podcast. Remember, this started as an open technology built by Dave Winer and Adam Curry. It was used and loved long before businessmen decided they could monetize it. Just like blogging. It’s was and still is a way for us mere mortals to communicate to the outside world, even if we’re not paid a dime to do it.

Oh, and I have a feeling some of the small podcasting shops are doing just fine, but they do things differently and have well loved shows. They’re just not exclusive to Spotify or Apple or whatever Big Co place you get your podcasts. They’re fully open and downloadable using your podcast player of choice because they’re built on top of RSS as the delivery mechanism.

The key phrase to listen for when you hear a podcast advertised is ”Download wherever you get your podcasts.” Then you know it’s a real podcast.

Crooks and Liars

The hearing got incredibly creepy when Arkansas state Sen. Matt McKee asked a trans pharmacist if she had a penis. “Do you have a penis?” he asked the woman, who seemed stunned at the question.

Unbelievable. I wish we could get past this and so many other things. So many people want to control how others behave and how they live their life. Often times based on some form of religion they’ve twisted to support their hate, disdain, or jealously of others.

Let people live their lives. Show them respect and grace as fellow human beings. It’s not our job to tell folks how they should live. That goes for women, brown skinned people, and the LBGTQ+ community. ❤️

Doctorow

After half a decade of sedate, steady growth, Mastodon suddenly surged, from 600,000 daily users to 2.6 million in the space of months.

Some folks are already writing off Mastodon. Silly people. If you’re looking to get a huge following and interacting with movie stars, influencers, government officials, and the rich and famous, don’t expect that from Mastodon. It’s not built for that. It’s built like your everyday neighborhood for us commoners to engage in. It’s real people carrying on real discussions. Sure, there’s gonna be some hate but there are mechanisms in place to take care of that crap. I love it and I’m excited to see it grow. There’s no algorithm to encourage you to follow people or corporate master to satisfy and no need to grow to billions of users because of it.

It’s like blogging. It’s all open and up to us, everyday people, to keep it. ✌🏼

New York Times

Lurking behind the concerns of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, over the content of a proposed high school course in African American studies, is a long and complex series of debates about the role of slavery and race in American classrooms.

Talk about hateful, mean, and unsympathetic to fellow human beings. DeSantis is an authoritarian who wants to mold Florida into his own disgusting image. He doesn’t want you to think for yourself or question authority, no sir. He wants a bunch of dumb drones serving the rich and powerful.

Get out if you can. It’s a terrible state. If you can’t, or don’t want to, I wish you luck and hope you find a way to help change the state. 🍀

Joseph Heck

In the past couple of years, I’ve had the occasion to want to make an XCFramework – a bundle that’s used by Apple platforms to encapsulate binary frameworks or libraries – a couple of times.

I don’t know Joseph personally but I’ve interacted with him on the NetNewsWire Slack and Mastodon and he’s a really kind, thoughtful, selfless man. He’s given me feedback on Stream and Mac programming questions. All that to say he’s one of the good ones.

Anywho, this is a great piece on how he built an XCFramework with a Rust core. Rust has become the new, safe, language for creating highly performant software and being able to use it natively on iOS or Mac and integrate it right into Xcode is wonderful. 🧰

Cory Doctrow

Mobile tech is a duopoly run by two companies – Google and Apple – with a combined market cap of $3.5 trillion. Each company uses a combination of tech, law, contract and market power to force sellers to do commerce via an app, and each one extracts a massive commission on all in-app sales – 15-30%!

Web tools continue to improve to the point that native apps may become a thing of the past for many companies. Of course folks like me will continue to do native iOS, and hopefully Mac, apps for as long as we can, but the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Native apps are becoming less and less important with each passing day. Learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

New York Times

Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.

A really great piece by Jamelle Bouie. Please, go read it if you can.

Yours truly who accidentally started a conversation about SwiftUI List performance. Smooth, fast, stable, code is important to me and most developers. we do strive to make our apps the best they can be. I’m still learning, still trying, to make all my apps better each time I work on one. This conversation may change how I do Stream for Mac.

Happy Valentines Day to those who celebrate!

WillowTree Engineering

“One of the biggest reasons the title of “Staff Engineer” is so hard to wrap up in one quick explanation is because it entails such a wide scope. Over the course of my time as a Staff Engineer, I’ve had responsibilities that fall into all of the following categories at one time or another”

Up until I became an Engineering Director I’d been a Senior Software Engineer since the early 2000’s, not long before Microsoft acquired Visio. I was so self conscious about the title change I asked that nobody talk about it. I didn’t tell anyone. Why? I was kind of embarrassed because I thought there was no way I could be a Senior Engineer amongst all the legendary Principal Engineers I worked with. At Visio a Principal Software Engineer was equivalent to what we call a Staff Software Engineer at WillowTree.

Fast forward to 2019 when I join WillowTree we had Staff Software Engineers and I had never actually heard the term. We also had Principal Software Engineers. The difference was a Staff focused on technical stuff and the Principal on managing folks and helping them grow.

Since then the Principal role changed name to Engineering Director. Same responsibilities, new title.

One of the things I found attractive about WillowTree was the dual track a Senior Software Engineer had the choice of taking when they promoted to the next level. I’d been thinking for quite a while I’d like to become more of a people manager and get out of day-to-day coding. To this day I still love writing code and building product. I fill that need today by building my own products. They’re small, digestible, apps I enjoyed building and maintaining, especially Stream.

Since I became an Engineering Director I’ve caught myself missing the day-to-day work of building a product. By that I mean doing the code. It’s a real transition to become a people and project manager instead of writing code. It’s taken time for me to really embrace the change and I’m finally started to settle into it.

A part of me wonders if I could be a Staff Engineer and I think I could. Staff folks tend to work on stuff around the edges, gluing all the various bits together, making sure the build pipeline gets setup and working, working with the client to decide architectures, third-party services, and overall strategy. They also tend to jump on big issues, bugs, and hop around technologies at will and pick them up quickly. In my experience at WillowTree they have the ear of our client.

My history tells me I have filled a lot of those roles, all of them in fact, but the thing that I feel would stop me from doing that job is speed. I’ve never been quick to make change. Yes, I can adapt, but I’m not one to do it overnight. I’m not what I’d label intelligent. I work really hard at what I do to make things soak into my brain. Over the course of my career I’ve outworked people. I don’t give up when I’m onto something. My lack of speed has always been, I believe, my biggest weakness.

That’s why the people manager track was so interesting to me. I knew it was time to get out of coding, I love mentoring, and it feels really great to see others grow in their career.

But I sure do love sitting in a quiet room building software and if I could work on my own projects all day, every day, I’d do it in a heartbeat. 😃

Self portrait December 26, 2021

Super Bowl pick.

Kansas City Chiefs over Philadelphia Eagles.

Patrick Mahomes Super Bowl MVP.

Take that as you may. I got both of my picks wrong two weeks back. 😂

Flynn likes to crawl up in my arms and be held like a baby.

I’ve had a head cold for the past week and my body is finally getting on top of it, finally. As a result I’m tired this morning and my brain is foggy and doesn’t want to do anything. Coffee to the rescue, I hope! ☕️

Hope you enjoy the links.

CNN

More than 23,000 people have been killed and tens of thousands injured after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Turkey and Syria on Monday, officials said.

It’s been a very sad week for the people of Turkey and Syria. So many dead and wounded. I haven’t kept up with it like I normally would for such a tragedy. Why is that?

Thankfully people are still being rescued from the rubble. America needs to send help.

Arstechnica

According to The Register, Google and Mozilla have recently been spotted working on versions of Chromium and Firefox that use their normal Blink and Gecko rendering engines, respectively.

It doesn’t surprise me to hear Google and Mozilla have native browsers built for iOS. Why not, their code is very portable already, it makes sense.

Some competition on the platform would be good for Apple and consumers.

Colm Doyle

It’s hardly insightful to suggest that the last few years have substantially changed the day to day experience of a knowledge worker. Nearly overnight even the most remote skeptical leadership teams were forced to embrace flexible work practices like working from home.

At WillowTree our CEO, Tobias, is a huge proponent of working in the office full time. When COVID hit we were just getting ready to move into our newly renovated building at Woolen Mills, but that didn’t happen and everybody went remote.

Fast forward a year and a half later and WillowTree is making preparations to return to the office on a hybrid schedule. Then COVID spiked again so it was out on hold. Eventually a poll was taken, we do lots of polls at WillowTree, asking if folks preferred in office or work from home. Tobias himself was shocked to learn that over 20% of the company preferred it.

Things changed based on the poll and a team was created to that would allow anyone to work from anywhere. I’m part of that team and I love it. I’m grateful our leadership is open to big change. So far it’s been really amazing.

Facebook Engineering Blog

Facebook for iOS (FBiOS) is the oldest mobile codebase at Meta. Since the app was rewritten in 2012, it has been worked on by thousands of engineers and shipped to billions of users, and it can support hundreds of engineers iterating on it at a time.

If you’re a developer go read this piece. When folks think of mobile software they most likely think of toy sized apps like Stream, not a lot going on. Then you run into a beast of a codebase like Facebook and you realize mobile software is “real” bonafide software with real challenges.

Mike Masnick

In the past few decades, however, rather than building new protocols, the internet has grown up around controlled platforms that are privately owned.

This is a piece from 2019 and it holds up really well. He’s basically discussing what ActivityPub and Mastodon have become. A lot of the challenges around siloed social networks is around “free speech.” I put that in quotes because most folks think free speech is a free for all, anything goes, and you can’t ban me because I said something nasty or threatening to you. Of course a platform could ban you and it has nothing to do with free speech. Companies and individuals don’t have to take the abuse and can choose to ban you if they want. Mastodon has helped this in many ways. I run my own Mastodon server and it’s by invitation only so I know and trust the folks on it to maintain a certain decorum. I know they won’t be nasty or threatening and it’s self policing. We need more small instances with better community management.

Cloudflare

Today we’re introducing Wildebeest, an open-source, easy-to-deploy ActivityPub and Mastodon-compatible server built entirely on top of Cloudflare’s Supercloud.

I read through this post and I think it’s really wonderful to see addition ActivityPub based services come online. It’s an exciting time!

Cordi

About the tech experience on Mastodon. This is the last of three posts I have on Mastodon. I’ve been on the app for more than two months and have been content to ghost Twitter.

A nice series of posts about one persons experience with Mastodon. If you have friends fearful of joining they should go read this and see what someone else has experienced. Sure, it’s not Twitter, it’s even better, and it’s growing day by day.

Jack Dorsey believed Twitter should be open, not a silo. Mastodon and ActivityPub are delivering that vision. A central hub, controlled by a single corporation, is no longer in charge. The people are.

Digits to Dollars

After 30 years of dominance, the industry has come to come view Intel as a giant who has fallen on hard times. We do not think this is the right way to view the company, and it creates mental blind spots which hinder our ability to assess what are the right next steps for the company.

It’s hard to believe Intel is having so much trouble. They coasted for so long on their x86 architecture and still make a ton of money from it but the times they are a changing. Apple creating their own, much better, silicon must scare the pants off of Intel internally. They’re lucky Apple doesn’t care to sell their tech to any computer manufacturer. Imagine a Windows PC running on Apple Silicon. That would be glorious. 😃

Dave Rogers

What is somewhat more puzzling to me is the nature or character of the people who are attracted to this type. The toadies and sycophants, the enablers and lickspittles who compete for proximity to someone in power, someone in control.

I love reading Dave’s stuff. He’s an extremely kind, compassionate, man and a great writer. Unfortunately he lives in Florida and that state is full of looney birds, especially at the government level. Their Governor is is King Looney, a complete nutter, with fantasies of making Florida a totalitarian government run by him. His desire to control everything is exactly the opposite of a free nation and against everything our nation was founded on. He needs to go.

Dave, like many of us, can’t understand why people want this sort of strongman creating horrible policy in charge. Why would you want your rights squashed? You’re American, don’t you believe in freedom for all?

Ms. Priss is tired. Nighty night.

Flynn just woke up and now he’s crawled back under the blanket, is making dough, and is going to go back to sleep.

Rough life.

CNN

On Friday night, a new national record for lowest wind chill temperature was likely recorded at the tallest peak in the Northeast, Mount Washington in New Hampshire, with a reported wind chill of minus 108 degrees Fahrenheit – thanks to a temperature of minus 46 and wind gusts of 127 mph. Wind chill records are not historically tracked as closely as temperature records, but the mark would beat other lows set.

I can’t imagine how that must feel. Can you even go out in it without consequence?

Here in Charlottesville we’d be in one hell of a pickle. The electric grid is made of toilet paper and goes down when we get a bit of snow. 🧻

Kitties gonna kitty! We cover the guest bedroom bed with a blanket just for the kitties.

After a few days of gray brother and sister found the sun. 😸☀️

Good morning coffee lovers! Hope you’re ready for some randomness because you’re gonna get some. Cheers! ☕️

Associated Press

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Thousands of frustrated Texans shivered in homes without power for a second day Thursday, most of them around booming Austin, and fading hopes of a quick fix stirred grim memories of a deadly 2021 blackout after an icy winter storm across the southern U.S.

Poor Texans are, once again, struggling through big cold snap. It’s not surprising though, the GOP run state doesn’t care about people, only profits.

I read something yesterday that rings true: How can you tell when you’re going to have six more weeks of winter? Ted Cruz goes to Mexico.

Folks, stop voting for Republicans. They don’t care about you one little bit.

Ars Technica

HBO’s The Last of Us tries a little tenderness in a surprising episode 3

This was a fantastic episode! We got to see a couple live their best lives under terrible circumstances. I didn’t play the game so I didn’t know Bill was gay but he was already an interesting character up to that point. A prepper with the talent of a gourmet chef and a musician. Being gay was just the cherry on top and his commitment to his partner was heart warming. This episode was a quiet reprieve to what I’d imagine will be non-stop violence to the bitter end.

ESPN

Tom Brady says he is retiring “for good” from football, ending a storied 23-year NFL career during which the star quarterback won seven Super Bowls and set numerous records.

Tom, Tom, Tom. I have a horrible feeling Mr. Brady returned to football because his wife broke the news to him that she wanted a divorce not long after he retired. Football was the distraction he needed to get through it. Now the divorce is final, he’s suffered that initial pain, and it’s time to move on.

I’m so sorry you had to go through that Tom. Divorce is nothing but pain for all involved. I hope you have a beautiful life. You are football’s GOAT.

NetNewsWire

Because of Twitter’s announcement that free access to the Twitter API will end February 9, we will be removing Twitter integration from NetNewsWire in the next release (6.1.1) for Mac and iOS.

Space Karen strikes again! This time he’s hitting anyone whow uses the Twitter API. He’s tightening up while over on Mastodon things remain completely open for business! Following folks on Mastodon from your favorite feed read is so easy you don’t need a special plug-in to do it! It supports RSS right out of the box. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

Also, who wants this domain? It would be great for a Space Karen watch site, like Twitter is going great.

Jeffrey Zeldman

Before the present owner, I was a Twitter Blue customer, because I always pay for software—to support its creators and help prevent it from disappearing, as so many great websites and platforms have done over the years.

Jeffrey Zeldman is an American treasure and web hero. I’ve enjoyed reading him for years and years now. This time Jeffrey shares his adventure of trying to give Twitter money. Their payment system failed. Doesn’t surprise me.

America, America

The authoritarian strongman types want us to believe in their power. They may even want us to think that their power is divinely influenced, a sign that they’re not like the rest of us, but better. Look no further than the surreal video released just weeks before the Florida gubernatorial election, complete with Voice of God-style narration and mad text about how Ron DeSantis is the fulfillment of God’s plan for a protector and a fighter.

I’m sure Florida has it’s share of wonderful people but why would you choose to live there? DeSantis is a true authoritarian scared of America’s future without bullies like him. Future America will happen. You may slow it down but it will happen. I hope to one day have a liberal society built on love and compassions for our fellow man, not some nasty place full of scared, old, white men grasping for every little bit of power they can. It’ll happen. May just be after I’m going. Here’s hoping it happens before then.

eFinancialCareers

The real problem is that C++ is neither easy nor loved. Rust got an 87% approval rate in the “most loved” category of the Stack Overflow Survey. However, only 9.3% of respondents used Rust at all and only 8.8% did so professionally. C++, meanwhile, languished at 48%.

Look, I don’t want to work on some web3 thing either. Why would I use my talents as a C++ developer to work on a thing I don’t care for? Sure, you could offer me tons of cash and it would be tempting but ultimately I’d be bored to death.

I’ve worked on award winning Windows Applications and highly performant video encoding and decoding systems. I can’t see working on trading systems. Nope, nope, nope.

NBC News

The U.S. military has been monitoring a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that has been hovering over the northern U.S. for the past few days, and military and defense leaders have discussed shooting it out of the sky, according to two U.S. officials and a senior defense official.

This is really strange to me. We should bring it down, but in a controlled way if at all possible. It would be fascinating to examine what the onboard package contains.

Who knows, maybe it’s full of radioactive material in hopes we will shoot it down. That would be our luck. 😂

Yahoo!

WESTLAKE, Ohio, January 30, 2023–(BUSINESS WIRE)–TravelCenters of America Inc. (Nasdaq: TA), the nation’s largest publicly-traded full-service travel center network, announced today an agreement with Electrify America to offer electric vehicle charging at select TA/Petro locations with the first stations planned to be deployed in 2023. Electrify America is the largest open direct current fast-charging network in the U.S.

This is excellent! There are so many nice electric vehicles on the market today so setting up a massive charging network makes sense.

The old time car companies have caught up to Space Karen’s car company and in many ways surpassed it. Good. We need the competition.

SFGate: ”Twitter was sued for millions of dollars over allegations of unpaid rent at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday, Jan. 20.”

SFGate

Twitter was sued for millions of dollars over allegations of unpaid rent at the company’s San Francisco headquarters, according to a lawsuit filed on Friday, Jan. 20.

I’m curious what folks think of the two quoting styles above? The top version is the way I quoted things for years and years, dating back to 2001.

The second is a blockquote. I’ve been doing that more recently.

Which one is better for my blog? 🤔

Miss Priss has decided she should watch The Last of Us.

Today’s NFL Division Championship game picks.

Bengals over Chiefs

49’ers over Eagles

Let’s hope I do better than last weekend. 🤞🏼

Unintentionally did a 3.5mi hike today by taking the wrong fork. Ups and downs, muddy, the works.

Kolby and I are done. 😂