At CRAB Park · On an errand, we felt the need to be outside near the sea. The closest opportunity was CRAB Park (see here). We hadn’t planned on visiting a homeless encampment but did that too. I seriously recommend the experience. Also I got pleasant pictures to accompany the story ...
Topfew Fun · This was a long weekend in Canada; since I’m unemployed and have no workaday cares, I should have plenty of time to do family stuff. And I did. But I also got interested in a small programming problem and, over the course of the weekend, built a tiny tool called topfew. It does a thing you can already do, only faster, which is what I wanted. But I remain puzzled ...
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Meta Blog · My recent Amazon-exit piece got an order of magnitude more traffic then even the post popular outings here normally do. Which turned my mind to thoughts of blogging in 2020, the why and how of the thing. Here they are, along with hit-counts and referer data from last week. Probably skip this unless you’re interested in social-media dynamics and/or publishing technology ...
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Responses · Boy, when your I’m-outta-here essay goes viral, do you ever get a lot of input. A few responses came up often enough to be worth sharing. This was via email, Twitter DMs, blog comments, and LinkedIn messages. All of which went completely batshit ...
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Bye, Amazon · May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19 ...
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Mac Migration Pain · What happened was, my backpack got stolen with my work and personal Macs inside. The work machine migrated effortlessly but I just finished up multiple days of anguish getting the personal machine going and thought I’d blog it while it was fresh in my mind. This might be helpful to others, either now or maybe later at the end of a Web search. But hey, I’m typing this ongoing fragment on it, so the story had a happy ending. And to compensate for its length and sadness, I’ll give it a happy beginning; two, in fact ...
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Early 2020 Mac Upgrades · With notes on microphones, Apple’s Magic Keyboard, laptop stands, and my [gasp!] new email client, MailMate ...
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MacOS Lore, Early 2020 · I’ve used a Mac for an extremely long time; long enough that this blog’s topic tag is Mac OS X, what macOS used to be called. Herewith a looking-back summary ...
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Plague Journal, April 4 · I’m an optimist so I don’t put the year in the title. Once again: Writing is therapeutic. Open up whatever program you use to write stuff in, and see what comes out. Today’s adventure was the Socially Distanced Farmers’ Market ...
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Plague Journal, April 2 · Hey folks, one decent therapy for times like these when the world’s trying to drive you crazy is to tell your story; doesn’t matter if anyone’s listening. This is adapted from an email to the family that got kind of out of control. Write your own #PlagueJournal entries and I’ll read ’em ...
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Eventing Facets · What happened was, at re:Invent 2019 I gave a talk entitled Moving to Event-Driven Architecture, discussing a list of characteristics that distinguish eventing and messaging services. It was a lot of work pulling the material together and I’ve learned a couple of things since then; thus, welcome to the Eventing Facets blog series, of which this is the hub. It’s going to take a while to fill this out ...
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Facet: Push vs Pull · If you want to process events, you can fetch them from the infrastructure or you can have the infrastructure hand them to you. Neither idea is crazy ...
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Facet: Broker vs Serverless · Your event infrastructure might be a service in the cloud or might be an actual computer (or cluster) you connect to. Both choices are perfectly sensible. The trade-offs? It’s complicated ...
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Plague Advice · A couple weeks back “Social Distancing” would’ve been a Big Thinker’s title in The Times, about the Downside Of Facebook. Now it’s a best practice if you care about flattening the COVID-19 curve and saving grandmothers. I’m a believer; recently I tweeted Cancel Everything and I meant it. But this shouldn’t mean that you can’t go outside; or shop; or photograph ...
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Facet: FIFO · When you inject events into the cloud, do you care whether they come out in the same order they went in? If you do, you’ll be asking for “FIFO” (rhymes with “Fly, foe!”) (stands for “First In First Out”). Some software has it, some doesn’t ...
Facet: Point-to-Point vs Pub/Sub · When there’s an event in the cloud, how many different receivers can receive it? There are two plausible answers: Just one, or anyone ...
Facet: Deduping · When you fire an event into the cloud, can you be sure it’ll only come out again once? It turns out that sometimes they come out more often than they go in. This may or may not be a problem in your application. If it is, there are techniques to help work around it ...
On Soaking the Rich · The government of BC, the Canadian province where I live, just released a new budget which, among other things, raises tax on high incomes. Here is an overview. The top marginal tax on incomes over C$220,000 goes from 16.8% to 20.5%. This is just provincial tax; what with the Feds, the total top marginal rate is now 53%. Not everyone is delighted. For example Garth Turner, finance/real-estate blogger, who emits a howl of right-wing grief. I’m comfortable speaking about this since I’m personally affected ...
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