Old Man Yells at the Cloud

It dawned on me recently that as a white middle aged man with a long career in Apple platform software development —going on 17 years as of this writing— it is my duty, nay, my destiny to share my takes with the Internet. And I got them. Hot, cold, sizzling and many, many milquetoast ones.

For that purpose I have chosen this most quaint of formats: a blog. The natural habitat for short form snark is Twitter and you’ll see plenty of that from me there. This place will be for the longer rants and the deeper[1] thoughts, and I would rather avoid the walled gardens for that. Plus I have a bit of nostalgia for the early 00s Internet back when folks just did whatever around and most of us believed it was going to grow into a good thing.

But before I start sharing those —and I know the Internet can’t wait to get them— let’s establish the rules of the game. What I plan on doing here and how I plan to do it here. Reader beware and complainers will be told to RtFIP (Read the F Introduction Post).

• My blog persona is going to be much more of a blowhard than I am in day to day life. The snark and constant digressions are a universal constant but I do actually know how to deal with other people respectfully. Most of the time at least.

• One of the more frequent subjects for posts will be stories about my experience in the industry, including 7 years at the world’s best known agricultural produce company. Dealing with junior developers lately has made me realize that having someone demystify a lot of what goes on in the tech industry may help them make their way in and thrive, and the Old Ones know[2] that more diversity in perspectives is needed. It may also help some folks outside understand better how the sausage is made and what all the fuss is about.

• My name is, by copyright need, attached to the posts, but otherwise the details of any stories I tell will be kept deliberately vague. I don’t want to bother the people I respect and I don’t want to bother the people I don’t, for different reasons.

• The tech commentariat is mostly about today’s news hot takes and how to do this thing with these tools. I’m not particularly interested in adding to either of those discourses nor do I think I would have anything novel to add. Exceptions may be made occasionally since it’s my blog and no one can stop me.

• What I’m mostly interested in is the Whys and the Whats. I’ve been doing this for a while and much of what folks talk about when it comes to software development advice feels like implementation details. I’d like to examine at a deeper level what it is that we’re doing and how it came to be that way.

• Much of the thrust behind this blog is to put in writing a good number of higher level ideas that have been shaping up through the last few years. I doubt that any of it will end up a brilliant insight that no one else has had before but I like to personally build up the concepts and understanding that underlie what I do.

• My more exploratory posts make no guarantees of correctness, let alone insightful. I’ll happily go back to older posts and make updates though.