Whatever it is that you do, if you have wondered about increasing productivity, improving outcomes or creating more long lasting value, you owe it to your self to learn a little about the study of systems. Okay, starting with the most banal definition of a system: A system is a group of interacting or interrelated entities that form a unified whole.[1] A system is delineated by its spatial and temporal boundaries, surrounded and influenced by its environment, described by its structure and purpose and expressed in its functioning. #

There must be a large and storied body of literature when it comes to curation, but I am unfortunately not familiar. I might have a chance someday, but for now, what I do have is this article from Frank Chimero “Sorting A Mass” 1. Up till this point, I had bookmarked anything and everything that came close to piquing my interest. But after this article, I remember bringing more of a critical eye to my reading. #

Being a child of the 80s I can recall a time before the internet permeated my entire reading experience. It was a happy accident for me and my career when I was able to access the internet on a daily bases. Before the internet, Wired came once a month. When I had enough money I’d buy 2600 (it’s hard to convince parents to subscribe to a “hackers” quarterly). Between publications, I’d dwell on the information. #

Gonna start out the month with a fun and simple one. MP3 Blogs and wget by Jeffrey Veen. When I read this, I had a VPS, that I could barely keep running. I blindly ran the command in this post. The next morning I found that I had downloaded almost 30 gigabytes of MP3s. It forced me to learning about things about linux, and wget. This was important, because I got one of my first tech jobs because I knew about wget. #

500+ articles to read. That backlog took years to build. Years of, “Yea, I’ll totally read that”. Then not reading anything. While I was able to trash part of the backlog. (No, I don’t need to read “4 spaces are better then 2 when formatting code”). I still had a healthy backlog. To not keep anyone in suspense, I read it 1. Reading it reminded me of my favorite articles from years past. #

Well, around 3ish years ago I stared working for a company that sells software to libraries and I didn’t know a thing. I have learned a lot since then, but I am now embarking on a new journey and I would like to leave some advice to other software devs who might find themselves in similar situations. The best advice I can give is to find a community who can remind you of how important libraries are. #

Managing IAM credentials is a burden. Besides juggling N separate credentials, I don’t want more secretes to manage. There must be a better way and I’m experimenting with some tools to find a better way. #

PPK is on a tear. He’s having a conversation in public that I’ve been having for a few years. You really should read these three blog posts for context. I appreciate the discussion and I hope that it continues, but the scope is sufficiently broad enough that I won’t be able to go through it all point by point. Instead I would like to provide a framework for the disscussion, thats why I titled this blog post with a quote from Donald Knuth #

The words full stack will quickly be overburdened, but for now they represents an ideal. The basic premise laid out by Chris Dixon. The new approach is to build a complete, end-to-end product or service that bypasses existing companies. Awesome, we now have this new word, and it’s a word that is getting used a lot from fund-raising, to job listings, to internal memos. Like any new label how the hell do you know if a company is actually full stack? #

Taken by a co-worker when App.net was still picplz. App.net is shutting It’s clearly the context for this post, but it’s not the point. I am leaving App.net to be the VP of Engineering at new company that should have a name shortly. Durring my time at App.net I constantly operated at the edge of my abilities, and past them sometimes. It was alternatingly painful and exhilirating. I will be processing my stay here for quite awhile, but the main thing I learned from App. #