I live in a building built in the 40s near Chicago and I've done a lot of work that exposed various parts of the underlying structure, and the history you describe is all over the place. The dimensional lumber in the walls and floors/ceilings are widely varied and rough, not planed to anything too terribly specific. To add further injury built on sand because we're on a dune by the beach, Which as you can imagine means things are never square or plumb :-)
I recently realized that the steel beams in the ceiling of the bar (building used to be a bar/restaurant/inn) are actually old railroad ties or something. Chicago industry baby! :-D
Willing to relocate: No, but I'm willing to travel regularly to get face time
Technologies: Agnostic. Bits and bits and history keeps repeating. Interested in navigating team and stack growth challenges, mentoring ICs, architects, and leads
I like leading and mentoring people and projects. I've got a lot of history and experience to leverage and I have a lot to give back in fostering good culture and process and cutting out the bullshit that too often creeps in. I've worked on all sorts of crazy platforms and leading edge situations.
I've fixed broken products and teams. I've done lift and shift and not died. I've originated cool stuff from a blank page.
I'm very happy with my home situation (at the beach) and I built a really great home office with sound insulated walls behind a secret bookshelf door with the expectation that the present and future of smart teams is remote-first and maybe AR/voice. So if coming into an office on the daily is involved, no thanks.
Maybe my primary use case is too rare to get much love, but I'm still stuck on Instapaper because so far in a decade of alternatives nobody has quite hit the mark for me; I want to be able to go into my list of saved articles and create a reading list that is going to then be read to me. They should be read in the order in which I select them. It should be that straightforward. I don't need any fancy synchronization of on-screen text with the speech etc, the whole point is for me to be able to queue up a few things and go. Should take a couple seconds.
This is what grabbed my attention most. Current means of deployment are a bit convoluted at best. It looks like they're on a path to a clean docker deployment that can truly be self hosted but they aren't quite there yet.
I was sitting 10 feet from PK when a lot of these decisions were made, but you have to realize what a different time it was, and it how much becomes obvious only in retrospect.
There's more than a few misunderstandings and errors in the article but mostly it's a valid 20-20 hindsight perspective. We knew it at the time too; when a couple of us formed a different company later it was with the express idea that we knew all the things that sucked about .zip files and would love a do-over. We never got around to it though; our thinking at the time was to get established with other products first and then come out with a new format. Our initial stuff ended up being pretty successful and we exited to McAfee and didn't look back. Different times, maybe we did the world a disservice not tackling archiving first :-)
One note about putting "PK" on the file format. In the dev culture Phil learned his craft in there was no source control and change tracking. Files were exchanged via 'sneakernet'. This was true even at PKWare in the 89-91 timeframe. Change tracking was done via file renaming, and if you added a new variable you put your initials on it so if someone had a question they'd know who touched it. I used usenet at home but not at work.
Our communication to the outside world was an 8-line BBS in the next room and the EXECPC BBS that one of us would dial into at least once a day to answer questions on.
The multi-part/disk spanning stuff wasn't added until pretty late in the game, so it was kind of hacky. The format overall is what you get when something takes off and people start asking to use it in ways that weren't anticipated on day one but you want to maintain backwards compatibility. For sure time was spent answering questions from devs who were implementing their own versions, especially info-zip which was iirc the most important seeming effort at the time, and a guy that worked in the office a few nights a week on a port to a mainframe environment which escapes me at the moment.
It was pretty heady to be able to walk up to practically any computer on the show floor at Comdex and type 'pkzip' and get a response, but even then the idea of just how ubiquitous it would become was impossible to anticipate.
Solving a problem and/or building a thing you are personally intensely interested in is the main thing I see over and over for all skills. Programming, woodworking, cooking, etc. If you want to make something happen you'll figure it out and bang on walls til you break through them. There is no substitute.
Absolutely. It was around 1983, I absolutely loved playing Pac-Man but as a twelve-year-old didn't have enough pocket money to keep feeding the arcade machines or to buy a games console. So I just kept hacking away at that ZX Spectrum until I had a playable version of my favourite game. I never studied CS, but around 20 years later in some random office job I discovered that Excel had some version of Basic built in, and again kept hacking away until I'd automated the most boring parts of my job. Eventually I taught myself the principles of actual software engineering instead of just flinging code together, with the help of some books and online courses, but it was always with a view to solving a specific business problem that was sitting in front of me at the time. I'm glad I learned this way, also approaching the process of software development itself as a real-world requirement rather than just theory; it makes it so much easier to recognize which patterns and techniques actually solve real problems versus those "best practices" which add unnecessary complexity when applied in the wrong context.
Toyota completely botched the transition. They were in the lead with Prius and then they make several strange strategic errors. This sounds like rationalization to me at this point. Cheap electric vehicles are very well within reach, especially for highly urban places. And PV for remote locations is totally possible right now, no grid.
We have a highly regulated environment and supply chain and have to go through a whole lot of GRC on a regular basis, and additionally one-off audits from some customers before they'll feel ok using our solution. So I will share here what I said to my folks:
"I looked further at the documentation solution I mentioned looked interesting. It is very nifty but it is pure SaaS, and I don't care how secure they are, having our source flow through another SaaS is not something I'm going to take on for any amount of pixy dust."
