Where is Smedley Butler? We live another day in this Republic, not respirator bed-bound, texting for air, marked present on the roster, snatched from Home Depot to a foreign camp. Time is gauzy. We dream of Spring vaccine, not your daily Cetirizine placebo, recalling the year you took tree-line snapshots
It has been far too long time since my last book-blog at the end of November. It feels even longer--as if my last posts was from a different age. I have been putting it off. Not only have I done a poor job at finishing books that I started, but
A few months ago, I listened to a podcast with one of the founders of Marimo and I didn't immediately try it out. I assumed it was another SaaS platform where I'd have to sign up for. I was wrong. Very wrong. However, I did share
It has been over five years since I first used Vector, but only in the last several months have I started to take advantage of ClickHouse with S3 as I mentioned on LinkedIn last month. I also recently stood up a website with Ghost CMS for a non-profit and wanted
Over the summer, I went down the workflow rabbit hole (starting with what I knew like Apache Airflow and Dagster) but ended up deciding on Windmill.dev as the tool of choice. It was a compromise between pure code options vs. no code for orchestrating random scripts. What were the
There is only one more month left until 2025. I'm not sure what to think about that. But at least the election is over. America decided, even if I'm not thrilled by the result. We celebrated two birthdays in the family over the Thanksgiving break. None
I've been using the "free" version of Gemini included with my ChromeBook plus for a few months but recently decided to upgrade to Advanced and testing with documents in my Google Drive and within Google Docs. The advanced version also gives you better image generation capabilities.
At some point over the last few years I discovered DuckDB as an alternative lightweight SQL database that is super fast and has support for a wide variety of file formats, but until now I'd only used CSV and Parquet, but recently a pcap extension was released, so
(Five years ago I started the tradition of learning and blogging over the 4th of July weekend, so I figured I'd keep the tradition alive) Problem & Prior Art Even with autocompletion, the AWS CLI can be extremely verbose, so I often find myself writing short wrapper scripts
In February as I wound up my last role as a SecOps Director, the Engineer-Manager pendulum was definitely on my mind, but I wasn't sure which way I'd swing. Would I choose the IC route like I did in July 2019 or pick up another team?
I start writing this at a York Road Starbucks after dropping our youngest child off at his first job at a grocery store, the same chain…
I remember when I finally got the “AI bug.”
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas last year, I took a trip up I-83 to the Best Buy in York PA and bought an Acer 516 GE “Gaming…
In my early 20’s, I wanted to be a writer. This is what you did if you were an English major and you were not bound to be a teacher.
In July 2023, when my wife encouraged me to take my European History vacation, the initial premise was to tour World War I and World War II…
Leaving Penn Station after spending the day in DC on Tuesday
The nearly six years I spent at Cisco in the early to mid 2000s were critical to my early career progression and I’m not sure what I’ve…
127 days ago seems like a lifetime!
I timed it just right!
Since I’ve been blogging a ton here and on LinkedIn, I don’t feel I need any personal introduction this time, but the clock is ticking…
No, this is not really a server
Remote or GTFO Except for the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, I’ve led remote teams for most of the last decade. At least half of that time has been on globally distributed teams, spanning multiple continents and way too many time zones to keep up with.
By Susan Wilkinson from Unsplashed
Memorial Photos from the World Wars — September & October 2023 On Wednesday, September 27th I took the train from Baltimore to Newark. This leg of the trip brought back all the fond (and not so found) memories of traveling to Europe, Canada, and India. Since I live 20 minutes from