Jake Savin

“Have no fear of perfection—you'll never reach it.” – Salvador Dalí

  • Meaningful Computers

    Someone was asking at work earlier about what computers people had owned or programmed on. I don’t think I’d ever made a list before, so I decided to make one. This list includes computers I’ve programmed on outside of a professional capacity, or owned personally.

    There are lots more machines I’ve used to greater or lesser extents in my professional life. The ones listed here are the machines I feel a personal connection with. (Yeah, I just said that I have a personal connection with some computers.)

    Here’s what I came up with roughly in chronological order:

    [Edit: Added links]

     

  • Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Privacy

    I’ve said this in a few other places:

    There are potentially important conflicts of interest in Microsoft now owning LinkedIn. A few examples:

    • Microsoft will gain visibility into private profiles and hidden information in public profiles, job listings, applications, etc. for many thousands of competitors and their employees.
    • Microsoft could potentially watch for changes to private profiles of current Microsoft employees to see who is thinking of leaving.
    • Microsoft could monitor interactions between current employees and recruiters, other companies, job applications, etc.

    Any of these things could be done in aggregate without violating any laws or privacy policies. More troubling is that these powers could also be misused either in an official capacity or seriptiously by unscruplous employees or managers.

    Microsoft monitoring employee behavior isn’t unprecedented. I’d heard that in the mid-2000’s, there were instances where security would be called to escort people out of the building if their manager found out that they’d accepted a position at Google. It also was (is?) a fireable offense in some teams if engineers were caught reading patents or looking at code from open source projects.

    I have no evidence that Microsoft will actually do any of those things, but…

    I. Don’t. Like it.

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  • FBIA: 39.5 Days, and Still Waiting…

    I submitted the form to have my site added to the Facebook Instant Articles (FBIA) crawler on April 11.

    Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

    A web that depends on large corporations to determine your site is worthy of inclusion is not the web I signed up for.

  • Apple is not the Gatekeeper of Podcasting

    Rob Fahrni attempts to set the record straight:

    “Here’s the thing, Apple did not invent Podcasting — Dave Winer and Adam Curry did — Apple just has a really good Podcast directory. Anyone could do the same thing. In fact you don’t need to be part of Apple’s Podcast Directory to have a Podcast. All you need is a place to put your audio files so people can download them. Yes, that’s it.”

    There have been, and continue to be, so many opportunities for diversity and competition in this space, and the media industry as a whole still doesn’t understand that they are themselves responsible for being locked in the trunks of the big tech companies.

    Podcasting is one market, but blogging, social media, news, the web itself – in fact digital distribution in general – are all segments of the same ecosystem. And the same rules apply to all: Understand the technology and make your own distribution channels, or you will be beholden to the so-called “gatekeepers” in the form of big tech companies.

  • Prince

    Prince

  • Applied for Facebook Instant Articles

    I applied this morning for Facebook Instant Articles. There’s a plug-in for WordPress that will create FBIA feeds, so fingers crossed that it’s easy to get working.

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  • American Political Discourse in 2016

    Right now, I’m not particularly optimistic about democracy and political discourse in the United States. There are so many things to love about our country, but She has been quite broken for most of my politically aware lifetime, and I have trouble imagining a nearby future in which this changes meaningfully.

    I left a long comment tonight on a Facebook post made by a friend about a hotly debated issue in American politics. The post referenced a popular but not recent, oversimplified news story that was only tangentially related to the issue.

    The comment thread on Facebook quickly latched onto the tangential story instead of the more current and much more important issue itself, and commenters fell back to lazily repeating polarized talking points from the side they happened to agree with. In this specific case the more polarized comments happened to be the right-leaning ones, but both sides are guilty of this behavior depending on the issue.

    Instead of ignoring the post or jumping into the fray to argue with people whose minds I’m nearly certain I had no chance of changing, I thought (probably naively) that I might do more good by attempting to elevate the level of discourse.

    The rest of this post is that comment…

    I won’t bother with jumping in on the “man-who” fallacies, except to say that the real truth in all of it is almost certainly somewhere in the middle, and is more complex than most are willing to bother to think too deeply about. Stories like [this] are like the UV bait light in the center of a bug-zapper. We see the glow, and can’t resist flying straight in.

    The older I get, the more certain I am that polarization (even radicalization) of opinion in this country on LGBT issues, guns, political speech, size of government, healthcare, religious freedom, immigration, and on and on and on…, is deeply hurting our country through a lost sense of shared values and community, and has been for decades.

    We as a nation of individual citizens have to start to realize that we have so much more in common than not. We have to find ways to allow ourselves be more tolerant and understanding. We need to be able to communicate – even disagree and debate – with sensitivity to those with different opinions than our own. If we can’t do this we will continue to spend our money, time, and energy on fear-based, straw-man, defensive, 24-hour-news-cycle bullshit, with no real hope to change anything for the better. We keep on doing this instead of seeking out and implementing real pragmatic improvements, based instead on the common ground and understanding that are the highest aspects of our shared cultural heritage and our core values as Americans.

    I still hope we believe in democracy, but these days it’s sometimes hard to believe we even know what it is.

    Policy and politics should not be an “us vs them”, winner-take-all activity. It’s ALL US! It’s our own responsibility as individuals to respect each other and ourselves enough to tackle real issues and work to resolve our differences, rather than attack people we’ve never met just because someone said something about them that we find disagreeable.

    The political class and the media (mainstream or otherwise) are reflections of our own attitudes and actions. If we want better government and less biased reporting, we have to invest ourselves into the future of our culture, our government and our community.

    On the other hand, we could just keep screaming at each other and not listening to anyone who disagrees with us.

    I know which path I prefer.

  • Shipping!

    As a software project manager, I often run project retrospective meetings with my teams. Sometimes they feel like this:

    Most of the time, we actually do ship, even with only one wing. 😉

  • Video of my March 10 Xcoders Talk

    Video (screen capture + audio) of the talk I did at Seattle Xcoders a couple of weeks ago is live:

    I shared some lessons learned on projects that went off the rails, in spite of having a plan that we thought we could execute on.

    No promises on it being a particularly good talk. 😉 YMMV.

    How to Fail by Following the Plan (Jake Savin, March 10, 2016)

  • Forgetting Where You Parked

    Here’s a random (but true) story, inspired by a story someone linked to in Slack this afternoon…

    Back in the late ’90’s my brother worked at a small local ISP/DSL provider in Olympia, WA. In those days DSL lines usually topped out at 128-256kbps. A few senior people at his company had dedicated T1 lines at home, so they could get online and resolve outages without the hassle and delay of showering, getting dressed, and coming in to the office. (The T1 lines presumably made sense because an outage might also affect a DSL line on the same infrastructure as their customers’ lines.)

    That ISP was eventually sold to another ISP in Santa Rosa, CA, which promptly purchased a fully-outfitted TelCo-style service van for the small team in Olympia. The folks in Olympia apparently used it exclusively to go out for pizza and Chinese food for lunch, since they never actually needed to touch any wires out “in the field”, and probably wouldn’t know how to repair anything even if they did.

    Eventually the Santa Rosa company was itself acquired and the people with the T1 lines left the newly-merged company. But somehow in all the transitions the new company completely lost track of what infrastructure was running on those T1 lines that were set up by the original ISP. Since they didn’t know what they were for, they were afraid to turn them off.

    So they just kept them running… For years… and years… and years…