personal



Sat, Sep 25, 2021 | announcements, personal

I’ve turned off Disqus comments on this site. There’s not usually enough feedback to be worth the extra page/cognitive load. My inbox is always open!



Tue, Dec 18, 2018 | personal

Leaving one opportunity…

The last couple months, I’ve been on the job market; my previous employer, mLab, was acquired by MongoDB and there wasn’t a good role for a full-time Pythonista with my particular open source baggage on the other side of that transition.

mLab was a great place to work and (per my 2016 post) a staunch supporter of my OSS, both re: time on the clock and real-world use cases. Fabric 2 might not have seen the light of day otherwise!

I’ve been absolutely #blessed with a deluge of job leads big and small, far and wide; the process has been exhausting, but also invaluable both for connections and gauging the state of the industry. (Actually industries, plural – not just tech, but finance, healthcare, rocketry and more!)

…and joining another

As of today, I’ve accepted an offer to join a high-frequency trading company called Jump Trading, out of their New York City office. I’ll start in early February.


Fri, Jun 29, 2018 | applications, documentation, personal, reviews
This is a quick review of Bear Writer, a popular note-taking application that I tried out a few weeks ago. A much larger and more detailed post about my overall quest for a note-taking solution (I have very picky, perhaps contradictory requirements) is forthcoming! The good Bear is a beautiful set of applications. Attractive without being ostentatious or getting in the way, pretty quick/slick to use, desktop and mobile apps clearly resemble each other, etc. It uses the relatively common “show raw Markdown text, styled accordingly” (e.g. text within asterisks still shows the asterisks, but is also bolded) approach which works quite well most of the time – with most exceptions being endemic to the approach itself and not Bear’s implementation. Checklist support is better than in some similar apps, including good keyboard shortcuts, an attractive strike-thru of checked list items, and optional ‘folding’/hiding; though see the next section for a bunch of pitfalls with this feature area. Organization is effected through tags (including nesting via forward-slashes in the tag names) and it feels simple yet powerful. Attention to detail is clear; for example, creating a new note while filtering by a given tag automatically tags the new note with that tag.

Sat, Jul 1, 2017 | personal

It’s been brought to my attention that I screwed up the RSS/Atom feed for this site during last year’s redesign - in a couple of ways! Thus, most feed readers haven’t picked up on new posts.


Mon, Apr 17, 2017 | personal, reviews

Along with some general site maintenance in preparation for another big announcement (!), I wanted to note that I’ve started a ‘reviews’ section of the site’s static content. Mostly to port over something that had lived in my private vimwiki and that I’d been exporting as a Github gist; content living in a gist always feels dirty to me, especially when I have an ostensibly easy to use website…


Tue, Jul 5, 2016 | announcements, career, fabric, personal
Being picky As mentioned in my 2015 round-up post, I’ve been trying to make ends meet, re: open source plus a paying job. In March, I parted ways with a bunch of great people to take time off1 and embark on a job hunt. My goal was to find a company that could dedicate time to upstream maintenance, used my projects heavily in production, or both: Without a clear split between “internal” and “external” development time, prioritization becomes a tug of war leaving both sides unhappy. (And verbal agreements can get lost when organizations reshuffle.) Only by using one’s own projects can a developer truly internalize use cases and encounter edge cases. Development in a vacuum isn’t great. A role lacking one of these is problematic; one with neither – regardless of how awesome it would normally be – can make OSS unsustainable. Work found Despite my tight focus, I’ve had many great conversations with amazing hiring managers – often, after grilling whichever friend or contact initially reached out. Thanks to all of you! After some difficult decision-making, I’m happy to say I’ve found a role filling both of my criteria! My new employer: uses Fabric to manage thousands of servers, giving me an excellent source of real-world problems to drive development; is giving me 1 day/week for pure upstream development; has plans for a new, interesting-to-an-ops-guy platform that I’ll help architect and develop.