This will be an angsty post with adult language. You’ve been warned.
So, I’ve got some shit to get off my chest.
Last weekend, I finished bit of work for achieving a master’s degree. Sans some wild issue with proctoring or unexpected grading, I’ll be receiving a piece of paper in the mail acknowledging my rad skillz in the whole Computer Science domain. The original plan was to roll straight into a PhD program, and eventually ditch the day job and teach at a local university full time. 5 years ago, that all seemed reasonable, but the world looks different now. The degree took a lot longer and required a lot more effort than expected. School work is a lot easier when you’re younger and not dealing with a series of health and professional challenges. Now that it’s over, it feels like waking up to an empty disheveled house after teen party in a 90s era sitcom.
I am not the biggest fan of brooding chickens in the house.
The chickens that we brooded in our media room at the old house were, for sure, some of the friendliest chickens that I’ve ever had, mostly due to the fact that they saw us for hours a day, every single day. We had older cats back then and I only had 8 chicks so it was super easy to just pop them in the bottom part of a dog kennel with a heat lamp and let them do their thing.
This is my first post in……..I honestly have no idea how long. It has been a long and, quite frankly, incredibly toxic multiple years. There has been such an amazing amount of trauma over the last 9 (fuck! 9!) years that all the good things that have happened during that time have been overshadowed by it. I’ve struggled to find my way back from depression and cPTSD and I think I’m finally making progress.
I’ve felt a long need to vent for a bit. Even the kinder articles about Millennials paint us as a bunch of entitled narcissists - likely to wilt under the slightest pressure of “real work”. We’re supposedly a bunch of entitled rich kids stuck in our parent’s basements binging Netflix movies in a marijuana stupor. In reality the oldest millennials, myself included, will turn 40 this year.
When ‘OK, boomer’ became a thing, media finally started covering our growing anger. I wrote earlier about looking for a new job. I didn’t write about the reason why: abusive leadership treating people like shit. After years of stellar performance reviews, successful products, and countless hours of unpaid overtime (yay salary!) a single generational “boomer” came onboard and wrecked the team. Looking back, I should have realized that his complete lack of respect for teams of lower paid specialists should have been a red flag. Years of hard work earned me a positive enough reputation with upper management to make a move in the organization and “flag” the situation of a poor manager needing addressed. But the damage was done. After a solid try at recovering in a new team, I left the organization to work at a much smaller, more specialized firm. Asshole bosses aren’t a generational problem though. Honestly, they’re not even interesting enough to motivate content here. That all mostly worked out - asshole boss “resigned” a bit later and I moved on to a better company.
The holidays hit me hard this year. Hard to believe that two full cycles of
the normal Holiday season were completely disrupted by an ongoing pandemic. Last year, many events were cancelled as society braced against a surge of pandemic cases. This year, society chose to largely ignore surging cases and full hospitals. Personally, I’m finding the continued lack of normalcy increasingly challenging. I think a lot of people have switched over to social media to find connection with others during these trying times. I don’t think it helps. I started working on this post New Year’s Eve, but really struggled to get it going.
I’ve only been “actively” seeking a job 2 times in my life. The first, I found employment via a friend’s socializing at the casino. The second, I found employment by returning back to a previous employer. Funnily enough, those times “actively” seeking employment closely match the times I passively applied to a new gig to “see what happens”. Serendipity. At mid-career, I look back and realize that my entire professional life is dictated by chance encounters and recommendations.
Alert: This post consists of substantial nerd rage and drama!
For those unaware, FreeNode is an old-skool internet chat network (IRC) previously populated by a cohort of nerds. In the grand scheme of social networks, the 90,000ish user count is tiny. However, those 90,000 users included critical developers across a range of core technology stacks. The vast majority of those users and groups now live on over another network (Libera). In many ways, Libera is FreeNode, but with a new name. For those curious, FreeNode suffered greatly from a series of inter-personal and technical missteps perpetuated by an (alleged) cocaine snorting play boy epitomizing the worst of California’s rot. For those more curious, Ars Technica ran a story covering the events.
2021 so far feels like jumping out of the 2020 dumpster fire only to realize that the dumpster was sitting on a freight train headed for a cliff. It’s been an interesting month so far to say the least.
I finished the book “Where Wizards Stay Up Late”. The book takes an in depth look at the history of the internet with a fairly interesting dive into the culture surrounding the government funding computing projects of the time. While the internet feels like a thing “that’s always been here”, it’s amazing to realize just how much development happened in my lifetime. I found the book very readable and would definitely recommend it to anyone wanting to peer back into internet history.
Ever known someone that just gave too much detail for comfort? Like the sort that talks about how their last bowel movement caught one of their hemorrhoids wrong when the drive through speaker says “Welcome to Taco Bell, How are You Doing?”
Yeah, I knew a few of those growing up. And I swore that’d never be me. Nope, I adopted the Man Code of never complaining, and more importantly, never admitting anything is wrong. Even if there is a mountain of evidence forming that shit-ain’t-right.
Well, after COVID-19 took a dump on my 2020 goals, I’m hoping for a marginally more productive 2021, we’ll see. I know calendar nerds claim that decades and centuries start with the “1” and end with the “0” - so perhaps 2020 was simply the completion of the crap-show of the 2010’s (I’m looking at you 2016).
After last year, I’ll be trying even harder to use “SMART” goals. That said, here we go: