Starting back in September I published a series of articles for the Red Hat Developer Blog under the series title “That App You Love”. I’m psyched to announce that “That App You Wrote”, my followup presentation, has been accepted as a talk at DevConf.cz this month! Didn’t read the original series? You can follow along here…
In Decemeber of 2014 I transitioned from fifteen years of being a developer into being one of the people managers on a really amazing team here at Red Hat. All told, my first year in this role has been a tremendous learning experience for me. If you are interested in becoming a part of a team like this one, here is some advice for you based on the dozens of interviews I have conducted over my first 15 months.
My primary workhorse right now is an HP Omen running Fedora 22. Thinking and talking about how to restore my work environment from a total failure, I came to the conclusion that there are three primary things that need to be preserved…
I almost feel like a traitor, which is a weird way to feel about consumer electronics. But my next laptop is not going to be a MacBook. Our current development work on OpenShift requires easy access to a docker service, and Boot2docker just doesn’t cut it…
Family Sharing provides users with a way to share purchases from their iCloud/iTunes account with up to five other people. Additionally, this feature enables you to create iCloud accounts for children, and to manage the purchases and content available to those accounts.
iTunes has been around a lot longer than this feature, and so for years now, people have had to a different means to share app purchases across multiple users. The most common solution is pretty straightforward; create one iTunes account that is shared by multiple people. Apple supports this approach, too: on any Mac or iOS device, you can use one account for your iCloud stuff and a separate one for your iTunes stuff…
Ello is a social platform that has been the subject of some buzz recently. Either by design or by accident, Ello is squarely positioned as the anti-Facebook, which immediately places it in a similar space in people’s minds. That’s a great deal for Ello, because feature-wise they have a long way to go before the can really throw down: no mobile app, no OAuth, no API. Ello claims to be built on a Freemium model that will sustain the company without them resorting to selling user info; but only time will tell.
Just tuning in? Have a look at Part 1 to find out how I installed Fedora 20 on a MacBook Air and why I am so interested in trying to duplicate or even surpass the user experience that I previously enjoyed with OS X.
A little background here: I have been a Mac enthusiast for a number of years now. I would not say that I am religious about OS X, but if the OS X user experience is a philosophical application of “opinionated software”, then I find myself in agreement with most of the opinions that the Apple UX team has expressed.
However, I am also an open source developer. I’d like to believe that it is possible to create a similar and possibly even superior experience with a Linux-based desktop environment. And lo, this is what lead me, a few weeks ago, to get Fedora 20 running on a MacBook Air. If you’re interested in trying the same thing, check out Matt Hicks’ invaluable blog post on setting things up.
Over a series of blog posts I am digging into my impressions of the Fedora 20 user experience as I work through this total switch-over.
My recipe for not losing important stuff on my home desktop system…
I’ve inherited a project that is seeing some performance issues. We knew this was at least partly to blame on the UI, but most of the problem is down in the application. Fine; we’ve got a plan for the application-level issue and that’ll get solved. But right now, I’ve been picking through the UI because even though inspection with FireBug reveals that the site is loading at a reasonable clip, it doesnt seem to be rendering the main page until every last linked resource is loaded in the browser.
I sent out mail to a bunch of folks today to let them know that our home phone is offline for the time being. If I forgot to mail you, well, our home phone is offline for the time being.
Well, that was a bad call. SunRocket basically imploded this week, and I’m unlikely to see a prorated return on my flat $200 for a year of service. So now I’m on the fence; I’d sure hate to come crawling back to Vonage in time to watch them implode the same way.
After giving the whole thing some serious consideration, I am ending my career with Brix Networks. I have had a tremendous seven years there, and will miss working along side some of the smartest engineers I could ever hope to meet; chief among them, my long-time friend and mentor Mr. Bennett. I have accepted the position of Director of Technology at Mark Altman & Associates, a small and successful publishing agency that is looking to add technical leadership as part of their plan for business growth. Many thanks to K. for bringing this opportunity to my attention. Most importantly, thanks to my wife for supporting me in this decision–even as we prepare to bring kid #2 (!) into the world. Obvious symbolisms aside, this is a great opportunity for me and I look forward to the new challenge.
When you publish something! And let me tell you, its a page-turner. Oh well; you gotta start somewhere :-)
Without going into too many details, I started Sunday with two computers and finished with none. Hardware problems were the order of the day, and so I am ditching my miserable SFF case (I’m looking at you, Soltek) and going with a comparitively gigantic microATX case and motherboard. With the investment of a mere $140, I’ll be able to cram the best parts of the two dead machines into something that is quiet and, ideally functional.