Today marks a somber event, which I started recording in a series of posts in my blog-of-the-time, ten years ago today. What follows is an excerpt from the first one: A family friend picked me up and we started the trek back towards Fort Collins. We heard one last update as we sped off from Read More
In some ways, tech is a much smaller and more incestuous scene than I ever imagined – and I grew up in the midwest. There are also people in it who are dishonest, manipulative, abusive, bullying, mean-spirited, harassing and destructive. Early in my career I was very paranoid about maintaining amicable relationships with these individuals Read More
Longtime readers of The Sober Build Engineer may find today’s XKCD amusing1. I get asked a lot of times why this blog tends to rely heavily on footnotes; it turns out it’s mostly a historical footnote2. The original incarnation of this blog started back when I was one of Mozilla Corporation’s two3 full-time release engineers. Read More
Ok, so… maybe updating my just-over-a-year-old iPhone 4S to iOS 6 about a month or so ago didn’t “brick” it in the traditional tech gadget-sense of the word, but… it’s made the device often totally useless. When Google finally released their maps app, I decided it was worth trying iOS 6. The new Do Not Read More
From an IRC conversation today: <[redacted]> github just deployed a feature that allows me to edit [redacted2]‘s comments in our pull requests without him getting any notification that I changed what he said <[redacted]> lot’s of R+s coming my way now <SoberBuildEng> [redacted]: that seems… huh? <[readcted]> SoberBuildEng: I _think_ it is because I am Read More
I finally had the chance to read the ars technica piece on Facebook’s release engineering team that’s been sitting in a tab since last week. Despite the article’s tone being a little… Charlie-in-Wonka’s-chocolate-factory-ish, it’s got a lot of interesting tidbits, and is worth the read. It’s especially interesting to see how Facebook’s unique engineering culture Read More
There’s been a lot of activity in the Mozilla community over the past 36 hours regarding community standards, free speech issues, and LGBTQ issues. It’s great to see these conversations happening; I believe this is precisely what should happen in a community when disagreement arises. One aspect continues to confuse me1: many of those discussing Read More
Major media outlets have started picking up Google’s news today that they’d be aggregating user profile and usage data across all of their products. To be honest, I didn’t find this particularly surprising since I assumed Google had long been doing this. But the winning quotation from the press release was this nugget: Our recently Read More
A few weeks ago, I tweeted about a great blog post on a technique for managing the massive amounts of email many of us navigate daily. I’d become frustrated with the state of my own inbox1 and had been on the prowl for a new method to manage the email torrent. Having used it for Read More
From a great Apple story: Once again, my sanity was saved by the kindness of a stranger. At 2:00 one morning, a visitor appeared in my office: the engineer responsible for making the PowerPC system disk master. He explained things this way: “Apple is a hardware company. There are factories far away building Apple computers. Read More