Author: John

i am a god

From my job search, two great recruiters


I contacted six recruiters in my recent job search. Four of them disappeared after only a couple of days. As a friend likes to say, "For most of them, we're just baubles. They forget about us once the shiny wears off." Two recruiters were head-and-shoulders above the rest. They got me into great interviews, stuck with … Continue reading From my job search, two great recruiters →

I’m leaving Solinea


I've resigned from Solinea. The Christmas company holidays made this a little awkward... My last day is Monday the 28th, but we have the previous Thursday and Friday off.  Not sure how much I'll get done on that last isolated day. I worked on Goldstone, which is an über monitoring and configuration platform (i.e., it … Continue reading I’m leaving Solinea →

Yet another Lyft crime


A friend's son used Lyft, and had his phone stolen. My friend had (and is still having) an extraordinary amount of hassle trying to get it back. There's no word yet on whether Lyft will do anything about this. Maybe they don't care much at this point because they have their money. This is a … Continue reading Yet another Lyft crime →

Vax 8600 (Venus) Ibox microcode


In a comment on my Thoughts on DEC post, Tom Miller offered a rat's ass if I scanned in my VAX 8600 (Venus) Ibox microcode listing. Well, here's Venus Ibox microcode v3.73, generated on 7-May-1984. Tom, you owe me one rat's patootie. This ran on Venus through the end of 1984. I had transferred to … Continue reading Vax 8600 (Venus) Ibox microcode →

Thoughts on DEC


I'm off this week, and while loafing around the house I took an hour or so to search the web about Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a former employer. That was a mistake, because it got me thinking about my past. This was fun for a while, and then it got sobering. I worked for DEC from February … Continue reading Thoughts on DEC →

OpenStack Summit reflections


Here are my thoughts after attending my first OpenStack Summit. All of my comments are relative to other conferences I've recently attended — PyCon, OSCON, Open Source Bridge, local unconferences, etc. I won't claim my observations are inspiring or unique. Everything here has been said before about one conference or another. But this is my blog so sod off if you're not interested. 🙂 I … Continue reading OpenStack Summit reflections →

A conversation about exceptions


Other person: The subclasses of this Foo parent class are supposed to define method bar(). So we should define Foo.bar() and have it raise an exception. Me: Why? Other person: So if subclass_instance.bar() is called, and the subclass hasn't overridden bar(), it'll raise an exception. That way we'll know when the method is missing on a subclass! … Continue reading A conversation about exceptions →

Cat panic


We recently adopted two cats. One of them, Faith, is a monkey head who loves to play all the time. Play play play play play play play. Two mornings ago, I came home and was unable to find her. Looked high and low. Looked in every room, under every furniture, under the blankets in the … Continue reading Cat panic →

PyCon, day 3


Today was half keynote addresses, jobs fair, and the poster session. And half talks. Beyond Grep: Practical Logging and Metrics. Sentry, Librato, Graphite, Grafana, StatsD, Riemann, Splunk, Loggly, Papertrail, Elk, Graylog... Python Performance Profiling: The Guts and Glory.  This talk dissected a real-world performance event from MongoDB engineering. Performance by the Numbers: Analyzing the performance of … Continue reading PyCon, day 3 →