In March of this year, I spoke at the Southern California Area Linux Expo (SCaLE), a conference I’ve been attending for years and highly recommend for its kind community, and great people and content.
Here’s the video of my talk:
I’m submitting this talk to other conferences, and it will evolve over time, so I hope to get a chance to continue refining it and sharing what I know with more people.
When I attended US schools in the 1970s, the term “bullying” was used to describe extreme cases of recurrent physical abuse of kids, by kids. Verbal abuse, no matter how severe, was identified by the soft term “teasing.”
Most of the adults around us did not see teasing as a problem that they could or should address. Everyone advised victims to reply with the childish chant: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” We all knew that this was bullshit: words can hurt – a lot – and are often intended to do so. But adults believed that: “It’s all part of growing up; kids have to toughen up and learn to handle it.”
It’s both the blessing and the curse of tech that there is always something new to learn, invent, and do. Some technologies require years of study and practice to become truly skilled at, and it can seem as if, the minute you finally reach a pinnacle of achievement with Technology X, along comes Technology Y – and everyone is excited to switch to it.
It’s a painful reckoning. The technology that you loved, worked hard at, possibly helped to create, is being eclipsed. All that you have invested in it – blood, sweat, brains, tears, and time – now feels like wasted effort. What should you do?
Continue reading Letting Go of a Beloved TechnologyAn ironically popular theme in social media lately is “Smartphones have made people antisocial!”, often illustrated with a photo of a bunch of people who happen to be standing or sitting near each other, all heads-down, engrossed in whatever is happening on their phones. There is usually accompanying text, some sanctimonious, head-shaking statement about how “before smartphones, people used to actually talk to each other in public.”
Actually, they didn’t. Continue reading Those Anti-Social Smartphones
While Brendan was writing his new book Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud, we filmed some short videos about why he wanted to write a systems performance book, how hard it was to get started, and about a few chapters as he completed them…
Then life became busy and insane (partly because he was writing a book, but not only), and we didn’t shoot anything at all for months. And then, finally, the book was finished.
Many months after that, when the book was finally in print, we launched it at a meetup of BayLISA, where Brendan gave a long talk on all of it, with in-depth look at Chapter 6: CPUs.
The book is also available from Informitin paper, ebook, or a bundle of both!
