with 'life' tag

the state of things

just over seven years ago, i mentioned that i had decided to switch over to using scat, the point of sale software that i had been knocking together in my spare time. it happened, and we have been using it while i continue to work on it in that copious spare time. the project page says “it is currently a very rough work-in-progress and not suitable for use by anyone.” and that's still true. perhaps even more true. (and absolutely true if you include the online store component.)

it is currently a frankenstein monster as i am (slowly) transforming it from an old-school php application to being built on the slim framework. i am using twig for templating, and using idiorm and paris as a database abstraction thing.

i am using docker containers for some things, but i have very mixed emotions about it. i started doing that because i was doing development on my macbook pro (15-inch early 2008) which is stuck on el capitan, but found it convenient to keep using them once i transitioned to doing development on the same local server where i'm running our production instance.

the way that docker gets stdout and stderr wrong constantly vexes me. (there may be reasonable technical reasons for it.)

i have been reading jamie zawinski’s blog for a very long time. all the way back to when it was on live journal, and also the blog for dna lounge, the nightclub he owns. the most recent post about writing his own user account system to the club website sounded very familiar.

plus ça change

the new york times has an article about how the fast pace of innovation is creating mini-generations.

while the story focuses on the users of all these technologies, the part of it that is of more immediate interest to me is the makers, since i’m one of them. the craft of making computers do what you want is progressing at least as fast as their uses.

new languages, new techniques, new environments. there are people who stand aside and laugh at the reinvention they see, but i would not count myself among them. there are people in the thick of it that think the current new thing is the one that will change everything. i am not one of them, either. there are people who get caught up in an eddy, where what was once the new thing has become their only thing. they are the next generation’s cobol programmer.

i think i am becoming one of them. i don’t think i mind. i don’t code in my free time any longer. i am moving on in other ways. my value as a programmer is not in knowing the newest things.