Bryan Ray

Just some random political thoughts that I had during this whole pandemic and drama filled 2020 … Politics for many people has essentially become a combination of religion (literally) and a lifestyle brand. The religious leaders that they follow tell them - in no uncertain terms - how to live, and that their politics are a part of that. Politics have turned into something that is moralized, and at issue absolutely everywhere.

I have a strong desire to be efficient and effective. I prefer communication through written form. Short and long form asyncronous discussion via a system like Discourse or email. I like the philosophy of stoicism. I do not like ego. I like doing the right thing. I like to see obstacles as ways to grow. I’m big on self reflection and ensuring that I adjust and change accordingly to adapt.

This is a bit of a long story, but one that I felt compelled to share, because it was an important part of my day. Tonight I decided to eat dinner at Salata. If you’ve ever eaten at a Salata, you’ll know that the tables are fairly close together. If you’ve never eaten at Salata, just know that their table placement does not take your personal space in to account.

I’ve been through quite a few developer interviews in my career. Some were great, some … not so great. I still remember one in particular, back when I was a young junior developer. I went in to an interview and was absolutely grilled by a couple developers in a conference room. I can still remember to this day walking out of that building feeling so embarrassed. My tail tucked firmly between my legs and a strong disdain for the company and almost my entire profession.

I see a lot of the benefit of Go. It’s “simple.” The stdlib is great. However, nothing ever seems to scratch the surface more than “look … I can start a web server using the stdlib and serve a single endpoint. It’s great!” Finding a good article or book that describes how to organize your (web) application seems extremely rare. Any developer who has built something of substantial size (small to medium), knows that there are some things that you typically don’t want to do when building software.

Most of the companies that I have worked for began moving their products to the “cloud” (read, “other peoples computers”). These companies have been mostly Microsoft shops, so Azure has been the obvious choice. Azure has a great user interface, a great set of services, and all the black magic pricing that AWS comes with. One of the things that lured me towards giving AWS a real look, was Light Sail.