Hello Again - Part 1
Has it been 5 years since I posted anything here? Wow. Well, what's new?
First, I moved from Colorado to North Carolina after living in Littleton for over 15 years. It was a great state to live in, but it was time to move for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, my Northern European skin couldn't handle it any more. For those who may not be up to speed on US geography, Colorado is quite hot in the summer, and quite dry, with a high UV rate owing to its altitude. The upshot is that I've had to deal with multiple skin issues since I moved, including several Moh's surgeries and one incident of actual skin cancer that also required surgery. Or, as I like to say, I loved Colorado but it didn't love me back.
The choice of North Carolina was primarily driven by work since the HQ for Redhat (my company at the time) was located here. It had other advantages as well, namely that it put me closer to friends and family. My reasoning didn't pan as well as I'd hoped, since I quit Redhat not too long after it was acquired by IBM, I lost friends either to Covid or circumstance, and my dad passed away. The silver lining is that it's a nice state with great weather, easily the best weather of any state I've ever lived in, and I've lived in several. I've no plans to move in spite of my personal and/or job situation. I sort of liken North Carolina to a southern version of Wisconsin.
I also changed jobs. After the shakeup from the IBM purchase I was forced to learn Go. At first I thought it might be a fun challenge. Learn something new and all that. But it didn't take long for the shiny to wear off. It felt like a weird mish-mash of C and some random FP language, where everything was 5x more difficult to accomplish than if I had been using Ruby. All for an internal facing web app that hadn't actually acquired any customers by the time I left. Thank goodness it was fast, though, whew! I came to despise the language, and can only credit its success to the fact that it was the first real multi-core language and because it came from Google. I can see absolutely no reason to use it over Crystal or Elixir other than "inertia".
More to follow in part 2!
First, I moved from Colorado to North Carolina after living in Littleton for over 15 years. It was a great state to live in, but it was time to move for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, my Northern European skin couldn't handle it any more. For those who may not be up to speed on US geography, Colorado is quite hot in the summer, and quite dry, with a high UV rate owing to its altitude. The upshot is that I've had to deal with multiple skin issues since I moved, including several Moh's surgeries and one incident of actual skin cancer that also required surgery. Or, as I like to say, I loved Colorado but it didn't love me back.
The choice of North Carolina was primarily driven by work since the HQ for Redhat (my company at the time) was located here. It had other advantages as well, namely that it put me closer to friends and family. My reasoning didn't pan as well as I'd hoped, since I quit Redhat not too long after it was acquired by IBM, I lost friends either to Covid or circumstance, and my dad passed away. The silver lining is that it's a nice state with great weather, easily the best weather of any state I've ever lived in, and I've lived in several. I've no plans to move in spite of my personal and/or job situation. I sort of liken North Carolina to a southern version of Wisconsin.
I also changed jobs. After the shakeup from the IBM purchase I was forced to learn Go. At first I thought it might be a fun challenge. Learn something new and all that. But it didn't take long for the shiny to wear off. It felt like a weird mish-mash of C and some random FP language, where everything was 5x more difficult to accomplish than if I had been using Ruby. All for an internal facing web app that hadn't actually acquired any customers by the time I left. Thank goodness it was fast, though, whew! I came to despise the language, and can only credit its success to the fact that it was the first real multi-core language and because it came from Google. I can see absolutely no reason to use it over Crystal or Elixir other than "inertia".
More to follow in part 2!