Privacy

I opened someone’s Twitter profile in April and saw a Linktree URL. I click it and start to poke around after signing up for an account. The changing gradient backgrounds amuse me. I appreciate the mobile-friendliness and the built-in analytics. I needed something like this to help me add newsletter subscribers, guide folks to my various projects, and all the other things Linktree does. I have a lot of sites and social profiles. Plus, Linktree is better than throwing my entire website at someone and saying, “You figure me out.” With a Zapier integration, this can lead to newsletter signups too?!?! “I kinda need this,” I think to myself. I plop down my $60 for a year of service and spend the next few weeks adding, tweaking, and tinkering. Then let it sit. ...

Photo by Aaron Burden from Pexels It’s been one of the more challenging years of my life for many reasons. Please allow me the space to do some healing in this intro. I promise the juicy tech bits are a header away. If 2020 was hell on earth (which, while close, wasn’t quite there), 2021 asked us all to hold our collective beverages. Vaccines and boosters aside, the pandemic was a staunch obstacle to tackle along with every decision. A thorn in the side of everything at this point, we tried to live as normal a life as a family can that has young, unvaccinated children amongst us. But, how do you reduce human interaction in a world that needs more humans to be human to each other? We have to figure out the answer to this question. In the face of a pandemic, government spending buoyed the economy here in the United States. Abroad other nations took stock and saw a world where everyone looked after themselves first. I am relieved that adults have returned to the White House, but I fear it might be short-lived given the stalling in Washington DC the past few weeks. ...

A slightly shorter version of this article was featured in DevOps’ish 144: Your 39 bps matters, happy little hybrid clouds, Kubernetes with a side of service mesh, HA SQLite, and more This week I read about a study of 17 languages that suggests humans, “no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to send information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code.” The study points out that some languages are clearly “faster” than others but, a steady average rate of 39.15 bits per second (bps) kept coming up. This study fascinated me since I talk to people as part of my work. My mind jumped to being on stage somewhere and spewing 1s and 0s out at a measly 17.6 kilobytes per hour. That is such a low data rate. It’s relatively equal to this random file I found on GitHub. At 39 bps, Kubernetes 1.15.3 would take about 1 day, 1 hour, and 14 minutes to download it’s whopping 443 KB of container orchestration code. ...