Iffy's Gazette

I'll say it again, the Internet is not the Gibsonian Cyberspace — but, the Internet certainly could support Cyberspace. Over the course of the past 30 years of various evolutions of the Internet, there have been many phenomena that partially approximate the Metaverse, and I'll attempt to point out some highlights, how they fit, and how they missed the mark, according to the criteria I laid out in my previous blog post . Note: I've added links to some articles that dive deeper into some of these concepts, mostly from The Digital Antiquarian . Jimmy is more of a historian than I am — I'm just here to give you the most valuable thing of all: my Opinion — so I strongly recommend you check out his work for the rich historical details! Think of this as an undergraduate survey, and Jimmy's work as a graduate course that's slightly less opinionated. Lecture BBSs While the Internet was still a small system open only to some university and government workers, there was ...

Ever since Facebook recently changed their name to Meta, everyone has kind of been wondering what exactly is up with that. What is a Metaverse? Why do I want it? How can I give it all of my money? I will attempt to answer these questions and more in this course, which is worth absolutely no credits. Caveat: This is a humble stream-of-consciousness blog post, not a piece of hard journalism or a Wikipedia article, so I'm not going to the effort of citing my sources. I could be wrong about some things but I think the broad strokes are accurate. Corrections welcome. Prerequisites When Mark Zuckerberg refers to "The Metaverse," he's referring to a specific idea from a specific science fiction book: Snow Crash  (1992) by Neal Stephenson. It's a great book, action-packed, with fluid prose. Reading it feels like you are watching a movie. In Snow Crash , the Metaverse was a general-purpose networked virtual reality system. Locations in the Metaverse were allocated much...

For most of my life, it seemed like there were only a few real programming languages worth learning, and they each had very specific constraints that you just had to live with. My dad put together an Ohio Scientific kit computer when I was really young, but I first learned how to poke around in programming on a Commodore 64, which booted into a BASIC interpreter. I stuck around with that until Junior High. We were lucky enough to have a BASIC programming class in middle school, and I ended up doing independent study there in 8th grade. The teacher had a Pascal environment for Apple ][ and so I started learning about procedures. I didn't realize, nor would I have understood, at the time, but Pascal actually came with its own Virtual Machine , much as Java does today. This is actually how the original Wizardry was built . Once I got to college, I learned Scheme, C, C++, MIPS Assembly, Fortran (!), Make, BASH, JavaScript, and Java. Of those, Java came bundled with its own bespoke VM. ...

Porting software is hard. A lot harder than it should be. That's not to say it shouldn't be hard, but the problem is that it is difficult for the wrong reasons. Those of us who find ourselves porting applications (that were not originally painstakingly designed up-front to be portable) inevitably spend a lot of time on the mundane mechanics of getting it to compile and run in a maintainable way, rather than the real work of adapting the app's functionality to the endemic properties of the target environment. What are you talking about? It's probably best to start out with some definitions, just to make sure we are all starting on page one. Let's call an " Application " any deployable unit of software . So, it could be a classic app, library, or a service. To " Deploy " an Application to an Environment is to make a unit of software available to install, run, and ultimately use, using the natural means of the Environment . An " Environment ...

Culture and Fit have been hiring concepts for a long, long time, but they've been seeing even greater weight recently. On the surface, I think that's good. In principle, companies should focus more on the humanity of the humans that make them go. But, we must go deeper. What are we looking for when we talk about "Fit?" What is the goal of "corporate culture?" Even with the best of intentions, this can be used for Good or Evil. Culture The thing about corporate culture is that you will have one whether you want one or not. It's something endemic in groups of humans working together. It's the way things get done, how employees interact, what to expect. Not only can culture hinder productivity, increase turnover, and otherwise cause a company to rot from the inside-out, it can also boost productivity, retention, and Glassdoor reviews. So, it behooves leadership to get a handle on it. I might argue it's leadership's One Damn Job. Another aspect ...

When interviewing at my last company, almost a decade ago, I was anxious that I would be asked this precise question. And, I was, immediately ! The first question from the first interviewer. This upset me tremendously. Why did this bother me so much? The common wisdom is that you never speak ill of a former or current employer in an interview. «If they feel that way about their previous employer, they might feel that way again, about us. Possible bad attitude. Not worth the risk.» My personal hang up about being anything but fully honest and forthcoming. The fact in that situation was that I was primarily leaving my previous company because I had some really bad interactions (not abuse) with some folks there, and wasn't able to get the system to handle it. That's a particularly terrible thing to admit. «If they had bad interactions with some people at their previous employer, they could have bad interactions again, with us. Not worth the risk.» or «We want someone who can hand...

Even though I have 21 years of experience in the software industry, and am fairly proud of some of my accomplishments, I Absolutely. Dread . Interviewing.  I am not good at it. I don't think I've ever interviewed nearly as well as the employee I ended up actually being. But, when hiring, you can't take people's word for it. Thus, we continue to interview, knowing that it's ableist, biased, and inaccurate, but not knowing what else to do. In fact, I wouldn't really trust a company that gave me an offer without administering at least a sort of FizzBuzz test , because I've interviewed a lot of people that couldn't pass one. I'm especially concerned about it, now, because I am not presently employed, and I intend to try to join any new company without the consequential role reduction and having to climb the ladder all over again. At my last two companies, I had to work myself up the ranks twice each time, at some point losing a lot of capital that I...