Author's posts
Jun 10 2013
Life in the information age (a response to PRISM)
I apologize up front for my rambling style. I promise these first few jaunts/missives connect up at the end. A few years ago, I saw a profoundly disheartening and disturbing movie, Taken. The movie portrays a james-bond-alike saving a young abducted person from being sold to a highest bidder. In the end, the girl was …
May 31 2013
Goodbye Google Reader, You Will Be Missed
Goodbye Reader. I will miss you. Back in my PayPal days, with many predictable big-company-engineering idle moments at hand, waiting on hour-long builds to see if I got all my semicolons just right, my friend Wayne introduced me to you. Almost immediately, he and I spent a few moments one afternoon making one the arguably …
Mar 30 2013
Loss is a sickness.
We lose stuff all the time, our keys, loose change forever embedded into secret areas of the couch, occasionally, our wallet. Some stuff matters a little, most doesn’t matter at all. What we do not lose so often, for better or for worse, are the things that matter. It may seem good fortune to live …
Mar 05 2013
Linus is no fool.
Linus is no fool, he knows the key to marketing success is having people constantly talk about your product. So, the most successful product idea ever is obviously a version control system so complicated that every engineering conversation ever for the forseeable future is dominated by talk about his product, such as “Well, I’d love …
Jan 28 2013
Oh, you think meritocracy exists? Tell me more about how you’re always overlooked.
So you want to talk about meritocracy, and how hard work will pay off, and justice will come your way someday? Cool story, bro. My turn, let me start with a little story that’s slightly less crazy than your imaginary meritocracy pipe dream – something ridiculous about growing up religious. I grew up being an …
Jan 18 2013
A Trillion Dollars & E.T.
Music: Blonde Redhead – 23 (the song) This is one of those fun, or, perhaps, overwhelming number games. It’s going to be like the drake equation, where we’re throwing numbers around, stacking assumption on assumption on assumption, and surely several assumptions will be wrong, and the number of zeros will get quite insane, but in …
Jan 07 2013
Waking With The Sun
Music: Blink 182 – Pretty Little Girl .. It’s time to switch from our designer’s credit card to the LLC’s, because, we’re lucky enough to have enough income that our LLC credit card can cover that no-longer-free Amazon VM. Adam tries his best to convert non-straight-forward AWS pricing structures into toddler level english, so idiot …
Jan 04 2013
Life & Career Lessons – 2012
Music: Angels and Airwaves – Diary I’m always a little late on the 2012 lists, stick with me, this’ll be worth it. Executive Summary of 2012: I started 2012 by taking a bit of a risk careerwise, where before I had been the enterprise huge-company guy, I ventured into mid-sized startupish culture, pushing myself out …
Dec 19 2012
Music To Code By, 2012
Here’s what I listened to while coding in 2012. This year I’d categorize my listening habits into three moods: getting shit done, relaxing, and background noise. Standard disclaimer: I listen to albums all the way through, front to back, and am often annoying the hell out of my wife with a single track or album …
About
Jason Baker is a software engineer. He works on enterprise infrastructure for big companies. He also enjoys creating smaller scale software products and scripts in his spare time.