Sep 11 2013
I haven’t been taking many photographs recently. When I analyze it, the story goes: I started sorting through years of photos, trimming the fat, collecting the better bits into something worthwhile. Sorting years of photos proved such a daunting task that at one point early on I was able to calculate how long it would …
Jul 18 2013
Corporate metrics are a necessary but terrible mouse trap. Rule benders will bend the rules, and creating a mouse trap to catch a rule bender inevitably turns into a rube goldberg machine. This machine eliminates autonomy and freedom of choice. It transforms personal pride, integrity, and accomplishment into a generic store-brand product of mediocre quality. …
May 31 2013
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 …
Jan 28 2013
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
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
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
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 …
Nov 03 2012
I can’t wait for the future. Not the 2013, 2015, or even 2020 future, I mean the 2050s, the next, better, version of the 60s. Think about it. For the next 20 years, the patent trolls (big brand and small) will deduce all possible ideas, patent them, filling the set as quickly as wikipedia became …
Oct 20 2012
A few days ago, Google slipped up in releasing quarterly earnings reports before they were PR-ified, popular media referred to their results as ‘terrible’: What Page couldn’t apologize for, however, is that Google’s results were pretty terrible. The company’s profits plunged 20 percent from a year ago, according to the Wall Street Journal (source) Today, …
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.