bsharitt

Location: Rochester, NY

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Kubernetes, AWS, Python, CI/CD, Terraform, Linux, Docker

Résumé/CV: https://sharitt.com/~bsharitt/resume/

Email: bridget@sharitt.com

Hi I'm Bridget, I have several years of experience building cloud infrastructure most in AWS, but also some GCP and in the past 5 years have had a heavy focus on Kubernetes. I'm mostly focused on remote opportunities.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bsharitt

This might just be the best game of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" I've ever seen.

This certainly tightens up the iPad -> iPad Air -> iPad Pro line, The Air -> Pro gap was already small(it widens a bit today with the M2 Pro, but not by much), but the iPad -> Air decision was between dated budget tablet or more full featured modern tablet, but now it's a little less clear.

I'm not old enough to have grown up on Tandy computers(though I recall my parents having what may have been a CoCo when I was very young), I do have have a 1000TX and CoCo 2 as part of my retro computer collection. I really kind of like that 1000TX in my collection. Not only is it one of my favorite XT compatibles(technically it has a 286, but still effectively has an XT rather AT architecture, so it ends up basically being a fast 8088) in my collection, that Tandy graphics and sound also give a bit of a soul of an 8-bit home computer and was pretty well supported by games of the era, especially compared other niche graphics and sound technologies.

Use of Teams has a been a deciding factor about not taking a job before. It's got to be pretty bad when it makes me nostalgic for HipChat.

I've had Amazon take down reviews that point out that a drive is a scam.

I also went the same Plex to Jellyfin route. Though it took me a couple of tries because Jellyfin wasn't quite up to snuff the first time I tried it, but the server/web side seems to be pretty great these days, at least I don't have any issues. While I'm glad they finally have an iOS app, I wish I didn't have to rely on a thirdparty app for Apple TV.

> The Roku OS is fantastic and neutral as far as the various content provider services go.

I originally like Roku, because they used to be a neutral hardware provider, but that's not the case these days. Their OS is becoming more full of ads and are really trying to push their own content. And now nearly every time I see the Roku in the news is that they don't have new provider or that they're thinking of kicking off a provider because they're trying to get a cut of revenues.

>but did not find much about the topic of motivation within it.

Agreed, this is much more of a "What to do to write once you have the motivation". That's not to say it's not a useful article, but perhaps a bit misdirected by the title.

> Is lack of interest a solvable problem?

That is an interesting question. One that I also find my self faced with regularly(and solving the general issue of motivation in general). I'm more into the fictional/creative side of writing, bit I think that general "motivation" issue is the same. I know I want to write. I consider writing a good use of my time, but I have trouble getting myself to sit down and a spend significant amount of time writing. I know for me specifically there's some degree of depression that suppresses my motivation to do anything, but even between those episodes, I do find it more difficult to actually motivate myself to write.

I've thought about this a lot and have come across two separate issues. One, is that trying to create something "new" in the world presents a challenge in of it self, whether its technical or creative. It's something I run into even when I'm working on something technical for work. For me at least, this is the easier barrier to overcome because I do enjoy the challenge when I'm in a state of mind to rise to the challenge. And that state of mind brings me to the the second issue, and that is the catalyst of the motivation. For professional/technical work that catalyst is essentially and external force (i.e. I need to work to make money and live), but for personal projects there's not that external catalyst. When I was younger I always had motivation for personal projects and my daughter spends all of her free time drawing(and she's very good at it). So I wonder if spending all of your "creative juices" at work(and despite people always creating barriers between technical and creative work, I think they may fulfill/tap similar parts of the brain) is the real barrier. The author of the article even mentions that he's done this since leaving Uber. I would be interested in seeing any statistics that correlated marginally successful authors(in any format) with the really successful ones to see of the marginal ones were more productive with putting out content because they needed too versus the super successful ones that had a major hit or two and are basically set for life.

I remember seeing this before(in the link, it appears to have been around since 2011) and at least a couple of other versions of "Goodnight Moon" with geeky leanings that I can't recall immediately. It's things like this and other similar remixes that have made me fully support remixes of copyrighted material and get dislike when companies take a hard line stance against them.

And even if you do skip over the Amazon version and click on the product you want, there's a good chance there's going to be a "similar item" box right near the description with a link to a similar Amazon product.

I admit I originally thought this post has omitted the (year) tag and was about the initial batch of Pocket PC dev devices in the 90s before I read the article.

The Nokia N900 is simultaneously I really wish I had gotten my hands on when it was new and also a device I'm glad I ultimately didn't wast my money on. The landscape slider is still a form factor I miss though. Sure I've mostly adapted to onscreen keyboards, but I occasionally still yearn for something physical.

I feel like these low spec ARM CPUs are basically the 6502 and z80 of the late 80s of our day. Still technically usable, but far outclassed by contemporary hardware, yet finding their way into the hands of hobbyists.

I'm skeptical that Samsung is anywhere near taking on the M1 given their current production Exynos processor, but I wish some one would. I have an M1 MacBook Air and it's essentially the computer I've been wanting for years, powerful without fans or other moving parts, but I wish there were good options outside of Apple.

I've been fairly lucky that for about 2/3 of my career I've worked in environments that have generally been pretty laid back. Though I did do a short stint just shy of a couple months at company that had just awful culture where everything was a crisis and it was always crunch time and 12+ hour days were the expected norm. I didn't stick around because of that(and also the job was quite different that what was discussed in the interview), and I don't know how or why people put up with that on a normal basis. Maybe if you were the founder or a very early employee with significant equity, but not just for a salary.

But even with my generally laid back workload at my job, I think the culture of the tech industry does seep in a bit and I feel like I need to be doing more. So I start side projects or go learn programming languages or some new tool, which aren't bad things in of themselves until they start to feel like an obligation and start sucking the vitality out of your life. I've started to keep those in check a bit better, mostly by keeping a further distance from the tech world by no longer following tech people on Twitter and drastically cutting back my time on sites like this one(I'm only here now because I finished watching a movie and it's tad early for bed, but to close to pick back up the book I was reading).

I almost want to say that the solution might be do tech work outside the tech industry, but I also spent a few years at mortgage company and with some defense contractors, and those are just soul sucking in different ways. Basically my cure has been to find hobbies and interests far away from anything related to my job.

Android should be the focus of this. I’d be upgrading every two years with most android manufacturers, and maybe a year or two more with a Pixel, but I’ve got an iPhone XR than I probably won’t even think about upgrading until the iPhone 15 but will have to think about it because my XR will still be getting updates. The Pixel 3a is the closest Pixel Android contemporary to my phone and has been been in the new lately due to random bricking so… iPhones aren’t perfect but it’s been a while since I’ve needed to jailbreak to do something I’ve needed to do.

I remember back in the late 90's or maybe 2000/2001 running some distro with X from two floppies. OSes that could be run from floppy were great because my parents weren't to keen on me partitioning the hard drive of the family computer, though there were options like the version of Mandrake that easily installed to a disk file on the Windows hard drive(it was probably possible on others, but Mandrake made it easy) and ZipSlack that used a UMSDOS filesystem to run on top of DOS, though it would leave weird little files around the file system that were noticeable once you went back to Windows, so it wasn't popular with my parents either.

I had always been super fascinated by Palm pilots since I was a kid and I finally got my hands on a Palm Zire 31 as an adult and later one of my first(maybe my first) smartphone was a Palm Treo 755p. Sure PalmOS had its shortcomings(especially by the time I got my hands on it), but I still have fond memories of my PalmOS devices. In fact the major impetus for replacing my Treo wasn't the OS, but the lack of onboard WiFi or GPS, especially has Google Maps came on to the scene.

Between this and the SMR NAS drive debacle, I think I'm done with Western Digital for the foreseeable future.

I used to be a big fan of Dropbox, but my problem is that they don't have a lower paid tier like Google, Microsoft and Apple have for $2-$3. I need a little more than the free plan offers, but I don't need terabytes of space.

Disney+ had inexplicably blocked my IP address for "being a VPN" for close to year, despite me never running a VPN from my home network. Though the block didn't stop me from watching their content, it just stopped me from paying for, which I was more than willing to do and spent far to long dealing with their support to try to make it happen.

If the same thing happens with Netflix, it also won't keep me from watching Netflix content, I'll just stop paying for it. Other than the aforementioned Disney+ content, I rarely pirate anything these days and I'd rather not if I can help it.

I've had similar issues with people who make 3d models for gaming and I find it super frustrating. I just want a model of a Dwarf cleric and maybe other models in the future, but I don't want to subscribe to you.

Outside of work provided computers, I've not been a Mac user for many years, but the M1 Macbook Air brought me back and it's been great. It's basically the laptop I've been waiting years for, silent with no moving parts and very little in the way of compromises(I don't personally have any need for super long running CPU intensive tasks). It's weird to see it compile code or encode video without fans ramping up, and even if does start to throttle toward the end of the longer tasks, it still beats my fairly recent i7 work MacBook Pro and my Ryzen 7 4700U Windows laptop most of the time.

Years ago I started using Macs to have a stable Unix desktop that also played well with commercial software while keeping Linux on the side as a hobby. Somewhere around 2010 or so I think finally switched away from Macs to pure Linux after my Mac that worked just fine was dropped from support of the latest version of OS X and by that point Linux on the desktop seemed far more stable and I was working with it much more professionally any way. Linux started getting really good as a desktop OS and I think it peaked for me around Ubuntu 16.04 and got very much to a "just works" state that I enjoyed with Macs and Steam was on Linux along with a handful of games I cared about(mostly Civ 5). Then a weird thing started happening and new updates on the same hardware started having weird issues on my laptop, mostly around sleep and power saving. It was possible to fix most of the issues, but the brief "just works" periods seemed to be over. It was still mostly fine on my desktop, and even improved when Valve launched Proton.

Eventually I used my Linux desktop mostly and later my Linux laptop went away in favor of a Chromebook, which supported their beta Linux environment. It wasn't perfect, but sleep/suspend worked and I could do most "Linux" things I needed to do. I also started using a Macbook Pro at work again after being off of OS X for 5 or 6 years and it was just a reminder to me that a Unix-like desktop that didn't need as much fiddling around existed(of course some of you may point out that the fiddling is more restricted on OS X, which is a fair point as well), but the thermal issues of the later Intel Macbooks kept me from buying one for personal use.

So fast forward to last year. I was moving and some other stuff was in flux and my already long in the tooth desktop needed to be put away for a while and while my Chromebook was useful, I didn't like relying on it as a primary machine. Since I didn't play too many demanding games anymore I thought this would be a good chance to kill two birds with one stone and get a laptop that capable playing the meager game library I had, which meant mostly better integrated graphics rather than discrete, and since it was before Intel Xe came out, a Ryzen 4000 series CPU seemed like the obvious choice with a GPU that was roughly GTX 1050ti class, just enough for me. Sadly it appears that AMD pushed forward with some new kind of "hybrid sleep" or what ever they're calling it and wast supported by Linux very well at all(I'm not sure of the exact state at the time of writing this, there was some talk of support landing in 5.13, but I'm not sure of that happened or if it got pushed out to 5.14). So I did the Windows thing full time for the first time in a very long time with WSL, which I actually grew to like somewhat, but I still wasn't happy with the laptop.

By the end of the end of 2020, Macbooks with the M1 were in the wild and the results seemed very good. And since I was still using a Macbook Pro for work during this time, I still had mostly positive feelings about macOS. It had its peculiarities, but I liked it better than Windows, and required less effort to keep running than Linux, I just didn't like the jet engine that my Macbook turned into when ever I tried to do anything remotely demanding. In fact I've always hated fans, and fan noise was a one of motivating factors in dumping my desktop. My "grail" machine has been a fast laptop with no fans or other moving parts. SSDs have been a thing for a while, but we've not had a rally solid performing fanless machine until the M1 Macbook Air(in the 21st century, I'm not counting the fast for their time fanless machines of the 80s and early 90's). So I felt almost obligated get that machine and that's what I did and haven't regretted it for a second(though ask me again in 4 or 5 years if/when Apple starts dropping support for these first gen ARM devices). It can silently keep up with any work I would do compared to my work 16" Macbook Pro which runs much hotter and louder and so far the M1 Air has been able to do what I've needed it to do.

It's much easier talk about integrating life and work and shun compartmentalization of work when you see much more direct returns from the output of your work/not work, rather than having a fixed salary.

I remember ordering a free copy of the IA64 architecture book from Intel in the early 2000's(actual paper even!) thinking I was getting some head start on the future of computing(when it was clear that Alpha wasn't going to happen), but that never panned out. Clearly I've got a poor track record in guessing the path of CPU architecture(I even went 32-bit Core Duo over AMD64, once I got disillusioned over the idea of "better tech" winning out), so I'm still hoping that my buying an M1 Macbook Air doesn't doom Apple's move to ARM.

That's crazy, I was also on a P120 machine looking longingly and Alphas and how much better they were. They just seemed so fast. If I'm not mistaken, they were also one of the early ones to 1GHz.

I remember Alpha in the 90s, it seemed like it was going to be the RISC architecture to finally take on Intel. I was so sad when it fizzled out and I was never able to get my Alpha-based computer(since its heyday was mostly while I was a teenager). Especially since it was the RISC architecture that seemed like Linux was going to work the best on. Eventually I had to settle for Mac OS X and PowerPC as a my accessible RISC Unix work station.

They technically still offer for generic Android, but for the most part it is for Fire devices.