On the Eve of a New Year
Here it is, the last day of 2024. Of course, when a year turns over is a pretty arbitrary thing in the grand scheme of the universe, but I take a pause anyway, because the rest of the planet does. Some years back, I learned the technique of making New Year’s Commitments, rather than Resolutions. The different being, resolutions are typically ditched after the first or second week of the year. One workout at the gym, and that’s it. One run, one turn on the new treadmill. You’ve just got higher priorities… A Commitment, on the other hand, carries the weight of something you can’t escape just after the first try. You’re committed, it has priority, you’re not going to let something else muscle it out.
Go Roughly Into That Good Light
What’s the difference between “software hacking” and “computer science”? I’d like to think that the more ‘science’ oriented part of writing code has to do with formal methods, algorithmic purity, and systems theories and whatnot. A lot more specification, a lot more academic, a lot less code. Then there’s how we generate 99% of the code that actually gets used on a daily basis. If we’re the creators of core systems, OS kernels, UI libraries, and the like, there might be more ‘science’ involved.
Machine, Heal Thyself…
A brief word about imagery. I’ve never been a visual artist. The only ‘art’ I generate is code and prose. So, it pleases me to no end that I can actually generate interesting images through ‘prompting’ from within WordPress itself. The prompt that lead to the above image:
an image of a humanoid robot sitting under a tree. The robot has a tablet computer in their hands, which has a wire connected to the back o their head. They are clearly altering their own code, as they attempt to make improvements
I like that, because I can fiddle with the prompt a bit, and come up with an image that fairly matches the sentiment I was trying to capture in that moment. That’s as far as I have taken the usage of “AI” in my writing. I don’t use it to come up with outlines, or to fill in chunks of text. That’s still just my freeform mind doing it. But, for how long?
Tequity Podcast on Spotify!!
Even before I left Microsoft at the end of 2022, I was making appearances on podcasts, telling my story, preaching the Tequity message. Over this past year, we made plans to create our own podcast, to control the narrative, find our own guests, and tell our own story.
Well, with a few fits and starts in terms of learning how to record, edit, and post, we’ve finally produced our premier episode of the Tequity podcast, and it can be found on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6qmwtXIfjluESiRfabYmke
I Think I Dreamt Of Electric Sheep
We are in India, visiting family. While in Hyderabad, we thought it would be a great idea to invite 30 of our extended family on a vacation to Goa!! I mean, the sun and the sand, palm trees and all the fish and shrimp you can eat. What could be more heavenly?
Well, with that many people, flying was out of the question, so, we rented a bus, and took a 16 hour trip to paradise.
Now, if you’ve ever done extensive travel in India, you might be familiar with what a challenging choice this might be. The railroads would be smoother, but might take quite a long time, and flying would only be a 90 minute trip, but again, coordinating that for 30+ people on short notice is kind of hard, and expensive.
TechNomadic – Living in the Wild
Long Story short, my family of 4 hasn’t travelled internationally since the pandemic. So, now we’re on the road internationally.
Deciding to leave the cushiness of MSFT at the end of 2022 left me free to pursue my own adventures. With that comes the freedom of not being tied to one single geography. I mean, I moved to the Pacific Northwest in the first place, to join MSFT in 1998, then stayed, and returned for 24 years. With new kids in tow, the anchor is always something on the lines of “but the kids are in school…”. It took quite a while, but I was inspired by a neighbor to just hit the rod. That neighbor has 3 kids under the age of 10, and they’re doing “Semester At Sea”. We’re not doing that particular program, but I was inspired enough by their example to say “It’s ok to take kids out of school when they’re young. We can ‘home school’ on the road and give them great lifelong experiences to boot”.
So, here we are.
Musings of a 60 year old Tech Daddy
Well, I just celebrated the completion of 60 years on this planet.
That’s me on the left with the glasses. I use this picture, because my brother Stephan and I (on the right) started our first company ‘Adamation’ back in 1984. We were wild eyed, and ambitious, living in Silicon Valley, trying to make it big. Well, we didn’t become an Adobe, but we held our own, and our early journey is documented in the Computer History Museum of Silicon Valley: https://computerhistory.org/blog/meet-the-adams-brothers/
That history piece was done quite some time ago, and the story kind of leaves off with my time at Microsoft. But wait, there’s more…
This post is about reflections on roughly 48 years of coding, and being a ‘Technologist’ and ‘Futurist’.
Mastering SVG: The Paint-Order Attribute Explained
You would think that in this age of generative AI, that going deep into a subject is no longer en vogue. I mean, when you’ve got copilot and ChatGPT at your finger tips, aren’t you just supposed to prompt your way to coding nirvana?
Well, us humans still have something to offer to the intellectual pursuits of programming. I’m going to explore one such case in point. I will use the rendering of .svg as a backdrop. This is kinda technical, so if you’re not into that, you might want to avert your eyes now.
Let’s Talk SVG Again
Last year, I did a whole multi-part series on how to write an SVG Rendering engine from the ground up: https://williamaadams.wordpress.com/2023/02/18/svg-from-the-ground-up-time-to-wrap-it-up/
Since the time of that writing, I’ve used the SVG engine quite a lot to create a mapping application, as well as be the foundation for creating some UI elements for general application usage. This past summer, a developer in the blend2d community asked if they could use the library as part of the work with the Tcl language.