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I don't think I've sent a newsletter since I rebranded from Opsitive to Monospace Mentor. The reason is simply that setting up the professional operation I have in mind is a ton of work. I've been very busy, and I'm happy to report that I've made a lot of progress in terms of offering you great learning opportunities. More on that below.
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Did you notice that I've found a name for my newsletter? This is "News from the Server Room", issue #1! I like it. Email me back and let me know if you like it, too!
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Mentor Monologue
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My Mentor Monologue for this week is about boring technology. And as an exception, I don't mean "boring" in the sense of established and reliable technology that I recommend you use instead of chasing the latest hype. No, I mean that technology in general has become boring for the most part. In his article "Plateauing technology and boring computing", Michael Wirth wrote something that hit home with me:
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But computing was interesting in the 1980s. Home computers were becoming a thing, Mac’s were making inroads everywhere, and you could play-around with PCs, even if they likely weren’t as interesting as Mac’s. Everything had its pros and cons. Unix provided an excellent platform to learn programming, much better than Mac’s which were awful to code, and PC’s which just really weren’t that interesting language-wise (unless you liked BASIC).
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It reminded me how excited I was about computers back then, how much I lusted after and saved money for the next upgrade or replacement machine that would open up amazing new possibilities for me. Sadly, that excitement is pretty much gone today. The new iPhone? Yeah, better lenses, but I always forget to take photos anyway. The next generation of CPUs or GPUs? Meh, I'm good, thanks. Michael claims that, in the last 20 years, almost every innovation in computer science was pretty much just a facelift of a prior invention. And, to be honest, it's hard for me to disagree. There's just not that much that's come out in the last decade or so that gave me that "Wow, I love it and I have to have it" feeling. I think that's why I've been indulging in nostalgia so much lately, reading old issues of BYTE Magazine and watching Usagi Electric on YouTube. It makes me imagine how I would have felt, back in the day, if I had had access to technology like the Pyramid minicomputer Michael mentioned in his article.
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But do we really need to have these quantum leaps to be excited about technology? Nowadays, the thing that comes closest for me to unboxing my new home computer is installing open source software. Optimizing my workflows, having even more fun doing what I already love, that makes me happy every time. Not all technology is plateauing. In the open source ecosystem, developers keep making breakthroughs, continue to amaze users of their software with new ideas, and improve the lives of people all over the world. I'd say that's something to be excited about.
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Has there been something in our industry that excited you? Let me know in a reply!
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Changelog
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One result of the huge amount of work I've been doing in the last two months is the new Monospace Mentor website. But that's such a massive change that I'm going to write a separate blog post about it. I recommend you add my blog to your RSS reader to get the post right when it comes out. You do have an RSS reader, right?
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However, the most important change for me recently was that I did my first cohort-based course! In my personal retreat at the end of 2023, I reflected on the fact that I had aimed far too high trying to get a full Linux course off the ground as my first teaching project. It felt like a massive failure. There and then, I made the decision to prove to myself that I can do it: I vowed to launch a full course in the first quarter of 2024. And I'm happy to report that I did! I picked a much smaller scope, namely the Varnish cache proxy, and got to work. I have to admit that scheduling the Varnish Mastery course for the end of February was still too optimistic given the amount of preparation work even a small course takes, especially if it's your first course and you're doing it on top of your day job. But I made it, and the feedback I got was overwhelmingly positive. The participants have learned a lot about Varnish, and I've learned a lot about designing and running online courses. The next one will be even better!
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Recommended reading
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As an online teacher, I always recommend additional material to my students with which they can expand their horizon. Here's a list of reading tips I've curated for you.
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A scathing commentary by Jürgen "tante" Geuter on the veiled moves by Automattic to sell content from creators on their hosted WordPress product to Midjourney and OpenAI. This seems to happen everywhere now, and the prevailing strategy seems to be to hide this practice sneakily deep in the terms of service, requiring users to actively opt out of letting AI businesses profit from their content, if they even get wind of it in the first place.
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Subtitled "Fables and Kōans for the Software Engineer", this collection of stories is going to lighten your mood even if you've just left this week's sprint planning session.
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I started to use Tailwind CSS simply because I'm about as good at frontend design as I am at tending potted plants: with luck, there will be no victims to mourn. Tailwind and TailwindUI looked to me like an efficient way to get a good-looking web page set up in no time. And it is. But I also bought into the claim that this was the right way to style HTML in the 21st century. In that regard, I might have been played for a fool.
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This article on the Honeybadger Developer Blog provides a deep dive into setting up an online documentation website using Jekyll, YARD, and Github actions for continuous deployment including Markdown linting. It accompanies the technical implementation with an in-depth discussion of the necessary processes and workflows for writing, revising, reviewing and approving documentation changes. Even if you don't have to document Rails applications, this is well worth a read.
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Thanks for reading!
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I hope you found my News from The Server Room enjoyable and helpful. If you have any feedback or questions, simply reply to this email!
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Jochen, the Monospace Mentor
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