As of today, it has been 573 days since my last post to this blog. Prior to this period, the most I had ever gone without posting here was a few months, going all the way back to 2005. I have literally never gone that long without blogging in my entire life, dating all the way back to my LiveJournal and OpenDiary days. More than a year and a half has elapsed. And it would be easy for me to say that my job was taking up all of my time, but that is only a fraction of what was actually going on.

As it turns out, a lot can change in a year and a half. A whole, whole lot. But I suppose we can start with one very obvious one.

My name changed!

It’s amazing how quickly time can fly when you are having fun.

Almost fifteen years ago I started working at DealNews as a Junior Developer. I was in my mid 20s, less than two years out of Auburn. I even remember it was mid November because I left my previous job on a Wednesday, went to the Auburn-Georgia Game, then started at DealNews the following Monday. It was just before Black Friday even. I still even remember what that first day was like: I didn’t have SVN access yet and I had to email my code to my boss!

To give you an idea of how long ago this was: when I was hired on at DealNews, I announced it to my friends on my MySpace page and my LiveJournal blog. Neither of which exist anymore.

Fifteen years is a long time in tech, where changing jobs rapidly is the norm and staying in a position for three years can be seen as a serious commitment to a company. But the only constant in the universe is change. Which is why it is definitely very bittersweet for me to announce that I will be leaving DealNews on September 16, 2022.

petfeedd users, I am proud to announce the beta release of petfeedd 1.0.1. This release has no major changes in it and is solely about addressing security issues in many of the underlying libraries used by petfeedd.

To install it or upgrade from previous versions, you can simply run:

docker pull peckrob/petfeedd:latest

I am getting this request more and more often - to the tune of multiple emails a week at this point. It usually starts friendly enough - friendly enough to that I know the sender isn’t a robot, they’ve very clearly looked at some of my pages. But then the pitch starts: “I’d like to contribute to your website an article on X” or “I’d be delighted to contribute to your website on this topic.” Usually promising to do so for free.

Recently, when my company was moving offices, I had the opportunity to snag a dozen or so used Polycom telephones. Had this idea that I wanted to try and it turned out that it worked pretty well. And that idea was this: what if I could use them to create an intercom system in the house?

Since it’s been a good six years since I did one of these, here’s what I am using in the year 2022 as far as tech and tech-adjacent things.

After five beta releases and months of testing, I am happy to announce petfeedd Version 1.0 is now available. All changes from the beta branch have been merged in and the release is now available on Docker Hub. To install it or upgrade from Version 0.2, you can simply run:

docker pull peckrob/petfeedd:latest

And restart. It should perform all the upgrades needed for version 1.0.

Twelve years ago I wrote a little program called Dystill. It is a filtering mail delivery agent that could sort and filter email based on rules stored in a MySQL database. At the time I wrote it, I was transitioning away from using Gmail to running my own mail server, and I needed a way to filter my incoming mail into folders (akin to Gmails labels and automatic filtering) with the ability to quickly add rules without having to manually edit files.

And for twelve years, that little program has just run reliably in the background with very few updates. The last time I changed it was 2012. In the meantime, the world has moved on and Python 2 (which it was written in) is no longer supported. And truthfully it was the last piece of Python 2 code in my whole setup. But I had been punting on updating it because it worked.

This is just sort of a stream of consciousness, so apologies if it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

I still remember the first time I realized I was directly talking with someone in another country. It was the mid 90s and I was a teenager, hooked on playing MUDs. When most people in my high school could barely turn a computer on, I felt like a wizard who knew about an entire secret world, and it was awesome. I was playing, every day, with people from Scotland, Denmark, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, and so many others I can’t even remember now.

And we talked. I learned so much about other cultures just by talking directly to people. And I remember thinking, in my own young, idealistic naivete, that if just everyone could be online, and could have these experiences, we might actually achieve world peace in my lifetime. We could see that we are all human bothers and sisters, separated only by artificially drawn borders. I believed free information will result in the most educated population in human history. And the Internet would bring the whole world a new age.

I look back on myself then and mourn the world that we could have had. Humans apparently just aren’t ready for world peace and togetherness.