Category: Miscellany

Disruption

Many people want to blame AI for significant disruption in the IT job market. I think this is true to a small degree, but it seems to me that it is not sufficient to explain what is going on.

I have personally wanted to blame a growing sort of rapacious value extraction. I think this is true to a moderate degree, and has various contributing factors relating to the watering down of Western Christendom; but I think this is also not sufficient to explain what is going on.

I recently stumbled across this blog post from Sean Goedecke: The good times in tech are over. Taken together with the considerations above, I think this has great explanatory power. Discretionary IT spending is naturally growing far more cautious.

In particular: in the SMB space you already see a pendulum swing away from cloud; consider the notable example of 37signals. Corresponding to this, large enterprises seem to be growing increasingly cautious with IT and cloud expenditure. Famously, for the past two years Hock Tan has insisted that his VMware customer base is largely interested in repatriation of public cloud workloads. This does not mean that cloud has no future whatsoever, but it does mean that some contraction and consolidation lies in the near future for public cloud.

Gmail DMARC failure

I use Fastmail as my email provider. Fastmail provides helpful instructions on how to setup both SPF and DKIM for a custom domain. In spite of properly configuring these, I was surprised recently to see that Google mail was marking my emails as having failed a DMARC check:

I spent some time double checking that my email met the normal conditions for DMARC checks. In my case the From addresses were consistent, and they matched a domain for both the SPF and DKIM check. So, nominally, I am compliant with DMARC expectations.

However, my domain did not have a DMARC policy configured. After configuring a DMARC policy, I found that Google began to treat my emails as passing DMARC:

If you’re encountering the same, you should check that your emails meet the normal DMARC conditions, but also consider configuring a basic DMARC policy for your domain.

GitHub printability

Certain complex GitHub Markdown documents don’t render well—or especially, print well—with the whitespace gutters on either side of the screen. This is especially true when there are complex tables in a document.

I use the following userContent.css stylesheet in my browser to override the use of gutters. This renders complex tables much better:

@-moz-document domain(github.com) {
 .container-lg { max-width: none !important; }
 .container-xl { max-width: none !important; }
}

Some tables are so complex that they still spill off the edge of the page even in portrait mode. To counteract this I adjust the print scaling, or print in landscape mode, or both.

Firefox exits full-screen mode when you press Esc

I’m switching back from Google Chrome to Firefox as my primary web browser. One thing that annoys me with Firefox is that it exits full-screen mode when you press the Escape key.

You can change this behavior with the following steps:

  1. Type about:config in the address bar to access Advanced Preferences
  2. If Firefox displays a warning message, click “Accept the Risk and Continue”
  3. In the search box, type “escape”
  4. Firefox should display a configuration item named browser.fullscreen.exit_on_escape
  5. If this item’s value is false, you are good to go. If it is true, click the toggle button (⇌) on the right hand side to set it to false.
  6. Close the Advanced Preferences tab.

How to bring your team back to the office (3)

[not]

I think of my job often as being a translator between executives, managers, architects, developers, testers, customers, writers, etc. My favorite work projects have been those we conducted war-room style or in an open landscape, yet now it is almost two years since I’ve been in the office. We’ve filled in the gap a little bit with some team outings. Today I went in to the office to collect my belongings, before my vaxx-leper status kicks in and my physical access is deactivated. This is such a stark contrast with my experience at church where we worked hard to find some way to meet, at times even with our fussy government’s disapproval. What a joy and encouragement that fellowship was, and what a missed opportunity these two years have been for camaraderie at so many anxious companies and churches!

See also: How to bring your team back to the office (2)