Wayback Micro Machine

Welcome to my new blog for 2010 and beyond. It’s a mixed bag of topics...

Well, that's how it started over 14 years ago.

I ran this blog between 2010 and 2014, posting about life at the time: mostly the problems, solutions, puzzles, tools, curiosities, and trends of software engineering.

A lot has changed since then. I still work in Java and Spring, but Python and JavaScript/Typescript have replaced other dynamic languages, and I've switched to Quarkus for some projects. Kubernetes is my very welcome replacement for those older platforms I often complained about, and GCP and AWS have replaced PCF. The AI Spring has finally arrived, so I'm enjoying some interesting computer vision and ML projects while pushing the envelope a bit.

Tech blogs filled a gap in the 10s that has since been largely addressed by AI Assistant LLMs. GitHub Copilot, Gemini, and ChatGPT will sometimes very confidently give wrong answers or weird hallucinations, but they spare us from having to write lots of local context to problems and solutions.

So when the time came to end my Wordpress hosting, I considered just ditching this site and leaving it to internet archives like the Wayback Machine. But since it's still getting hits on some topics (like TEA encryption and Friday Fragments), I instead converted some of the less ephemeral posts to this static site. It was a relatively quick conversion to 11ty via wordpress-export-to-markdown. Hosting is essentially free, since it sits alongside my other stuff in AWS. Some things got lost along the way (like nicer formatting and smart search), but the substance mostly remains.

So I hope you enjoy your visit to memory lane, and maybe solve a few Friday Fragments while you're here.