unethical blogger

Tomorrow morning I will be in court, hopefully finalizing a process I started earlier this year. I will be changing my name.

When I was first considering it, I found the entire idea a bit scary. I have worked tremendously hard to make a name for myself, from my work in the open source community to conferences I've spoken at and interactions with numerous companies and people who have been instrumental in my whittling out a career in software engineering. I have been very particular about being referred to as "R. Tyler Ballance," ensuring that my "self-branding" remains consistent, netting me somewhere north of 36,000 results when searching Google.

Tomorrow I intend on throwing all that out the window, there are more important things in life than Google results (as shocking as that may sound).

I'm hesitant to go too much into the motivations for the change, knowing full well that everything I publish might as well be set in stone on the internet.

Those close to me know that my parents divorced when I was young. After a particularly nasty divorce, my mother and my three sisters parted ways with my father who I have since only had sporadic contact with. After a couple dark years for my sisters and I, my mother married another Navy man, George P. Croy, III. George came into the marriage with his daughter, bringing my sister-count up to four.

Over the past fifteen years or so, I have become George's son. Successfully exploring his emotional spectrum from tears of joy to turning him a bright crimson shade of pissed-off, never once treating me as if I were anything less than his kin. I'm convinced my attitudes towards family, women and friends not to mention my strong opinions on honor and integrity have all been heavily influenced by him

Plainly put, I would not be the man I am today without his guiding hand.

Provided everything goes well at the courthouse, I enter as R. Tyler Ballance and leave as R. Tyler Croy.

Might as well update your address books.

Thanks to @pemullen, I was introduced to Sonic.net some time ago. Unfortunately I never took the time in my old apartment to switch out my AT&T DSL for Sonic.net's Fusion service; the thought of home internet downtime was just too dreadful to even contemplate changing, despite AT&T's absolutely awful service.

Now that I've left that apartment, I can finally take the dive into some delightful Sonic.net service, and while it's not even installed yet, I can tell this is going to be a wonderful relationship just by some of the support emails I've been exchanging with their folks.

From me:

Like an idiot I moved in last weekend instead of this upcoming weekend, so I'm now in the unenviable position of zero home internet service. In the interest of time, can you guys just ship the kit instead of sending some poor tech to Berkeley? :)

I understand that AT&T still needs to install a line, but after that I'm hoping to get up and running as soon as possible, I'm almost to the point of considering opening a book to read.

Oh the horror.

After only a couple hours Kelly R. got back to me:

Sorry to hear that you've been driven to such desperate measures. I know the lead time takes a while from AT&T, but we here at Sonic.net have been working on expediting our end of the install process as much as possible. I'll keep my fingers crossed that this installation process doesn't result in a library membership.

This fourth of July I find myself thinking a great deal about being an American in the 21st century, and pride. In the back of my head I have that hokey country song "God Bless the USA" with its chorus:

That I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. And I wont forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.

The concept comes off so comical to me, "proud to be an American." What does that even mean? I am no more proud to be an American than I am:

• Proud to have been born in California
• Proud to be white
• Proud to be tall
• Proud to have four sisters
• Proud to have a grandpa named Bob

I had no control in any of it, I won the birth lottery and just happened to be born in the United States. I just happened to have grown up to be a tall, white guy with four sisters and a grandpa named Bob, I didn't select this configuration, it just happened to me. What's to be proud of?

Taking pride in one's country however, I entirely understand.

Quite the mixed bag today has been, I went to court (more on that later), I signed a lease (more on that later too), and I worked from home. Since ET and I are leaving this apartment soon, the management company has been showing the apartment during the day. Not a big deal, strangers walk around the apartment, all the windows are opened, all the lights are turned on, doors are opened and closed and if you're lucky enough to be around, you get to field questions.

About an hour or two after the showing of the apartment was over, ET looks up from the couch and asks "Where's Buddy" (a.k.a. Fatso). After looking in all of the usual hiding places, she grabs a can of food and taps the lid and listens. A faint meowing is heard. She opens the closet door and taps the lid again. Meow, meow, meow. I think to myself "no way in hell is that cat in the closet, so I hold the can out the window and tap, tap, tap. Meows are coming from outside of the bathroom window. Our bathroom window opens onto this tiny area between two buildings, and is rarely opened because the view sucks, and we don't stink up our bathroom too much.

Not entirely sure where the cat is, I go to the other side of this little area, in the buildings stairwell and open the window, climb out, and poke around for Fatso, a.k.a Buddy, a.k.a Missing Kitty #1. I can't see Fatso at all but I can hear him. I tapped on the hood for the ventilation shaft and I hear meowing. I tap again, meowing. Reaching my hand around under the hood, I hear more meowing but I don't feel anything.

Thanks to a flashlight and mirror loaned from a friendly neighbor, who's more earthquake prepared than ET and I, I was able to look down the ventilation shaft.

In the next few weeks, ET and I will be moving out of San Francisco, perhaps for good. I am living up on the promise I made back in April and leaving. Over the past weekend I was struck by how picky I've become, particularly with where I live.

For starters, living in San Francisco, I live in a place with:

• A thriving bicycle culture, which is only looking to get better
• Hundreds of restaurants with all sorts of delicious food stuffs
• Surprisingly few douchebags (hipsters and Mission bartenders not-withstanding)
• Fantastic weather
• Low violent crime

And I'm still not happy with it.

In the past, I've lived in places where enormous cars are a status symbol, giant belt buckles that double as shields are accepted; truck nuts. Moving here from Texas I left, stale, windless 100+ degree heat, random people shouting "faggot" at pedestrians from their cars, no tolerance drug policies coupled with binge drinking and drunk driving. To its credit however, Texas is cheap and areas like Austin are wonderful (not counting traffic). When I lived in eastern Germany, I was constantly confused, cold and more than once crashed a bike due to black ice on the roads. Before that, Northern Virginia, living dangerously close to the "south will rise again" group of folks, an area of the country where the Ku Klux Klan is still surprisingly strong, albeit more hidden than before.

Every place that I have lived has had its own unique set of problems, San Francisco included; the lack of progress for a progressive city still irritates the hell out of me.

There are so many parts of this country that unabashedly fucking suck compared to San Francisco, and I'm still not satisfied. What a silly problem to have.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on how to "Be a Libor", trying to codify a few points I feel like I learned about building a successful engineering team at Slide. Shortly after the post went live, I discovered that Libor had been promoted to CTO at Slide.

Over coffee today Libor offered up some finer points on the post in our discussion about building teams. It is important, according to Libor, to maintain a "mental framework" within which the stack fits; guiding decisions with a consistent world-view or ethos about building on top of the foundation laid. This is not to say that you should solve all problems with the same hammer, but rather if the standard operating procedure is to build small single-purpose utilities, you should not attack a new problem with a giant monolithic uber-application that does thirty different things (hyperbole alert!).

Libor also had a fantastic quote from the conversation with regards to approaching new problems:

Just because there are multiple right answers, doesn't mean there's no wrong answers

Depending on the complexity of the problems you're facing there are likely a number of solutions but you still can get it wrong, particularly if you don't remain consistent with your underlying mental framework for the project/organization.

As usual my discussions with Libor are interesting and enjoyable, he's one of the most capable, thoughtful engineers I know, so I'm interested to see the how Slide Engineering progresses under his careful hand as the new CTO. I hope you join me in wishing him the best of luck in his role, moving from wrangling coroutines, to herding cats.

God speed mooncat