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Everything here is my opinion. I do not speak for your employer.
October 2017
December 2017

2017-10-15 »

Event horizon

One of the dangers of working at a big company that does a little bit of everything, even if that big company has a pretty open culture, is it's really hard to remember which things are still secret and which have been released. Since I started working for such a company back in 2011, I've still had as many opinions as ever, but I've contained them mostly to an audience at work, so that I don't accidentally leak something. People who used to follow my writing have probably noticed that there has been a lot less of it than there used to be.

Well! Luckily(?) for you, I had a bit of spare time last weekend, and managed to extract, then filter and review, my posts from the last 6 years. They've now been "seamlessly" merge-sorted into apenwarr.ca, including their original dates, so you too can see the slow evolution of my thought processes (especially regarding wifi) interspersed with the previously-published content when I finally got something that overcame the friction of making a public post.

Useless trivia: this import more than doubled the total number of posts, but only increased the total word count by about 50%. It's probably because there are a bunch of articles that are essentially just sharing a link to someone else's content, with a line or two of commentary. Such is the New Way of the Internet, I guess.

Anyway, I had some misgivings about this, as the new content is maybe not as useful, on average, as the old content. Or maybe it is. I don't know. You don't have to read it. No one, as they used to say at work, is forcing you.

More useless trivia: the automatic "Related" and "Unrelated" links generated by the latest version of the software that runs this site tends to consider the old-style (mostly long-form) content "Related" to itself, and the new, shorter-style content "Related" to itself, with few overlaps between the two. Apparently my writing style was different enough to be detected by even my very naive clustering algorithm.

I'm CEO at Tailscale, where we make network problems disappear.

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