I may finally have some respite from my hectic schedule full of flying all over the continental United States. On the other hand, I’m typing this very post from the airport, so perhaps not? The yearly EdgeFest company event was the last item on my itinerary after several conferences, and let’s just say the return trip is an ongoing dumpster fire. EdgeFest itself was long, because the team that works on the Spock extension decided to get together and get some actual work done before festivities and other requisite meetings.

I’ve finally gotten tired of maintaining my own mail server. I’ve been maintaining it since 1999 in one way or another, and I think it’s just time to take it behind the shed and put it out of my misery.

As to how I reached this decision and what I intend to do about it, well… that’s a story.

This year has gotten off to an utterly ridiculous start. Now that I’m working with pgEdge, they’re encouraging me to submit to every possible conference that will have me. So I have. In addition to that, there are a few company events which require travel, so I’m globe-trotting for those too. All in all, this is what my schedule looks like this year so far: Feb 3-7 - Spock developer symposium in Alexandria March 5-8 - Presenting What’s our Vector, Victor?

I’ve been somewhat tight-lipped about my job hunt, but not through any particular desire to obfuscate. No, I’ve just been laying low because I caught Covid right before Christmas and spent the last couple weeks recuperating. Just my luck, getting sick again so soon after whatever got me following Thanksgiving, and effectively missing the holidays as a consequence. Still, I had an informal offer before being incapacitated, so I only had to worry about recovering.

There’s a phrase that’s now become ubiquitous on various parts of the internet, and it goes like this:

The purpose of a system is what it does.

At first glance it’s a meaningless non sequitur, a sort of self-referencing zen koan seeking to make something simple seem profound. Obviously systems work as they’re designed, right? It’s tempting to discount it out of hand and move on. And yet, there’s a lot of linguistic trickery going on here that I want to unpack, and it carries far deeper implications than mere language.