I’m in a window seat, at 36,000 feet, and just finished up my free mini bottle of buffalo trace. Years ago, this was my happy place. Flying somewhere, leaving some place, being treated like someone special because I spent so much damn time and dollars for the right to sit on an airplane as it took me from point A to point B.

Sure, I’ve been a United 1K for half a decade at this point. Racked up almost half a million millions flown in the past 6 years. But it was more than that. I was a frequent flier, damnit. I could navigate airports with my eyes closed, could tell you the best seat on every plane in UA’s fleet. Hell, I called United Airlines “UA”, because that showed how much of an insider I was.

Now, we’re several years and one giant global pandemic later. The world’s been turned on its head so many times over the past two and a half years, I can’t even remember if it’s currently upside-down or rightside-up. And here I am, sitting in seat 10F (have booked 10D, don’t ask questions), having consumed my in-flight freebies, and …… it’s not the same.

Shocker.

I’ve spent a lot of this year thinking. I think most people have.

I was sending some random tweets to a friend last week, and I captioned the exchange by saying “… I think this year has made me, and there’s no other way to put it, insufferably Jewish”. (Now, I know I’ve always been insufferable. I was merely commenting on the nature of the insufferability these days). He responded by first assuring me, “that’s not a bad thing” (which is how you can tell he is, indeed, one of my Jewish friends). Next, he said something that’s made me reflect a lot, that “a lot of this year has been identifying what you value”.

What do I value?

I write software for a living. At least, I pretend to. Most of the time, my job is building & running (& yes, occasionally fixing) software other people have written.

One of the aphorisms of software development is that “it’s never a compiler error”. Sure, it’s not never a compiler error, since compilers are written by humans and therefore are as flawed as any other piece of software. But it’s never a compiler error, in the sense that, when you find a bug, the probability of it being caused by a compiler error exists on a set of measure zero.

Well, today I hit the jackpot. This time, it really was a compiler bug.

Almost.

I came across a tweet recently (it’s not that unusual these days). Someone was saying they wanted to get a KitchenAid (do it!) to be able to make homemade pizza dough, and said that this made them a boring adult now. It got me thinking, and then I wrote this.

I’ve contemplated a lot about my life recently. Maybe it’s something to do with being 25. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten to watch several people around me undertake significant life changes. Maybe it’s because I’m human and we’re prone to doing this sort of thing all the time. I don’t know.

There are several different trains of thought when it comes to software “nagging” users about updates. Naturally, I want to talk a bit about how this works in the open-source developer tools world.