Month: January 2024

WFH

Most days I’m grateful for where I’m at in my career. I’ve had the privilege of working remotely since 2016.

You usually hear about the typical benefits. Dressing comfortably, flipping the laundry in between calls, showering when you want.

Yesterday I had to drive to an appointment 30 minutes away in the midst of out of service traffic lights and rush hour traffic.

All I could think about is how little time I’d see my two young children during the week if I added a 1-2 hour commute to my life. Thoughts like this make me both grateful and motivated to do my best work.

Paywall Circumvention

As the title suggests, a recent curiosity of mine has been paywall circumvention. I found two approaches so far worth sharing.

Good:
Disable Javascript add-on for Firefox allows you to block javascript per domain. This approach can have some drawbacks but overall it seems to work.

Better:
Bypass Paywalls Clean supports bypassing a number of paywalled sites. It is available for Chrome and Firefox.

Been A While

It has been a while since my last post. An incredible year filled with ups and downs, but mostly ups.

Amazon ended up not being the dream employer I had imagined. I found the work challenging and engaging, but massive layoff rounds combined with threats to return to a physical office which would require relocation really made it hard to square with their mantra of “World’s Greatest Employer®”.

During the chaos a new opportunity arose at Mozilla. I took a position as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer overseeing the Apple infrastructure used for Firefox CI and performance testing.

I was somewhat reluctant to get back into the MacAdmin space but I soon discovered it would be unlike any role I had previously. I am enjoying seeing how the software “sausage” is made and am proud of my contributions to the team thus far.

On a personal note, my wife and I brought our second daughter into the world in February. It’s no exaggeration when I say that I feel as if I am the most blessed person on the planet.