I've been promising myself I'd start a blog for about 100 years now, but it's finally here! I decided to build everything from scratch to force myself to learn Vagrant, Puppet and other general sysops stuff that was on my "to explore" list. This was dumb in terms of how long it took me to get everything up & running, but I have no regrets.

To bless the blog's launch, may I present…

Foreword by Alex Russell

It was a dark, gloomy summer day -- as you expect in London -- when Jake mentioned his blog to me. In the hushed tones one reserves for the death of a loved one or the news that a friend has acquired a 3rd cat, he unveiled the boxes (if not the text) that would become his tragic last forray into relating to developers.

It wasn't the fitting end his all-too-short career deserved. But an end it was.

What could one say to someone driven so mad by perfection that they had to re-build a shit WordPress with all new, custom security vulnerabilities? Alas, the light that shone so brightly was now just a wisp of smoke and an ember, all but dark. The insightfulness...the wit...the studied humor. All erased by an act of hubris so shocking, so pedantic that it could scarcely be discussed in polite company.

To contemplate how far he had fallen from dick jokes and genius comic timing is to reflect on tragedy itself. No fearlessly donned mankini, this, but a horrid, distended mangnum opus of self-indugence and self-loathing. The hours of self-reflection his ascendence to a life of luxury at Google were likely the torturous conditions that his previous hard-scrabble days as a minor-leauge webdev had deprived him of, to his former benefit.

This...this corpuscle of self regard, too grotesque even for the world "blog" was surely the predictable outcome. What madness had preceeded it? How many OKR discussions and pointless meetings...how much selling and shilling...had led to this?

It's comforting, then, to think back on his early work. The fart noises, the tales of debauchery and tongue-in-cheek debasement. Simpler, better times. Let us remember his work as it was: vibrant, in a pink mankini. Erected, if you will, as a statement that even northerners can make it big.