So here we are. The day has come that my novel finally goes out to the world. Without hyperbole, I can tell you that it feels like this day would never, ever arrive.

Ever.

Five years I’ve worked on Screens. Five long years as I’ve chiseled the stone, polished it nigh endless times until the final edits were made, the last change was complete.

And yet at long last it’s done. Check it.

I feel this sense of overwhelming exhaustion, the writer’s equivalent of crossing the finish line of a marathon. …

“We have never heard the devil’s side of the story, God wrote all the book.”
― Anatole France

Much to the chagrin of the Almighty and the Angelic Host, the Devil has never managed to go out of style.

Quite the contrary, actually. The Evil One has managed to maintain popularity as a character even in an increasingly secular world. One need not look far in terms of popular culture across the ages to see the Devil comes back again and again as a fictional character.

Some might argue this is a Bad Sign, an ill omen of the faithless…

On the Center and the Periphery

Joseph Campbell once said that most of us stay comfortably at the centre of human society and consciousness, with only scientists, philosophers, and artists willing to stray to the outer edge.

It’s true, of course. Most people do tend to stay closer to shore. People by and large approach anything out on the fringe with mincing, timid steps. New foods, new music, new art, new ideas: these are the things which the mainstream shuns, or at the very least, patently ignores. New is different; it’s uncomfortable and painfully unfamiliar. …

I’m always looking for great horror. Terror not so much.

I peruse movie sites, book stores, graphic novels, what have you. I dig into the ‘Horror’ section, and am very often left empty-handed.

Why? Is there not enough content? Oh no, there’s plenty upon plenty. Horror is a very popular genre. It hangs tough with action and romance, no doubt about that. Content-wise, there is a plethora of work in the Horror genre.

Is the stuff not scary enough for me? Well, a lot of the time — especially in movies and TV — the “scary” is the usual ghost…

It’s funny how often tech debt gets ignored by business people. Not haha funny, but ironically so. It is ironic, because it is such a common problem in software companies that the business / sales / boss types don’t seem to care about tech debt. The responses I’ve heard run the gamut of “We need features, not perfect code,” to “We can fix that another time,” to “that’s a tech thing, not a business problem”, as if we engineers / devs were climate scientists / pandemic experts.

It is a constant source of frustration for devs and engineers that no…

Abstract

Here’s the situation. I need to build a test harness to verify that when my software sends / receives data to some other system (a system outside my control), the data is not only received, but is in fact the data I expected to have been sent.

Pretty standard test harness stuff, right? The testers say they need this for manual and for automation testing suites. Internal customer need. Great.

So the developer starts rattling off software tools / languages we will use to build this test harness.

Wait, what?

Not so fast, cowpoke

How did we get from a high level need to…

“All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

We’ve all heard it nine ways from Sunday. Someone voices a half-baked or uneducated or hyperbolic opinion (often at a family gathering), which, when backed into an intellectual corner to justify their nonsensical belief, counter with this line

“My opinion is as valid as anyone’s!”

We’ve heard it before, and we feel frustrated, stymied by this truism of democratic life. Yes, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and yes, their…

“No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.” — Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down

I was seventeen when I first read Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. The year was 1984. The 1983 film adaptation had come out the previous summer, and my advanced literature High School teacher had ingeniously added it to the curriculum in an effort to capitalise on the film’s popularity and a brief resurgence in the book’s readership.