I talked about what it would take for me to leave Twitter a couple of years ago, but never followed up when I did leave around a year later. So here we go.

I didn’t quit in one go. I stopped posting. I checked in on my feed less frequently. I switched my account to private. I didn’t go cold turkey, I simply found fewer reasons to return.

I’d like to say that I was high minded and principled, that I quit because of Musk and Nazis and hateful content. But the truth is that the people I followed and blocked meant that my feed was mostly hate-free, an odd mixture of geeky stuff and dad jokes. Though I did leave because of the people and the content.

I wrote my initial thoughts about the Switch 2 announcement a couple of months ago. Against my better judgement, I pre-ordered one. What follows are a few thoughts about it now that I’ve had my hands on one for a couple of weeks.

The best summary I can think of for my initial impressions is: consider the name. The +1 label neatly captures both the good and the bad. It’s a better Switch. Faster. Higher resolution graphics. Generally… just nicer. It’s not a game changer (pardon the pun), but not everything needs to be revolutionary. Nicer is good.

My wife mocks me for watching SWAT. Sadly with some justification. It is kind of silly. The main character is supposed to be a heart-throb but – I dunno – I don’t quite see it.

If you’ve not seen it, it’s a police procedural set in the SWAT team of the LAPD. In each episode there’s some disaster or crime that’s being committed that needs the efforts of our heros to resolve. Standard stuff.

This post was originally shared on Medium in 2016. With all the anti-trust action currently happening in both the US and Europe, it’s still quite relevant. In some ways, things have not progressed very much at all!

Given the things that Google *didn’*t say in their response, I wonder if they agree? Contrary to some commentators, I think what they do goes beyond playing hardball. I’ve no idea whether that’s illegal but they’re certainly not being nice to their “partners.”

A few years ago I had a job where every new recruit would go through a long process of shock and gradual acclimatisation to the main software product.

What it did doesn’t matter as much as how it was built: it was an application developed on top of a proprietary programming language and user interface designer. The reaction was always the same. Why? Why?! Why would you reinvent Visual Basic on Unix? Why would you inflict a programming language even worse than Basic on developers?¹

I recently shared a blog post entitled “The Most Successful Developers Share More Than They Take” with the comment:

I try to practice “public by default” though, because of my work, it’s often “on the internal wiki” rather than fully open.

Unfortunately the article spends a lot of time talking about blogging and podcasting which, perhaps, undermined the point I was trying to make. If you want to write blogs, speak on podcasts, and present at conferences, good luck to you¹. Not everyone will want to do those things, and that’s fine. I’m not advocating for that. I think most people can do what I meant.

Sometimes it’s only when you start writing about a subject that you truly understand your opinion. That’s the approach I’m taking to answering the question: are you going to leave Twitter?

A few people have asked me in the last couple of months and the only response I have is that I’m not jumping ship and closing my account immediately.

But as the weeks have progressed, as I’ve written this piece, my thinking has evolved. It’s not that I’m going to immediately close my account but I can see The End approaching. Indeed, my usage of Twitter has dropped considerably.

The whole team got this email today. Okay, it wasn’t today and these are not the exact words, but it was something like this:

We have a serious regression in build 456. We have set the project back rather than taken it forward. We need the utmost focus and commitment on fixing it. We’ve broken it and we stay in the office until it’s fixed.

I’ve had a few of those messages over the years and while it’s intended to focus minds it often has the opposite effect. Let’s examine why.

With the fuss about the Log4Shell vulnerability finally dying down, it’s time to step back and take a good, long think about what happened and, more importantly, what can be done to stop it from happening again.

Sadly the prognosis is not good. The tl;dr is both simple and obvious: we simultaneously like free stuff and getting paid for our own work.

Most companies treat open source software exactly the same as commercial software but with a much lower purchase cost. When the software goes wrong, we want someone else to fix it for us. Unfortunately, sometimes we don’t even know where the software comes from. In the case of log4j, it’s run by volunteers. There is no 24/7 help desk with eager employees waiting to take your call.

As is common these days, I was complaining about something on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/sdarlington/status/1523588282986033152

It’s easy to complain about security practices which, if I’m honest, is why I do it. But there is an important point, one that I included in a follow-up tweet:

https://twitter.com/sdarlington/status/1523602044791115776?s=61&t=69wO28ER8NUpssCyeNkqJw

The security team in many companies models itself on the DUP. Say no to everything. But – and this is the key – offer no alternative.

The tweet above is about passwords but I see it everywhere. Another common one is transferring files. I understand why sharing files can be problematic. Confidential data can be exported, either deliberately or accidentally. Viruses can be imported. Security defects can be exploited.