January 6th, 2018
Turn and face the strange
Hi all,
So it’s a new year. A lot has changed, and a lot is staying the same. So I was thinking that maybe it’s time to start writing again. Maybe. Let’s see how it goes.
First things first, I have put some different subjects on different blogs before. I might continue doing that for some of them – but I’ll also use this main blog to cover more different subjects. If you come here for programming language geekery, there might not be that much of those things anymore. But we will see.
Last year did come with some significant changes. I’ve left ThoughtWorks, and am now working in an NGO form on privacy, security, crypto and anonymity things. Once we have a public web site and so on, I might tell more of the story here. Suffice to say, leaving ThoughtWorks was very hard, but also the right thing to do, in order to be able to expand the impact I can have, working on the things that I find important to the world.
That’s really most of it. My mind is very much focused on privacy these days. Some days I’m heads down writing low level code, others I’m spending on specification of cryptographic protocols, or the usability of common types of security interactions. This world is full of horrible things, and we need a change.
I have also basically stopped giving talks at conferences. For now, that is probably going to continue – I think most of what I have to say isn’t necessarily so relevant to conferences like Goto or QCon anymore – and I find that finding time to write software is hard enough as it is, even when not competing against conference travel.
So I think I’ll leave it at that for tonight. My life goes on in interesting directions. Code is as much a part of my daily life as it has ever been. Only the focus has changed a bit over the last ten years.
In my next post I was thinking about talking about one of the projects me and my team have spent a lot of time on the last year or so. Until then!
