Januaries tend to bring a time of both retrospective and prospective thinking. This new year has brought both in heaps. The past couple of years have been a living fever dream, but I started off with a more literal fever. That’s right — I’ve now officially joined a very exclusive club: despite being fully vaccinated and boosted, I caught COVID-19 and lived to tell the tale.

In 1978, the US toy company Mattel released a handheld electronic LED baseball game. In 2021, I had a 3D printer, a Raspberry Pi, and a hackathon to enter. And so, Mlattel Electronic Blaseball was born.

Wow, time flies when you’re a software developer trying to get hired in 2021 and you have to take dozens of virtual interviews before you get completely ghosted by behemoth companies and startups alike! Sadly, between actually doing the interviews and grinding Leetcode problems in preparation for the same, all the madcap mayhem has left me with only a little bit of time to make progress on the project. But progress I have made!

After reflecting on the entirety of the year I’ve spent in quarantine, it’s also (almost) time to commemorate the anniversary of the event that made me leave one of my previous jobs, something which was an absolute nightmare at the time but is actually amusing to read in retrospect. Luckily, one of my colleagues from back then is already doing the work of writing the whole thing up. You can check out Part One which describes some context and the initial disaster; future installments will cover what actually went wrong, which should make it clear why I had to leave. Names have been changed to protect folks, and I will not be giving away who I am in this sordid tale, so for now just read and enjoy. It’s the sort of harrowing story that begins with the alert nobody wants to get: not one, but all of our production systems were down.

Just a little over a year ago, several counties in the San Francisco Bay Area announced the country’s first lockdown measures in response to the spreading of COVID-19. The measures were supposed to last for a few weeks; one year later, we’re still locked down, along with much of the rest of the United States.

Let’s get this party started!

…A miserable little pile of secrets?