Not the greatest UNIX workstation in the world, but we had rooms full of them at my uni and I learned how to Internet on them. Still a lot of love for these.

Great keyboard, great display, great OS. It was fast enough and a great terminal to bigger Sparcs if you needed it.

The shift from URLs accessing resources on file systems to more abstract resources (implicitly HTML unless the headers said otherwise) occurred around 1999/2000. Suddenly we were all doing it once we’d figured out the necessary Apache directives. It wasn’t just Flickr, although it and its APIs were a good example of clean URL design

ST Writer was freeware and did the job, but Tempus was gold standard, even better than 1st Word Plus.

Huh, 1st Word Plus was what I had! Sudden recollection of pressing a rhombus-shaped F10 key to reflow after editing ...

Typing in code from magazines into my ZX Spectrum. Learning a bit of Z80 assembly from a library book. Being taught Pascal at college. Learning Perl to create grammars. Writing Delphi apps to automate stuff on Windows. Teaching myself C from K&R to extend Apache.

This is a great overview of web tech as I more or less recall it. Although pre-PHP CGI wasn’t a big deal, but it was more fiddly and you had to know and understand Apache, broadly. mod_perl & FastCGI made it okay. Only masochists wrote CGI apps in compiled languages. PHP made making screwy web apps low-effort and fun.

I bugged out of front-end dev just before jquery took off.

This is terrible advice.

Multi-region architecture is hard, and AWS sure don’t do much to make it easier. Cross-region data transfers are too profitable for them to do that.

Passive PoE getting a lot of stick in the comments, but for one-off point solutions, it’s fine as long as you know what you’re doing.

I have it to run a couple of MikroTik devices in awkward places and not having to run wall warts and flimsy DC cables around the place is very handy.

My next switch upgrade will be a proper PoE+ one, but it’s not justified yet.

If you want to understand the UK, Dibnah is where to start. I named my cat after him.

Doesn’t have kids, other caring responsibilities or chronic illnesses (that they declare) therefore everyone should do what they do and are just doing life wrong. Okay.

I used a Stacy in a MIDI setup at college, whereas I had a standard 520STFM at home. They were pretty rare at the time even in the UK where the ST was relatively popular for a few years. I never dreamed of trying to take it anywhere - way too cumbersome.

A couple of years later someone showed me a PowerBook and that was that.