Not pictured: the Optus@Home ball cap, various other 1996-2001 Excite tchotchkes, and stray liquidating trust paperwork.

I worked with a fantastic ops team at Excite, great people worldwide. Learned a ton, taught a little, probably more than I'll ever know. Ultimately all for naught; you aren't your job.

You know what actually brings me joy in computerland? Recovering and modernizing old scientific codes. I learn new science & engineering, the codes get a new lease on life and an overhaul that will last them for another 30 years without maintenance. It's a better class of problem than anything involving the web, the codes actually solve meaningful problems, and keeping them in ANSI/ISO standard compiled languages avoids so much meaningless churn and the infinite cesspit of dependencies. At the end you get a dependable tool that only changes when it needs to. Infinitely more satisfying than web code that exists only to justify the job of a product manager or to line the pockets of some of the worst people and organizations on the planet. Way better than churning Python because the Zen of Python is that stability is for chumps.