Stuff That I'm Looking forward to (or not)

Even as I lie deep in the holiday zone, blissfully abstracted from just about everything work-related (although I still get the the odd 10AM call from less lucky folks), I find myself wistfully pondering what I might actually enjoy going back to this Fall from a purely technical perspective.

Given that I’m willfully self-restrained to using mosh and vim to edit drafts while caked sand sloughs away from my ankles at roughly the same speed these bits are squirted across the ether, a lot of what’s on my mind is related to personal tech (and a lot more I simply cannot write about at all), but here are some of the highlights for your continued amusement:

• Elementary OS 5.0, because I like the current iteration quite a bit and would like to entertain the notion that I might be able to use it exclusively some day–on what are effectively purely academic grounds, for sure, but one has to entertain options. Possible pitfalls: some initial flakiness on the battered hardware I intend to use it on, and a continued sadness for it not being available on ARM in any shape or fashion.
• iOS 12 and watchOS 5¹, largely because I expect to upgrade from an iPhone 6 to an improved/more sensible X (remember, kids, never buy the first iteration of an Apple product if you can help it). Extremely likely pitfalls: I am going to be very annoyed at the lack of Touch ID (which I still believe to be a better fit for me than Face ID), which is sure to be outweighed by having a phone that launches Twitter in less than 15 seconds again.
• The Windows 10 Fall Update (whatever they’re calling it now), solely because it will bring along some much-needed fixes for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (which is the bit I use the most). Corporate Kool-Aid is slowly percolating from my bloodstream as various varieties of chilled beverages seep in, so I can but hope that Windows Update stops being so much of a nuisance as it’s been lately (I’ve had it recently force reboot my machine during an all-nighter when we were preparing a major customer deliverable, and the scars are still there in my psyche).
• Visual Studio Code native support for WSL binaries (git, python, pyenv and many others). This has progressed unevenly over the past year, but I have hope that will eventually get sorted out, because as it is, the only platform I can really enjoy working on is still (ironically) macOS, and that kind of defeats the purpose of both pieces of software. In all honesty, I would love to have that be the default cloud dev stack, because it makes so much sense it hurts when you get paper cuts from the tottering stack of workarounds you have to go through to have portions of it working.
• Go modules, because the current gibbering insanity that is Go dependency management needs to stop and I want a sane way to do version pinning as well as vendoring (and getting rid of GOPATH is just icing on the cake).

Until these come to pass, I intend to spend some time (un)evenly split between figuring out how to realign my hobby compass to compensate for the rather blistering pace things are getting to and delivering my best impression of a corporate hamster on a treadmill. Many of my usual hobbies have suffered throughout these past three years, and I need to get some less-used neural pathways firing again before something shorts out.

Other stuff (including the usual garden variety product roadmaps, personal goals and family endeavors) are rolling on, the only worthwhile comment being that the Kubernetes juggernaut is still remarkably alive and shows no signs of letting up–it is experiencing some growth pains (people are finally starting to realize it doesn’t exclude proper governance, due processes and a functioning brain in all involved), but with luck we might finally have a (borderline) sane way to deploy properly component-based applications in the cloud.

What no one tooting those particular horns seems to be able to convey to the unwashed masses, however, is that developers need something simpler than a thirteen-page checklist to sign on, and that means building even more tooling to simplify things.