Hi Erick
thanks for your work you have done for the library world.
You were one of the people who made it possible to show libraries the
way to use search engines for their "discovery services".
Günter
On 30.12.20 15:09, Erick Erickson wrote:
40 years is enough. OK, it's only been 39 1/2 years. Dear Lord, has it really been that
long? Programming's been fun, I've gotten to solve puzzles every day. The art and science
of programming has changed over that time. Let me tell you about the joys of debugging
with a Z80 stack emulator that required that you to look on the stack for variables and
trace function calls by knowing how to follow frame pointers. Oh the tedium! Oh the (lack
of) speed! Not to mention that 64K of memory was all you had to work with. I had a
co-worker who could predict the number of bytes by which the program would shrink based
on extracting common code to functions. The "good old days"...weren't...
I'd been thinking that I'd treat Lucene/Solr as a hobby, doing occasional work
on it when I was bored over long winter nights. I've discovered, though, that
I've been increasingly reluctant to crack open the code. I guess that after
this much time, I'm ready to hang up my spurs. One major factor is the
realization that there's so much going on with Lucene/Solr that simply being
aware of the changes, much less trying to really understand them, isn't
something I can do casually.
I bought a welder and find myself more interested in playing with that than programming.
Wait until you see the squirrel-proof garden enclosure I'm building with it. If my
initial plan doesn't work, next up is an electric fence along the top. The laser-sighted
automatic machine gun emplacement will take more planning...Ahhh, probably won't be able
to get a permit from the township for that though. Do you think the police would notice?
Perhaps I should add that the local police station is two blocks away and in the line of
fire. But an infrared laser powerful enough to "pre-cook" them wouldn't be as
obvious would it?
Why am I so fixated on squirrels? One of the joys of gardening is fresh tomatoes rather
than those red things they sell in the store. The squirrels ATE EVERY ONE OF MY TOMATOES
WHILE THEY WERE STILL GREEN LAST YEAR! And the melons. In the words of B. Bunny: "Of
course you realize this means war" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XNr-BQgpd0)...
Then there's working in the garden and landscaping, the desk I want to build
for my wife, travel as soon as I can, maybe seeing if some sailboats need
crew...you get the idea.
It's been a privilege to work with this group, you're some of the best and
brightest. Many thanks to all who've generously given me their time and
guidance. It's been a constant source of amazement to me how willing people are
to take time out of their own life and work to help me when I've had questions.
I owe a lot of people beers ;)
I'll be stopping my list subscriptions, Slack channels (dm me if you need
something), un-assigning any JIRAs and that kind of thing over the next while.
If anyone's interested in taking over the BadApple report, let me know and I
can put the code up somewhere. It takes about 10 minutes to do each week. I
won't disappear entirely, things like the code-reformatting effort are nicely
self-contained for instance and something I can to casually.
My e-mail address if you need to get in touch with me is: "[email protected]".
There's a correlation between gmail addresses that are just a name with no numbers and a person's
age... A co-worker came over to my desk in pre-historical times and said "there's this new
mail service you might want to sign up for"... Like I said, 40 years is enough.
Best to all,
Erick
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