I almost hope the previous sentence exaggerates Kingsnorth’s view. And yet as I thumb through Chapter VII of Against The Machine I can find no suggestion that science might actually offer something useful. While I can understand the temptation to go so far, I think without some additional nuance there is a pretty large baby getting thrown out with the dirty bathwater. I can’t really follow Kingsnorth here, and in fact do not even agree that it is science that should be rejected so much as scientism. Even Chapter VII of Kingsnorth’s book seem to me really to be taking aim at scientism, so perhaps I am being pedantic. But the language is important, and I am not sure I understand what he is really taking aim at here. If he means to reject scientism, then I have no problem; if science, then what of the medical advances on the last two centuries?

There are a lot of applications of science I could accept doing without. The Internet, computers, automobiles, central heating and air conditioning are all things I think I could learn to live happily without. Even highly processed foods seem worth giving up, as much as I occasionally enjoy them. But when I pull on the thread of modern medicine I find a lot of things I would be happier to keep. Anesthesia, antibiotics, triptans and all the other more mundane developments that modern medicine offers really do seem to have improved our lives. And they are largely, perhaps entirely built upon the foundation of science: biology, chemistry, and germ theory. I have heard Kingsnorth talk elsewhere of “raw” and “cooked” varieties of nonconformists. If the raw, radical version of his proposal requires an outright rejection of science, then I suppose that puts me in the cooked camp.

But I do not think a thorough nonconformism should require a rejection of science because that would misidentify the source of our ills, which is better stated as applied scientism. It is (as Kingsnorth states) the reduction of our world, our society, our very selves, to machines. Science asks how mechanical systems work in order to leverage them to serve humanity. Scientism seeks to turn humanity and everything else into machines so they can all be leveraged to whatever ends the powerful have in mind. This is, I think, the larger point Kingsnorth is making, and I fear he is essentially correct.

The trail is part of the Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park. I took the pictures below on Sunset Rock, looking out over Tennessee. You can see the outskirts of the city of Chattanooga in the distance toward the right side of the top picture.

Note

What follows is a first attempt at something I would like to see become a new tradition: a short reflection on a Christmas passage, written and given to my kids on Christmas Day. As that suggests, that means this is not the primary forum for this. Still, I like being able to share them here as well, and I hope they brighten someone’s day. Merry Christmas!

Eugene Peterson has a quote that makes me think of this passage. In Traveling Light he says, “God was not out to get sinners so that he could make them good and sorry; he was out to get sinners so that he could make them good and joyful.” It makes me think of Simeon, who was “righteous and devout” not because of anything he did, but simply because he was “waiting for the consolation of Israel.” We say that Advent is a season of waiting, but waiting for what? Hasn’t Jesus already come? So we spend the season of waiting, celebrating the Jesus who has already come?

Of course that is not quite right. Jesus has already come, yes, but we wait for Him to come again. And this is what the Advent Season reminds us. The season’s darkness is the world’s darkness. We are still waiting for The Light to come.

And how will The Light find us? We will be sorry or joyful at the end of days? The answer depends on how we see ourselves in relationship to that Light. God is out to get us. Is he out to make us good and sorry, or good and joyful? Of course he wants to make us good and joyful! And guess what. That is the best reason for us to be joyful now. Even as the world’s darkness surrounds us like nighttime in deepest winter we can still have joy that The Light is coming.

Our lives in this world give us more than enough reason to feel down, scared and sorrowful. Simeon had reason for that as well. He lived in a time when Israel’s identity hung by a thread, completely dependent on Rome’s permission to exist. All it would take is one emperor’s word to bring down Jerusalem’s Temple. In fact, that is exactly what would happen less than 100 years after Simeon met Jesus. Yet even in the midst of that uncertainty, Simeon was able to say, “Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace.” The Light had come, and now there could be joy even in the midst of the world’s darkness.

And if Simeon had reason for joy, we have even more. What he accepted by faith, we can read in the pages of history. Jesus came, lived, died, rose again and ascended. All we have to wait for is Him to come again; we have it all besides. If our joy rests upon just a little faith, then it is completely unbreakable. So as we celebrate Christmas, let us remember that the reason for our joy is not any gift underneath that tree, but the true Gift that hung upon one.

Merry Christmas!

If you’re in the area, reach out and let me know. It would be great to make some connections in the area!

Just learned that the hard way.

Note

This post is pretty different for me, and a little scary. I am posting this because it helped me to write it all down, and because I hope someone out there will benefit from it. I fully understand that might not be you.

I also realize that, despite the difficult things I discuss below, my life comes with a lot of privilege. Please do not think for a second anything below comes from a place of self-pity. In fact, as you will find below, I feel a lot of gratitude!

I was going through my journal from 2024 as part of a planning activity for 2025, and I came across this one-line entry:

My perfectionism stems from a borderline terror response to shame.

It is true that I have struggled with perfectionism as far back as I can remember. What I find fascinating about this entry is how simply, even beautifully it connects my perfectionism (which I have known about for a long time) to something just a pervasive but which I have only recently become aware: shame.

My experience of shame is as resistance to admitting uncomfortable things about myself, to myself. And given this reality, overcoming shame involves doing just that, which is of course uncomfortable. Discomfort, I have found, often comes from a sense of having fallen short of some sort of expectation, having “missed the mark.” It is interesting, then, that this is also a commonly cited meaning of sin¹, and that sin is also often coupled to shame in the Bible. If we are talking about shame in terms of sin, perhaps we should bring in the related concept of temptation as well.

Temptation To Shame

My point in bringing sin and temptation into a discussion about shame is to point out the reality that shame, in my experience, is not something I am subjected to, but something I choose. In other words, I am tempted to feel shame over something, and subsequently choose or agree with it. I have arrived at this conclusion after spending a lot of time—and not a little money—in therapy dealing with depression and anger. This process took as long as it did because, as the above journal entry implies, I have mostly experienced subconsciously with the result of driving me toward perfectionism. Being subconscious, it was easy to distract myself from it.

But if shame is something that I am tempted to do, then I have the opportunity to reject it, no? Indeed, I believe I do.

Rejecting Temptation To Shame

When feeling tempted to shame, I have found it helps to first identify what is triggering you in that situation. For me the usual triggers are: feeling powerless, out-of-control, or otherwise experiencing a sense of futility; feeling alone, abandoned, or betrayed; or feeling an unusual level of stress.

After identifying the active trigger(s) in a given situation, I next respond to the temptation by exploring it. Part of what is important here is not suppressing or ignoring the discomfort. That path leads to anxiety. I realize this might sound a bit squishy—even woo-woo—but the goal here is very practical: self-understanding. The exploration might bring to light healthy ways to meet an underlying need, assuming the trigger says something true about you.

Understand that the desired outcome of this activity is awareness, not the elimination of the temptation. It is the awareness that empowers you to reject shame. It becomes almost as easy as saying no.

Conclusion

This post has been a personal reflection on my journey from perfectionism, depression and anger, through anxiety, to a place of relative health. The animating force of those negative emotions and experiences has been shame. I am thankful to say that today I can look back with gratitude on the things I have experienced, even when they have been tremendously painful.

If you have made it this far, then I would like to think something above has resonated with you. If it is because you also deal with depression and shame, then I hope you will seek out the help you need. We are social creatures, not meant to go through hard times alone.

May we all find ways to accept the things about ourselves we wish were different.

“Good morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.

“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”

“All of them at once,” said Bilbo.

I also think it is a funny passage. I am not really going anywhere with this. I just think it is nice having kids old enough to appreciate some of the same things you do. I am here for this new phase of being a parent!

I was one of those folks for a time. Then I realized the magic wasn’t the terminal per se, but rather what is best described as a highly-regular, text-based user interface with a clear interface to other utilities. Modern GUIs tend to each be created from scratch and are designed to operate hermetically. But treating every application like its own blank slate and creating every user interaction from scratch has the effect, in aggregate, of making modern computers overwhelming to use. The heavy use of iconography makes the uphill climb all that much steeper.

Terminal-based programs don’t suffer from this. Their inability to display arbitrary bitmaps (pictures) essentially narrows their bandwidth. With text as the dominant mode of communication, behavioral patterns have emerged across programs, making the second terminal program easier to learn that the first and scaling from there.

Text-Based GUIs?

So can we create GUI-based applications that rely only (or significantly) on text and provide a standardized mode of interaction? We can, and, in fact, it has already been done in the area of text editors. The editor I have in mind is Acme², originally released in the 1990’s as part of the Plan 9 operating system and brought to other Unix-like systems by Russ Cox’s plan9port project.

The power of the Acme editor is twofold. First is its seamless way of integrating the command-line tools programmers are already familiar with into its environment. Users can select any text and pipe³ it a command. The output of that command can in turn either populate a new window within Acme, or it can replace the original, selected text. Second is Acme’s use of the 9P protocol under the hood. Without diving into the details of the protocol, this allows for a variety of interactions, including the use of what would in other programming environments be called plugins⁴. What makes these so powerful is the free-form nature of the interaction model. The 9P communication is exposed on POSIX systems via Unix domain sockets, but the protocol’s semantics are simple enough that plan9port includes a general-purpose client, allowing for helper programs to theoretically be written even as shell scripts.

This is all a bit unusual and hard to imagine, so I recommend viewing this brief(-ish) tour of Acme by Russ Cox.

Acme’s Un-Strengths

While I was taken with all of this when I first became acquainted with it, there are a couple things to say about what Acme does not do that have also contributed to its staying power for me. To summarize, there is no configuration to speak of: no color themes, no syntax highlighting, no attempt (save for an optional, primitive auto-indent) to automatically format code⁵. Prior to Acme, I had spent far too much time concerned with how my Vim setup looked, e.g. the color scheme. Configuration files running into the hundreds of lines do not and cannot exist in Acme. Not everyone will want such a thing⁶, but I cannot emphasize enough what a breath of fresh air it was for me to enter an environment with no knobs to tweak.

An Integrating Development Environment

Acme is remarkable for what it represents: a class of application that leverages a simple, text-based GUI to create a compelling model of interacting with all of the tools available in the Unix (or Plan 9) environment. Cox calls it an “integrating development environment,” distinguishing it from the more hermetic “integrated development environment” developers will be familiar with. The simplicity of its interface is important. It is what has allowed Acme to age gracefully over the past 30 or so years, without the constant churn of adding support for new languages, compilers, terminals, or color schemes.

And yet I find myself attracted to it. I even like to think of myself as a systems programmer of a sort. I’m not content to simply use the layers of abstraction provided to me. I always want to know what’s going on above and especially below the layer I am programming. Over the course of my career I’ve had the privilege of working on everything from device drivers, to power-on self-test (POST), all the way up the stack to large, web-based systems.

An Actually-Useful Definition of Systems Programming

I think this approach to programming is about the best definition of systems programming I can come up with. Systems programmers want all of the layers in their software system to cooperate. They don’t think abstraction should be used to hide messes in lower layers. Those messes should be cleaned up. The whole system will be better for it.

This all came to mind as I read Fernando Hurtado Cardenas’s blog post “That’s Not an Abstraction, That’s Just a Layer of Indirection.” In noticing and commenting on the difference between abstraction and indirection, Cardenas is behaving like a good systems programmer (at least by my definition). They recognize it is the whole system that needs to be optimized and not just the topmost layer.

With my own experience and Cardenas’s post in mind, maybe we can start to sketch a useful definition of systems programming as applying the same thoughtful approach to the entire stack that one does to the software they are actually writing¹. This mindset is not a given within the software community, and with well-designed systems it does not need to be ubiquitous. But I would argue it does need to be present in any large-scale software team.

How Is This Useful Though?

What does this mean for the makeup of software teams, particularly in large organizations that embrace DevOps, Platform Engineering, and the like? I actually think this understanding of systems programming fits quite naturally within these kinds of organizations. The application developers tasked with writing the value-add business logic are usefully abstracted away from the system as much as possible. The systems programmers are the architects, platform engineers, and DevOps/SRE staff who concern themselves with the rest of the stack (or, in the case of architects, the whole stack). Indeed, this models comports quite well with the division of labor advocated by the Team Topologies crowd.

At this point I imagine one might respond to all of this with, “So what?” I have basically invented a definition of systems programming out of the blue that just confirms that Team Topologies got it right? Yes. And …

I think this definition of systems programming sheds light on something I have struggled with. As someone who wants to understand and appreciate the entire software stack, I am tempted to look down on folks who just want to write their code and be done with it. This whole thought experiment has brought to light the fact that application programmers are necessary too. Of course they are! They are the ones writing the value-add business logic that will make or break the business. A systems programmer’s job is to support an application programmer. How can that happen if instead we look down our noses at them. They are our customers! So elitism within the Platform Engineering community should be verboten.

This systems/application programmer model might also be a helpful heuristic for hiring managers. Ask questions that tease out whether a candidate wants to understand the entire software stack, or if they would rather focus on writing their business logic. Doing so will give you an idea of where they will fit more naturally.

Conclusion

For me this started as a thought experiment to understand why, despite the lack of clarity, I still find myself attracted to the term systems programming. I then used my own experience and intuitions to induce a definition for the term that put words to my gut-level intuitions about it. I rather doubt that framing the term this way will take off. The term has fallen out of regular use anyway. Still, I think it is helpful to have a catchall term to distinguish application programmers from all the other supporting disciplines, and I am not aware of any other term doing that today.

Why zombies? Look it what Welch has done since her debut. There are podcasts, public appearances, and now an infamous meme coin. The last of these is clearly tied to her value as a meme, but the others were enabled by her pop culture currency as well. Her ability to do these things at all is a recycling of her first moment, like that ouroborus, eating its own tail, recycling itself. Or, if you like, it is an act of cannibalism, just like what zombies are known for.

I do not mean to criticize Welch here. She’s getting hers. Rather, in being taken in by this sort of thing, the finger points back at us.

Past

To review where I am coming from, apart from the occasional foray into the Fediverse I have not had an active social media presence since maybe 2017. LinkedIn is arguably an exception since I have largely maintained an account there, but even this one was mostly dormant.

That began to change this past summer when I opened public accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky. This followed me shutting down my self-hosting presence, and looking back it seems fair to say the implicit logic was that, if I was no longer self-hosting my code repositories and personal data, then why not jump back into the mix and reconnect with old friends. If it also gave me the chance to reconsider my aversion, so much the better.

I did indeed reconnect with some old friends, which has been great. But as so often happens, I ended up learning as much about myself as anything else. For starters, it seems clear now that I cannot have something like social media available to me at all times without becoming like a rat hitting a feeder bar. Second, most of the conversation on microblogging sites in particular is designed to be ephemeral—which is great!—but it doesn’t really work for me. I can’t help feeling like the sort of off-the-cuff post I might make on Bluesky is a poor match for the permanence of the Internet. I’ve seen too many people get a lot of negative attention for saying something thoughtless online, and I know that there but for the grace of God go I.

Present

But anyway, that brings us up to today. I have accounts on a handful of social media sites. Some accounts I’ve already deleted again, but most of them have survived this experiment the past six months. That said, it feels like time to re-orient my time online toward writing more, and more often.

There are some IndieWeb principles that I intend to put into practice to help make this happen. The most relevant of these is POSSE or “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.” In other words, everything that seems worth posting on social media will first be posted to this site, and then (usually?) linked from my other accounts.

The way I see this helping is by introducing some friction. While it is entirely possible to automate the syndication process, I still maintain a static website. I considered adding a dynamic backend to automate the syndication, and even had the beginnings of an architecture drawn up, but my heart wasn’t in it. Then I realized this situation could work in my favor by forcing me to slow down before I post. So for now I’m considering the manual effort involved in posting a feature rather than a bug.

And the manual effort is not trivial either. Posting is effectively a three-step process:

1. Create and publish the post on this website
2. Syndicate to my social media accounts
3. Add social media links to the original post and re-publish

If I get to a point where I haved tamed the pull social media has on me then I might revisit adding a backend to support automated syndication. A middle ground option to automate would be to use a paid service like Micro.blog.

Future

As I’ve said already, the point of this is to write more. It seems necessary, in order to do that, for me to dial down my dependence on social media. I have made a few other changes to my life in the past several months as well. My primary aim has been to be more present with my family, but I hope it will make me more so with myself as well. If that happens I would like to use that headspace to read, think and write more. That writing will primarily occur here, and in an ideal world will have more substance than the half-formed thoughts I’ve contented myself with occasionally publishing here to date.

None of these are promises. I won’t even call them resolutions. Consider these things I am hoping for in the new year.

That said, it could perhaps be a nice signal for anyone looking to build a reputation-based service for vetting open source contributors and/or maintainers. I haven’t fully thought through how that might work, but having a second source linking SSH public keys to email addresses seems like it could be valuable.

At any rate, I’ll be keeping my eye on this.