DEI equals American Values

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in modern America are not departures from our founding principles but rather the fulfillment of ideals articulated by the nation’s architects. While the practical application of these values has evolved over centuries, the philosophical foundation for DEI can be traced directly to the words and vision of America’s founders, including George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. The Declaration’s Promise and DEI’s Mission Thomas Jefferson’s most famous contribution to American political philosophy appears at the very beginning of the Declaration of Independence: ...

November 20, 2025 · 8 min · 1668 words · Christopher Hicks

Glowing review of "Evolution of Lua, continued"

Introduction I really enjoyed reading The evolution of Lua, continued that I learned about thanks to this Hacker News thread. This is a great perspective on the long-term (15 year) evolution of the Lua programming language. While discussing language evolution is not completely unheard of, it is rather atypical of the discussion we usually have around programming languages. Most often you’re only concerned about the syntax or features of a particular language version, usually the latest one. Sometimes you might look at release notes to see when a feature was introduced or a bug was fixed. Our day to day needs don’t often benefit from a longer term perspective. ...

October 22, 2025 · 4 min · 765 words · Christopher Hicks

Vocal Media is hiring for a Data Warehouse Engineer

Is anyone in my network looking for work these days? One of our family members works at Vocal Media. They’ve been very happy with their role, so I hope this Senior Software Engineer role could be worth your time to check out. It sounds focused on the data warehouse from the job description. So you don’t have to worry about me competing with you. Feel free to comment on this post or DM me if you’re actively looking for something now.

October 8, 2025 · 1 min · 81 words · Christopher Hicks

Man in Finance in LEGO

Artificial Intelligence I had fun putting this together with Galaxy.AI. It is amazing to me how easy it was to get a result that I’m very satisfied with. Galaxy.AI One of the reasons I went into so much detail about Galaxy.AI in my linked-in post about this is that they were offering a months worth of credits for writing a review. I didn’t have to pull any punches, so I was happy to share how’s it been working for me. ...

September 28, 2025 · 3 min · 461 words · Christopher Hicks

DNSControl + CoreDNS Container Example - Announcement

Subject: New Complete Example: DNSControl → CoreDNS Container with Automated Testing Howdy DNSControl Community, I’m excited to share a comprehensive example repository that demonstrates the complete workflow from DNSControl JavaScript configurations to a production-ready containerized DNS server: 🔗 Repository: https://github.com/fini-net/fini-coredns-example fini-net/fini-coredns-example Public Coredns with dnscontrol example Go 2 1 github.com What This Provides This repository showcases a real-world implementation of: ...

September 12, 2025 · 3 min · 480 words · Christopher Hicks

How Rust Had to Save Python From Itself: The uv Revolution

Well, well, well. Here we are in 2025 and Python packaging has finally been fixed. Not by the Python community, mind you - they had their shot for about 20 years. No, it took the Rust folks to come in and show us how it’s done. The Long, Painful History Let me paint you a picture. Back when I was starting out, we had distutils. That was it. Then came setuptools, which was supposed to fix everything. Then pip showed up to handle installation. Then virtualenv because global package installs were a nightmare. Then pipenv to combine pip and virtualenv. Then poetry because pipenv wasn’t quite right. Then pip-tools for deterministic builds. Then conda for scientific computing. Then… ...

September 4, 2025 · 4 min · 716 words · Christopher Hicks

John Schreiber passed on July 29th, 2025

Post on linked-in John Schreiber passed on July 29th, 2025. Remembrances will be held tomorrow, Saturday 23rd of August at Darcie Kent Estate Winery and Pete’s Brass Rail and Car Wash. Please also check out https://tinyurl.com/JohnSchreiber if you’d like see some pictures and video of John enjoying life. Comments Steve Schiro commented on linked-in: ...

August 22, 2025 · 1 min · 147 words · Christopher Hicks
Feeding 5 Lorakeets at Busch Gardens Williamsburg.  They are sitting on a tubular metal fence rail and we are feeding them from cups purchased from Busch Gardens.

Lorakeets at Busch Gardens Williamsburg

It was fun to feed the Lorakeets at Busch Gardens Williamsburg this week. We kept missing them by a few minutes so we were so glad that we got to make it in finally. I tried the Merlin app in there, but it only detected the American Robin. I’m not sure if it ignored the exotic birds because they don’t belong in Virginia.

June 25, 2025 · 1 min · 63 words · Christopher Hicks

Charities that I Respect

Introduction Like many, I’ve usually kept my charitable giving private — and I’ve respected that choice in others. But recently, a few people have asked where they might consider donating. Since I don’t see a need to keep it to myself, I’ll share my recommendations for anyone interested. I’ve organized this around a few themes. For each one I will link to the organization’s website and the Charity Navigator rating. For all of the organizations mentioned below, I respect them and I have personally donated to them at least once, but often over several years. I’m leaving out organizations that I don’t want to donate to for various reasons and local charities, but I may revisit those topics someday. I’m also not including much commentary on each one since I’m hoping you will find your own reasons to like them and contribute. ...

June 13, 2025 · 3 min · 435 words · Christopher Hicks

Redis backslides into open source community

Disclaimer I am not a significant member of the Redis community. I have not used Redis on a regular basis. I’ve discussed Redis more in interviews than during regular work. My few work encounters with Redis have been using Elasticache. These facts would discourage me and should discourage you from having me as your next redis admin. Despite all of that — I have been part of the free software and open source communities for many years. With all of the tumult around licensing with prominent open source companies in recent years I am well positioned to talk about companies and their relationships to their communities. ...

May 16, 2025 · 6 min · 1195 words · Christopher Hicks