I'm not dead!

Not the greatest joke in the world, granted, but the reason I haven't been posting is because I've embarked on the great and wonderful journey called "career switching". In my particular case, from "infrastructure engineer" (a.k.a. Site Reliability Engineer / SRE, Cloud Engineer, Ops, etc.) to "Developer Advocate". It's been a lovely, but busy, journey.

I've also picked up some Hebrew along the way:
!שלום

(Note that regardless of the medium, blog or Slack, nothing handles changing carriage returns particularly well. Especially if you're trying to change direction on the same line, rather than a new one. Joy ;) )

In any event it's been a busy yearish. I'll be posting some things to come, but to start I had a funny idea wherein which I'll post a quick stub about a domain and/or handle idea that I had, that someone else had first and therefore is either in use or, regrettably, just poached. Here's some quick ones:

Twitter: @quintessence
This is pretty straightforward, as it's just my forename, but what "grinds my gears" about this one is that Twitter, unlike Github, does not have a "no parking" policy. Someone made two tweets in 2007 (twelve years ago) and now the handle is indefinitely in use :(

Twitter: @blackpajamas
I had an idea recently that I wanted to start learning how to cook Indian food like some of my snazzy international friends. This involves a lot of tasty and unforgiving spices (stains!), so I had the idea that I should cook in black clothes. In black pajamas, specifically. I was also writing up a blog post on Chef at the time, which means that I had the doublethink that it'd be funny to rename everything (even the blog ... 😅) to "I Code in Black Pajamas". Additional fun to be had when working from home, because work pajamas are definitely a thing.

URL: quintessence.dev
When the new .dev TLD was about to be released I was waiting on the trigger. I was finally going to have something in my name. It spurred a new era of hope: if I was able to secure "my" Twitter handle, that would mean consistent branding across Twitter, Github, and domain. Trifecta! Alas I was always a poor gambler and didn't want to to pay so I waited until it was opened up to the general public. The last cost tier was $125, so non-trivial even for a URL. Alas someone else managed to snag it, I blame bots, and now it is... parked.

Variations of "my (fore)name as a domain" that others put to use first:
quintessence.is -> Redirects to a Tumblr owned by a possibly current (?) Director of Content for Parachute Home, but hasn't been updated since 2015.
quintessence.com -> professional sound equiment. From the looks of it, exceeding even "prosumer grade". Cool.
quintessence.me -> Parked
quintessence.space -> Parked, but "for sale" for $450 USD. 😅

Anyway, y'all get the picture on the domains. I might reveal some of the other iterations of my name that I tried for things over time, if they're funny.

Banner source: "I'm not dead" from the greatly missed Hyperbole & A Half and some shameless backdrop by yours truly.