Allen Wittenauer
Allen Wittenauer
@aw.effectivemachines.com
Globehead. Believe platypuses are real. Professional babysitter. Occasional hot take. Sometimes hockey talk. Influencer to the influencers.

Ex-Sun, Ex-Yahoo!, Ex-LinkedIn, and Ex-a bunch of companies you've probably never heard of...
It seems like a bug that I can't export a BigQuery table with a JSON column to Apache Parquet. Why doesn't it just export it as text or binary blob or something instead?
November 11, 2025 at 3:44 AM
Reposted by Allen Wittenauer
November 1, 2025 at 7:19 PM
Reposted by Allen Wittenauer
Apparently some folks are playing real dumb about skull symbols so let’s play a little game I like to call “Nazi skull or not a Nazi skull”

First up, the Jolly Roger. This is a pirate skull, not a Nazi skull. It means you might get robbed, but prolly not genocided.

With me so far? 1/x
October 22, 2025 at 5:23 AM
“I’m pleased with the response “. But you just said it wrote some shitty code? Why would you be happy with that?
October 3, 2025 at 7:02 PM
Found an old folder of Sun stuff, including my offer letter. Weirdest thing I kept was probably this piece of paper. I don’t think Sun got their moneys worth on this one. We used Veritas Volume Manager on Sun HA/Sun Cluster.
September 29, 2025 at 5:12 PM
Reposted by Allen Wittenauer
NFS at 40.

Phenomenal collection of seminal documents, related work, source code, ephemera, etc...

https://nfs40.online/

#sunmicrosystems
NFS AT 40 – Sun Microsystems NFS
nfs40.online
September 24, 2025 at 4:19 PM
Reposted by Allen Wittenauer
(comic) We don't have the budget
September 24, 2025 at 4:25 PM
A bit shout-out to @super-deluxe.bsky.social . Not only is the site informative and has blu-rays no one else does, but can save you money. With shipping+import fees, Amazon FR comes in at $149 with a bit of delay to get here. I can wait.
September 15, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Reposted by Allen Wittenauer
did he play a show without backflips
August 29, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Reposted by Allen Wittenauer
As someone who served in the National Guard, the replies are depressing. Most service members signed up because the military can be a springboard for social mobility. And you can’t just “quit” that easy. You are required to follow all “lawful orders.” What is “lawful” is not subject to your opinion.
Remember that most of the people in the National Guard want nothing to do with this and are, in fact, probably pretty pissed off that their governor ripped them away from their normal lives to do security theater miles away from home.
For the first time I've seen, National Guard outside the Library of Congress this morning.

They are unarmed and look incredibly bored.
August 25, 2025 at 1:13 PM
Anyone know of a honeypot I can send traffic to? I just have some moron wordpress script kiddie that would probably be happy to provide you with data for all your security needs.
August 21, 2025 at 6:55 PM
August 6, 2025 at 2:17 PM
FYI: debian bookworm-updates breaks SSL with libssl / openssl 3.0.17 packages. If you have weird things going on, look there.
August 4, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Reposted by Allen Wittenauer
Social Security recipients are set to face an $18,000 benefit cut in just seven years.
A new analysis projects a 24% cut to Social Security benefits by late 2032.
Trump's "big, beautiful bill" will cause sharp cuts to Social Security by late 2032, a new analysis says.
trib.al
July 24, 2025 at 5:54 PM
I wonder if there is an Airflow DAG for investigating your CEO.
July 18, 2025 at 10:18 PM
"No streaming updates available"

Dear Circle CI.

I don't care. Stop spamming your UI with this big ass window telling me how to make them available. MAKE IT STOP.

Your buddy,

Me.
July 17, 2025 at 8:25 PM
Twitch has been showing re-runs of Pee-Wee's Playhouse. I forgot how wonderfully it hid the adult humor even in kid's show.

Ricardo: "I made Miss Yvonne a diary to keep her secrets!"
Yvonne: "I made Ricardo a log book to keep track of every time he scores" (pregnant pause) "in a game!"
July 14, 2025 at 5:07 PM
Everyone's career goal should be the creator of the next leftpad.
July 13, 2025 at 5:43 AM
I get more spam than things I care about on my @apache.org email address and have for a very long time. I mostly quit paying attention to it as a result.
July 10, 2025 at 3:07 PM
If you put your GPL3 code on GitHub and then merge in other people’s code, you CANNOT relicense to include the project in your own non-GPL work without a license change from those other contributors.
July 9, 2025 at 1:26 PM
Reposted by Allen Wittenauer
It is Bandcamp Friday which is a great help for us little labels.
I have around 50 copies of the 'Waiting For The Sun' 12" left for just £14.99 today.
Will be in post next day for you.
Digital track not released till July 25th.
Lot of very cool DJ support on this one.
July 4, 2025 at 2:23 PM
Copilot is so bad. I'm sort of surprised that Microsoft is even showing it to people outside the company.
June 30, 2025 at 8:47 PM
I don’t know if I can express enough how frustrating Google Dataflow and Apache Beam are. Oh, you want to do something trivial like write log information at different levels? Too bad.
June 18, 2025 at 2:03 PM
Reposted by Allen Wittenauer
The Alt National Park Service account calls itself the official "resistance" team of the US National Park Service. With 887k followers, is one of the biggest accounts on Bluesky. It is the 11 most followed account according to some trackers.

This thread will dive into its activity.
🧵 1/x.
June 17, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Reposted by Allen Wittenauer
I told you guys
June 17, 2025 at 2:16 PM