Recently I’ve gotten more involved in the Decred community. I’ll elaborate more on my thoughts of what Decred aims to be in an update to this post. Suffice for now to say that its aims are the most admirable I’ve seen in the space, and having spoken with members of the development team personally, they’ve got great backers and it’s going to go far. UPDATE: In my opinion, three things make Decred the best cryptocurrency at the moment:

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Raspberry Pi Time Machine This week I received a new MacBook Pro 2017 to use as my development machine when ‘on the go’ (or on the couch, to be more accurate). I also received a larger SSD to replace the boot drive on Desktop PC, and suddenly had a 120GB SSD with no job. I decided to put it to work to hold backups of my new mobile dev machine in the event of the worst case scenario.

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I am currently training for the Network+ certification offered by CompTia. It’s a vastly more interesting subject for me to review and familiarize myself with than A+ has been in the past. As for the moment I only have the money for one certification and I’ve decided to pursue this one first. CompTia Certifications For anyone else interested in studying up for this or any other CompTia certifications, I highly recommend Professor Messer’s YouTube Channel, which can be found here.

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You may have heard. If you haven’t, then you’re about to. Which is exciting for you because not having heard is most likely what Congress was hoping for, for nefarious reasons. Congress recently passed a bill to repeal the Federal Communication Commission’s privacy rules for Internet Service Providers (referred to as the common acronym ISPs). These rules never had the opportunity to go into effect, but they would have allowed the average consumer more control over how our ISPs use the data they collect on us.

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Scripting languages and command line interfaces is an area I’ve decided to focus on in 2016. I’m currently a part of an online course on Python with Udemy by Jose Portilla that I highly recommend. I’m also diving into Powershell at work to become more familiar with remote Azure AD management. Familiarity with Powershell scripting will make me much more powerful in my domain. Over the weekend I decided to get a little more comfortable with the command line interface with my Mac.

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Something I’ve always wanted to do but have not as of yet, is to get involved in Open Source development. The biggest reason for being scared off was fear of being the new guy, or committing to a project and then being pigeonholed into something I’d find boring, such as writing documentation or quality assurance testing. Don’t get me wrong, I know this stuff is important. I’ve never tried either of these so it could be something I’d enjoy, but I really want to focus on new features instead of improving upon old code.

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As most of you know, for most of my life I was very anti-Apple. The price difference between an Apple product and the rest of the competition struck me as insane. “I can get way better specs for that price!” I’d think to myself, if I wasn’t actively debating with someone. This perception started to change when I got my first smartphone. It was a hand-me-down iPhone 3G from my father.

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