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Stuff that arrived over the weekend

Joey de Villa’s NetFoundry business card

A few goodies I’d ordered all arrived nearly at once on Saturday, and I thought I’d share them here.

Business card

A snapshot of Joey de Villa’s desk, showing two boxes of his business cards. One business card is raised so it is readable. Beside the boxes are a mechanical keyboard and a steel mug with a stciker on it that reads “Punch today in the face”.
New business cards! Tap to view at full size.

It’s been a while since I’ve had an honest-to-goodness business card, but since NetFoundry makes them available to employees and since a good chunk of my job is about making myself available to the public, I placed an order and received two boxes containing a few hundred cards in total.

These days, I tend to simply display my LinkedIn QR code on my phone when exchanging contact details with people, but I still like the old-school feel of giving someone a card (which just so happens to contain my LinkedIn QR code).

Book: Developer Relations Activity Patterns

Joey de Villa, smiling and holding up a paperback copy of the book Developer Relations Activity Patterns.
It arrived! Tap to view at full size.

Another thing that arrived on Saturday was my copy of Developer Relations Activity Patterns, written by Ted Neward, Scott T. McAllister, David Neal, and Chris Woodruff, and published by Apress, which is now an imprint of Springer Nature.

I know a couple of the authors. Way back in 2016, Ted reached out to me after I’d landed a developer relations job with SMARTRAC and wanted to see how they did developer relations. I also know David from my time at Auth0, because shortly after I joined, Auth0 merged with Okta, where David worked. In fact, to prepare for my technical interview with Auth0, my primary resource was David’s 2019 article in the Okta Developer blog, An Illustrated Guide to OAuth and OpenID Connect.

Since I’m now pretty much Supreme Developer Advocate at NetFoundry (I’m the only one; it’s a small, scrappy company that punches above its weight class), I figured the book would be useful.

Also, I have a policy of buying books written by people I know, as illustrated in the meme below:

Meme with title “When you tell someone about your book and they say ‘oh cool’ instead of buying it immediately.” Below the title is a cat wearing cool sunglasses and a gold chain necklace saying “That wasn’t very cash money of you”.
I try to be cash money all the time. Tap to view at full size.

You may have noticed that I bought the dead-tree edition instead of an electronic one. This also follows a rule of mine:

  1. If the content is ephemeral or likely to be outdated in a couple of years (or a couple of months, given the pace of change these days), get the electronic version.
  2. If the content is likely to be longer-lasting or seems timeless, get the paper version.

Also, it’s nice to get away from screens from time to time. I’ve carved out a little time each day to sit on the rocking chair on our front porch and read paper books, and  Developer Relations Activity Patterns will be one of them.

Teeny-weeny hard drive

Joey de Villa holding up his Lexar external drive side-by-side with his NetFoundry business card. Viewed from the top, they’re the same size.
Nice and compact! Tap to view at full size.

Between the RAMpocalypse brought about by AI data centers hogging all the storage chips and the war in Iran blocking off access to a large chunk of the world’s helium (it’s a key part of making high-end chips; see my earlier article for an explanation), SSD prices are climbing.

Fortunately, there was a very short-time deal for a two-pack of 2TB Lexar SL500 SSDs for about $400, so we placed an order so that Anitra and I could each have one. They arrived on Saturday, and they’re about the size of my business card!

Joey de Villa holding up his Lexar external drive side-by-side (and on its side) with his NetFoundry business card. The drive is quite thin!
Skinny! Tap to view at full size.