Thoughts

Disclaimer Most of you aren’t going to have a clue what I’m talking about. I sincerely apologize ahead of time. I’ll attempt a layman’s explanation, but I make no promises. I’ll try to link to unfamiliar terms. Backstory Even before my new job - oh yea, by the way, I’m a web developer now, fancy that - I was practicing with DVCS as a hobby. A Distributed Version Control System is just a way of tracking the history of source code files throughout the life of a project. There are two major DVCS’s out there, Git and Mercurial . It seems Git is more widely used and more widely accepted for projects with multiple developers (and I’m learning it for work), but I like to use Mercurial for my personal projects because that’s what I taught myself.

I'm slowly becoming a machinist for an incredibly tiny part production company ( Inspire Products, Inc. ). Not a manual machinist, mind you. A better title might be a machine programmer, though my official title is manufacturing engineer. Whatever you call it, my position sometimes requires me to run CNC machines overnight or over the weekend, especially when cutting molds. These machines can sometime fail and require maintenance. We have a camera set up so we can check the status of the machine lights, but that doesn't always tell us a lot (especially in the dark when color is indistinguishable) and I don't intend to nervously watch the shop camera on my time off. However, if I were notified of a status change, then it would be a lot easier to enjoy one's time off and simply go in to solve the problem as needed.