Should the software engineering profession pursue collective bargaining?

Greg Wilson, who has built a significant career in the field of software engineering, recently wrote a set of essays called “Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code” with the sub-title “a few things programmers should know about society to understand big tech, social media, and AI”. The essays cover a wide set of subjects, with this intent from the introduction: “The essays that follow will explore a few things I wish I had known earlier: where power comes from, how it is used, how its use is hidden, and how people have held the powerful accountable and made the world a fairer place.”. Greg also provides multiple references to other sources supporting the topics in the essays, which I greatly appreciate.

For today, I am going to point to one of the topics – collective bargaining. My experience in software engineering within the aerospace industry is that almost none of the engineers I worked with were part of a union. The only example I have heard of is an engineers union at Boeing, which is an affiliate of International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), AFL-CIO. In one of my previous companies, a co-worker made a comment about “we ought to start a union”. I said; “You say the word and I will call the AFL-CIO!”. When I checked into it though, we would have to get people to sign cards to indicate interest, then fight with management, etc. I told this to my friend, and he said “Sounds like too much work”, and that was the end of that.

Recently, I had lunch with a former colleague who is still working at one of my previous employers. His tales of office politics and lack of promotion opportunities made me glad that I was retired. I related the story I listed above, saying that it was an alternative to “stay or leave”. I am not sure if anything will come to it, but I felt the need to share.

I also told my friend about this series of essays – again, he did not express immediate interest, but I think I will send him a link. I think this paragraph from the essay “When The Algorithm Comes for You” is appropriate, given that AI is transforming the software engineering industry (bold text is my addition):

In 2023, the Writers Guild of America struck for five months over issues that included AI. When the strike ended, the WGA had won explicit contract language: AI cannot write or rewrite scripts, and scripts cannot be used to train AI systems. The Screen Actors Guild reached a parallel agreement that included restrictions on the digital replication of performers’ likenesses without ongoing consent [Kelly2022]. These victories established enforceable contractual limits on what employers could do with AI—limits that individual workers negotiating alone could never have secured. The lesson is not specific to Hollywood: wherever workers have collective bargaining rights, they can negotiate from a position of strength. Professional associations, open-source communities, and standards bodies can create analogous leverage in sectors where formal unions are absent or weak.

Since my retirement, I have had time to reflect about my career, the difficulties and successes, and how I could have approached things differently. I think I will add that topic to my “Future Essays” list….

What are the attributes of a “social platform”?

On June 28, 2026, Dave Winer put out a call for social web app developers to work with him if they are including inbound and outbound RSS in their apps. Manton Reece from Micro.blog referenced this in a post on Micro.blog, and had this statement: “I’m actually not aware of any social platforms that support inbound RSS except Micro.blog. It would be great to have more.”. Dave Winer then responded on Micro.blog as follows (partial quote):

I want a world of social platforms that support inbound RSS

Those two posts caught my eye, specifically the word “platform”. Why did they choose the word “platform”? That made me wonder – is this really a call for “centralized” services like Bluesky/Mastodon to add inbound RSS (to allow users to post within these services as “first class citizens” (as if they were posting within official apps for Bluesky/Mastodon))? In earlier comments on this topic, I wrote:

I have addressed this second objection before, stating “What is in it for the “other people’s software developers to add inbound and outbound RSS support”? My answer is – nothing – no users are demanding this – no users are clamoring for a RSS-based “social network” that can communicate as a peer with other social network software.

I had developed a web app in 2023 called MyStatusTool, and this app allows users to follow RSS feeds that support rssCloud (inbound RSS) and allows the user to create their own posts with a feed (outbound RSS). However, I had not thought about the following/display of other RSS feeds as “inbound RSS” until now.

I created this app because back in 2022, Dave Winer kept talking about creating an app that could do this, but he did not actually do anything about it, so I decided to do it! The one feature this app does not have is support for replies/following threads, which “platforms” like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Micro.blog support. Perhaps that is a key “attribute” of a “social platform”….

From recent posts, I am aware that Dave Winer is “working on something” with RSS and rssCloud to create some chat application. Hope he releases it soon! Hope it has inbound and outbound RSS!

How podcasting got its name

On June 24, 2026, Dave Winer pointed to a podcasting article in – wait for it – Glamour Magazine – and the South African version at that! Anyway, it gives a brief history of podcasting (mentioning Dave Winer and Adam Curry), but then says that Ben Hammersley coined the word “podcast”, and I felt that was incorrect. I reviewed the Podcast article on Wikipedia, and it mentions the Ben Hammersley article. I reviewed the archived article, from February 2004, and the word “Podcasting” appears within a list of possible names for what the act of podcasting is, but does not recommend/promote the use of the word “podcasting”.

Dave Winer has a page discussing how the people involved in podcasting started using the term in September 2004, and that it had been called “audioblogging” before that point. Wikipedia does mention some of the September 2004 events. From my review, I think that the September 2004 point is a better reference point for actual use of the terms “podcast” and “podcasting.

Got an app supporting inbound/outbound RSS

Dave Winer recently posted asking developers working on apps supporting inbound/outbound RSS to send him a post on it, so here is my post. I created an web app in 2023 using rssCloud and supporting inbound and outbound RSS called myStatusTool. I have working instances of a Node implementation developed by me and a PHP implementation developed by Colin Walker.

From this thread on Micro.blog, it looks like someone is preparing an iPhone app with many of the same features (BlogWarp). Cool!

Dealing with death

My family has had to deal with the death of a pet and the death of a friend recently. In the pet case, we put down one of our cats (cancer), she was 11 or 12 years old. The friend had a terminal cancer diagnosis and was successful in fighting it for a long time, but got to the end of the treatment trail and died a few weeks ago.

For our cat, we worked with our vet to rule out other possible causes, but the cancer cause eventually became the dominant one. We worked to make her last days comfortable and gave her chances to be outside (we adopted her as a feral cat, and she loved sitting outside in the sun). As we approached the end, our vet had a notice on their door that they had a litter of kittens looking for a good home. We decided to get a girl kitten just before the passing of our older cat. She has turned out to be a real blessing for us – so cute, playful, and cuddly. This weekend, our male cat (we had two cats before) finally started playing with the kitten instead of hissing and batting at her. That was a real turning point.

Our friend’s funeral was this past weekend. There were 300-400 people there, almost a full church – I have never seen this many people at a funeral. The eulogy was given by our friend’s adult children (survived by his wife, two children, three grandchildren). There was so much I learned about our friend from the eulogy – I almost felt like I did not know who he was! I had sung in our church choir with him for most of the past 10-15 years. Still, I felt that he was a good friend to me, and me to him, in our way. The next day, I started crying at Mass during the communion song, it took a minute to compose myself and get back to singing. I shared this with my wife, she said it was ok to cry. I think it may happen again…

At the reception after the funeral, I visited with a number of people from our choir, remembering moments about our friend. As my wife and I started to leave, we stopped to have a hug with some choir members, and I said “See you tomorrow – 8 o’clock!”. This is when we are supposed to get to church to warm up for the 8:30am Mass. I was saying it to keep the faith, that we were dealing with sorrow and loss, but we can still get up the next morning and do the work (via Peter Rukavina), and that this was what our friend would have wanted. The other thing that I want to remember is when my friend’s wife returns to our choir, to not look away (again, via Peter Rukavina):

This doesn’t mean they won’t cry. Everything makes them cry but they are tears of loss combined with gratitude for days that are gone but not forgotten. Hold their hand, hold their gaze, hold their loss. Stay with them and for the briefest of moments make them feel less alone in their sorrow.

Managing memory usage for Node.js apps

When I moved my Node apps over to Opalstack, I was having some issues with the apps failing, getting a 502 error. My account has 1GB of RAM, and I saw my Feed News Archive app reaching 700-800 Mb before quitting. After some Claude sessions and good old fashioned searching, I found the –max-old-space-size parameter to use in Node commands. As an example:

node –max-old-space-size=128 river5.js

The value used in the parameter is in megabytes (MB). For the Feed News Archive app, I set the size to 256. With those limits, I have not seen any 502 errors/app quitting – yay!

Retirement Update – June 2026

I thought I was going to do this last month, but…..oh well, better late than never! I have been exercising more (which is a good thing), and did start some personal software projects (my Feed News Archive site is running nicely!). The other major effort over my first two months was to transition to a new hosting provider (Opalstack) from my previous provider (Bluehost). When I started with Bluehost, they had an “unlimited plan” (websites, storage, etc). Over the years, their cost increased, but I was able to keep adding sites without issues. In the fall of 2025, I found out that my plan “now” only covered 20 websites (I had 59). Although many of them were test sites, the ones I wanted to keep was still higher than 20 – grrr!

I did some looking around at other hosting providers, but got a good recommendation from Anton Zuiker (micro.blog, site), and made the move! A benefit of moving to Opalstack is that I can have PHP, static sites, and Node.js sites all on the same account. With that, I will be able to drop my Digital Ocean account for Node.js apps.

The other things that has happened is that I am slowly approaching each in a more relaxed way. When I started, I had a list, and worked to get everything done on the list, and updated it during the day. Now, having a list is not so important. I feel more and more comfortable being retired.

Test – power user post

The slow death of the power user:

There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why. Someone who read error messages instead of dismissing them. Someone who, when something broke, treated it as a puzzle rather than a betrayal.

That person is dying off. And nobody in the industry seems to care. In fact, most of them are actively celebrating the funeral while billing it as progress.

This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.

Disappointing results for RSS feeds from US newspapers

As part of my News Archive project, I am trying to add feeds from one major US newspaper per day. As a start, I used this Wikipedia page (which has a list of the top 10 US papers by circulation). Only 7 of 10 papers had feeds (Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and Newsday did not have feeds). Some of them have feeds by default because their sites are built using WordPress (there were no links to those feeds, but by going to sections and adding “/feed/” to the end of the URLs – voila! Feeds!

Another interesting possibility is the existence of sitemaps in XML format. It appears this is being done so that Google can index content. I used Claude to create a script for creating a RSS feed from a sitemap file (see Github gist here). I am going to start using this for sites that do not provide feeds.