I saw a headline in the Wall Street Journal speculating that the several year trend towards men wearing beards was coming to an end.  Like all shifts in fashion, nobody can say for sure what causes a trend to turn, but I hypothesize it might have been this photo.

In the world of computing, the rise of the cloud has left little oxygen in the press for anything other than the storyline that Amazon, Microsoft and Google (the tech fashionistas) have decided cheap servers running Linux are the answer to every computing problem. When one unit of compute isn’t enough, you write your software to split the workload two ways, or four, or eight, or a thousand. If you find that hard, too bad, hire smarter people like Google and Amazon.

Horizontal scale on cheap CPUs became a religion, and anything that didn’t look like AWS EC2 was like telling the girlfriend who bought you a flannel shirt for your birthday, “sorry, I don’t want to grow a beard”.… Read the rest