Holy shit, this is me!

A couple things to clarify:

I posted the original issue as a minor complaint about the docker cli and promptly forgot about it. I never expected it to get any traction or follow-up. At the time I posted it, I was working as a contractor for my former full time employer. I had left full-time work there in early 2017 to attend the full-time program at the (sadly now-defunct) Furniture Institute of Massachusetts[0].

I finished that program in early 2019, and split my time between commission work and part time work for other woodworkers. Like software, in woodworking there are things you learn at school and things you learn doing it for money.

In early 2020 (which now feels like a million years ago), my partner and I left the Boston area for her to take a job in the northern hinterlands of NH.

It's been an interesting year to say the least: A lot of the opportunities I was hoping to have to publicize my business have been canceled (craft shows and fairs, open studios, etc) due to the pandemic. I'm fortunate to have brought a couple of paid commissions with me when we moved. Owing to the pandemic, the schedule on them has been protracted. I was going back and forth to Boston to fulfill a teaching obligation until early March. Then the pandemic hit, and all of my suppliers and my shared shop space[1] closed down for a couple months.

Just before the shared shop closed, I grabbed my workbench and set it up in my living room. The place we're renting doesn't have a basement, garage, or anything resembling shop space, so that was the least bad option. I bought wood for a couple of house projects, and got going working entirely by hand. The first project was a desk for my partner. I built it following the design for a staked work table from the Anarchist's Design Book[2]. She's been working at it since, and we've been doing our best to manage my noise and her Zoom calls separated by perhaps as much as 20 feet.

Sometime in late May or early June things started opening up slowly. I bought wood for those projects, and the shared shop space began operating with extremely limited hours. I've wrapped up those couple of projects, and honestly, the next thing on my TODO list is to spend some time doing some business planning, re-shooting some of my earlier work, and updating my website[3]. Bad timing on the pithy github comment on my part; had I known it'd hit the top of HN, I'd have made it after I updated the website!

If you're in the Boston area and would like to see some of my work, the Cabinet on Stand shown on my website is on display at the Fuller Craft Museum[4] in Brockton, MA through November 8th. It feels a bit weird to mention it, but that piece is also for sale through the museum. Purchasing it supports not only me, but also the museum. They were closed for a long time this year as a result of the pandemic, and like a great many of our cultural institutions, they're hurting. They laid off the curator for the exhibit my piece is in due to budget issues.

If I can offer everybody only one thing to get out of this, it's that our cultural institutions live a fairly fragile and perilous existence, particularly the smaller ones. The Wharton Esherick Museum[5] in the Philadelphia area is also taking a beating. Please, please, please take some time to support these institutions. A lot of our shared culture doesn't make it to the MFA. Those headline institutions show a limited subset of stuff; there's so much of value in the smaller museums, galleries, and historical societies.

[0] http://furnituremakingclasses.com

[1] https://claremontmakerspace.org

[2] https://lostartpress.com/collections/books/products/the-anar...

[3] https://longwalkwoodworking.com

[4] https://fullercraft.org/event/2020-biennial-members-exhibiti...

[5] https://whartonesherickmuseum.org