Monthly Archives: April 2015

On Job and Career Stagnation

Reflecting on my career as a government contractor in the DoD, I feel as though SAIC/Leidos didn’t value me as much as AppNexus values me as an employee. AppNexus is invested in my growth and demonstrates it through training opportunities, educational incentives and growth opportunities.

A piece of advice, free, from me to you: if you’re in a job that won’t train you, won’t improve you, doesn’t invest in your success and doesn’t seem to value that humans can learn, grow and change, do you yourself a favor and find a different job.  It’s easy to clock your 8 hours and collect your paycheck, but you’ll probably find that the domain you practice has passed you by while you’ve been asleep at the wheel.  When you finally decide to leave, you’ll have a difficult time finding something new because all of your skills are old or irrelevant and all of your experience applies to the world 10 years ago.

TL,DR; Don’t stagnate at your job just because it’s comfortable.

On Apple and Aperture

I’m normally very deferential to Apple Inc.​, having become accustomed to their particular ecosystem, offerings and lifecycle over the last 10 years or so. I paid full-price for the original release of Aperture, and that’s proving to be a mistake.

It’s beginning to look like Apple is abandoning the battlefield with regards to a professional photo asset management and image editor application. I’ve used the new Photos for a bit, and it lacks a lot of features and capabilities that I would need to continue using an Apple platform for my photos.

This leaves me in a sticky situation, that of vendor lock-in. Any migration away from Apple’s platform presents difficulties in preserving any post-processing steps such as exposure changes, color-balance shifts, crops, and a multitude of other types of edits.

To free myself from that lock-in, I would either have to re-edit the pictures and hope that they vaguely resembled the original sets of edits that were originally presented to my clients, or I would play the odds of hoping that none of my clients ever wanted reprocessed images. A very long-shot would be Adobe riding in on a white horse with the ability to migrate edits from Aperture.

On a more holistic level, this has really soured me to Apple and their claim to offer professional-level A/V tools. No professional can afford to perform a wholesale platform migration every 3 years, and no software company should ask there customers to do so.