I flew to Detroit yesterday for a job interview. The interview went fine. The city is what stuck with me.
I’d been hearing about Detroit’s decline for as long as I can remember. Since the crash, at least. People I talked to while I was there traced it further back, to the crack epidemic, to decades of disinvestment before that. The specifics of when it started matter less than what it looks like now: city blocks with a single house surrounded by nothing but grass, and that house itself falling apart. Block after block of it.
My father-in-law Allen passed away last week after a cardiac event. His funeral is this Saturday.
After he died, my mother-in-law asked if I could engrave something for the service. I said yes before I fully understood what I was agreeing to. I was picturing a wooden urn, maybe some text on a keepsake box. Something I could knock out on the CNC in an evening.
What she actually wanted was an engraved .30-06 bullet casing for every guest at the funeral. Allen loved guns, and she wanted everyone who showed up to take home a piece of brass with his name on it.
I’ve been building the complete North American Sega Genesis collection for about a decade now. That’s a story for another time, but it means I stream retro games on Twitch, dump ROMs for preservation, and flash homebrew onto dev carts. The tool for all of that is krikzz’s FlashKit MD programmer, a small board that reads and writes Genesis/Mega Drive carts over USB serial.
The problem is that krikzz’s client only runs on Windows. The original C# code targets an old .NET Framework, uses WinForms, and calls into Windows-specific serial APIs. If you’re on Linux or macOS, your options are a VM or a dedicated Windows box just for cart work.
I’ve been a platform engineer for twenty years across eight companies. The pattern is always the same: arrive, find the hard problem, build the thing, scale it.