Retiring from 'sad' on twitter

_posts/2019-01-01-retiring-from-sadness.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Retiring from 'sad' on twitter"
+tags:
+- opinion
+---
+
+Before moving to San Francisco an older friend had given me the name, which I
+carried as the title on my first business card: "Angry Young Man." I had a
+tendency to practice "anger-driven development" wherein I would stay up late
+hacking away, determined to make something less shitty. I don't think I have
+ever truly been an angry person, so let's call it "playful cynicism." I used
+this energy to develop two characters on Twitter through which I could vent my
+frustrations and make jokes about day-to-day stupidity in the tech industry. The most
+popular character and certainly my favorite:
+[**sadserver**](https://twitter.com/sadserver) and its relative which I added
+later on [**sadoperator**](https://twitter.com/sadoperator), are as of today
+effectively _retired_.
+
+When I originally developed both of those characters, I was spending an
+inordinate amount of time maintaining systems. Like most who work in
+infrastructure and automation, I tended to be overworked and underappreciated,
+or at least I believed I was. 
+
+@sadserver was the dry, sarcastic, and irreverent personification of the
+servers I was trying to work on. Often times the jokes or retorts came from
+real life situations where I had inadvertently screwed something up, and
+@sadserver would playfully mock my frustrations. As I developed
+the character further, it took on a life of its own. As my career progressed, I
+spent less time working directly with infrastructure and more time working in
+the no-man's land between Operations and Development, an uncanny valley of
+hilarity which further fueled @sadserver's discontent and lamentations. 
+
+I fancied myself as a "Dev who could speak Ops" and created a complementary
+character @sadoperator. Unlike @sadserver, @sadoperator was meant to be a real
+person. Somebody who frankly, is sick of your shit. A year or two after I
+created @sadoperator I started to burn out, but didn't know it at the time. The
+character became more cynical, saying many of the things I was thinking during
+meetings-with-no-end, responding to the news with sarcastic eye rolls, and
+becoming increasingly combative towards "management" and "dev" who existed as
+foils for the stories I wanted to tell. @sadoperator was a caricature of my own
+internal thought processes. Perhaps not the most healthy outlet, but for quite
+a while it continued to make me laugh.
+
+As I recovered from burn out I continued to create content for both characters,
+but to do so I would have to indulge in cynicism even if I was really having a
+great day. I would look at something happening on twitter, I would let my eyes
+lose focus and put myself into a negative frame of mind; often times I would
+even get a chill. Soon enough I would arrive at a witty retort or comment to
+share with the tens of thousands of people following one of the two accounts. I
+felt almost like I was vacationing in a place of despair, all for the sake
+giggles on the internet.
+
+I'm no longer angry like I once was. And I have actively worked on my own
+mental health, working to recognize the caustic effects of sarcasm and comedic
+cynicism. While I can still laugh at the tweets written over the last many
+years, I do not delight in writing them anymore.
+
+It's time to retire.
+
+---
+
+It has been difficult to decide what I should do with these accounts. Years ago I
+considered selling merchandise featuring some of the tweets. My first idea was
+to take [this tweet](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/558022551369043968):
+
+
+> _it's not "corruption", it's a database index REMIX._
+
+
+I thought that an 80's stylized MySQL dolphin standing at a couple of
+turntables would have been perfect, but I could never find the right designer.
+I eventually gave up on the idea of monetizing any of this silliness and
+instead decided to ride it out, enjoying it while it lasted.
+
+Much of the other content I still am very proud of and is worth _something_ at
+least to me, such as my [Twas the night before
+Opsmas](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8109885)
+poem which I wrote in one sitting five years ago, lounging in rented cabin
+during a truly wonderful family Christmas vacation.
+
+Or [the short story I
+wrote](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/910227437983645696) after mistyping some `curl` incantation to a
+misbehaving server:
+
+> _A connection is established on port 80.
+>
+> After a moment, four-bytes are received.
+>
+> h
+> e
+> l
+> p
+>
+> I terminate the connection.
+> 
+> Bad request._
+
+
+The praise for that story from one of my own favorite accounts, [Micro SF/F
+stories](https://twitter.com/MicroSFF/status/910234372380479488) was
+exhilarating.
+
+Another dystopian [short
+story](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/981555646419017728), inspired by
+the Google fall from grace and their "do no evil" motto which still plucks at
+my heart strings
+
+
+> _They set out to make the world a better place.
+>
+> Building more technology, more automation.
+>
+> Optimizing it all, for sake of the machines.
+>
+> Finished, the people had all gone.
+>
+> Surrounded by their machines, they felt alone.
+>
+> The world had become a better place.
+>
+>
+> Only not for them._
+
+There are [years](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/523519779470991361)
+[of](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/174554682621042688)
+[tweets](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/1024045823384907776) [which](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/1011652439303262208) [still](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/598598544296050688) [make](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/880112111279497216) [me](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/825126193544388608) [laugh](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/735135582997909505), and some still make me [sad](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/727879508984877056).
+
+Twitter is an interesting medium in which to tell stories, and I thoroughly
+enjoyed the challenges of telling stories or making jokes within its
+constraints.
+
+
+In the end, both of these characters served primarily to entertain myself and
+some of my colleagues, a number of whom didn't know who was the man behind the
+mask. It was always hard to hide a smile when somebody would share one of my
+tweets in an internal work chat. "omg too real!"
+
+Indeed :)
+
+
+---
+
+
+I don't plan on deleting the accounts or selling them off to anybody, instead I
+am releasing all the content I have ever created on Twitter for these two
+characters under the [Creative Commons Attribution-ShareALike
+4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) license.
+
+
+* [**@sadserver**](/files/sadserver.json)
+* [**@sadoperator**](/files/sadoperator.json)
+
+
+Please share, remix, or use these however you would like. If you use these
+tweets to sell something or make money in some way, please consider donating
+profits to the [Electronic Frontier Foundation](https://eff.org).
+
+---
+
+I'll leave you with [this
+tweet](https://twitter.com/sadserver/status/674264875259052032), potentially my
+all-time favorite dark-but-true tweet.
+
+
+Please don't take things too seriously and do try to find reasons to be happy.