The personal blog of Scott Polhemus

Yes, that title is a mouthful (I’ll just call it "The Mask of Fear" from here on out). Yes, this is a tertiary piece of media in one of the biggest franchises in entertainment history that assumes a certain level of familiarity with the broad strokes of the pre-existing narrative to fully appreciate. Yes, the massive corporation that now owns this intellectual property (and thus profits from it) has little ground to stand on when it comes to defying real-world injustices not unlike the ones depicted in its stories. None of this takes away from the fact that the book is absolute fire.

There’s a scene in Spider-Man 2 (2004) where Peter Parker has, for the time being, given up the superhero gig. He’s been walking on air from that weight being lifted off his shoulders, but he soon learns that abdicating responsibility is not the same thing as freedom. As usual it falls to his Aunt May to talk some sense into him. Thanks to its use in the opening of the film’s theatrical trailer, Rosemary Harris’ reading of one key line is indelibly etched into my brain.

The blatantly fascist owners of certain established-but-declining social networks like to wax poetic about a world where everything you do online might take place within their own restrictive ecosystems of algorithm-driven bullshit. They call it the dream of the “everything app”. For a while this felt like the inevitable conclusion to the direction the web was heading, with content becoming more closed off inside the “walled gardens” of these platforms and less accessible as a result. Thankfully, we’re starting to see a different and more open future for the web taking shape.

Have you ever shed tears over a comic book? I'm not ashamed to admit that I have. For me it was Zeb Wells’ beautifully written issue 11 of Avenging Spider-Man with art by Steve Dillon and Frank Martin, a stunning meditation on overcoming grief that I discovered recently at just the moment when I needed it most.

Tech debt is the boogeyman of every fast-paced software team. It's the malicious and secretive force lurking in the corners of your legacy codebase waiting to spring bugs and performance issues onto poor defenseless users when they least expect it, or the necessary evil you pay sacrifice to in service to the ever-demanding roll of forward progress. As an engineer and as a leader, I've often been put in the position of balancing the harsh realities of time constraints and resource pressures squarely in opposition to the critical need to architect technical systems for the ability to scale well and be maintained by other engineers for the foreseeable future.

I recently decided to start writing more, so naturally one of my first steps in procrastinating from actually doing so was to figure out how to set up a custom website for my blog in 2024. While I could easily spin up an account on one of the many platforms that exist these days which allow for “no-code” online publishing, where’s the fun in that? I’m a software developer by trade, and if there’s one thing we’re great at it’s taking a simple problem and heavily over-engineering a solution.