For the latest, follow Just Here for the Lulz on X! @therealjhftl

If pressed, I'd probably call myself an engineer. Unfortunately, the word engineer has become so overused that it's lost much...most...just about all of its meaning. Given that, it may be more useful to describe my profession and avocation as navigator: That is, I blaze trails between what is and what, optimally, could be.

Getting to an optimal solution is never easy, and always involves tradeoffs. But the fascinating thing is that technology is rarely the problem. The real challenges are the way ideas and solutions are received by the teams charged with implementing them as well as the larger community.

Responses tend to be polarized, partisan, and, if I can be delicate, strongly held. The effort of finding and walking the middle ground between the extremes is probably the most significant drag on efforts to deliver excellent technical solutions that are good enough.

This polarization (maybe tribalism is a better word), is not unique to engineering or technology teams. It's everywhere. In every aspect of society. As Ryan Holiday noted in Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (which, if you haven't read, you should), it's not sex that sells, it's antagonism. People love to have someone or something to hate. The holy wars (and warriors are everywhere): Rock vs. Disco, Windows vs. Mac, Republican vs. Democrat...the list could go on ad nauseam. And that's great, if you're selling clicks. For the rest of us, caught in the crossfire, not so much.

Just Here for the Lulz is the result of a bolt of enlightenment: Most of the events and perspectives that divide us are, when reduced to their essentials, funny. And not just funny, but funny in a slapstick or Vaudeville way.

All of that is to say that Just Here for the Lulz's goal is to offer an alternative way to understand events: A way that is, hopefully, humorous, human, and that advances all of us on the path toward an optimal solution.

Stick around for the lulz!