Since his term began, my retirement has probably slipped about a year or so, and so much further to go.

Like I get and appreciate the CLI and for networking, that’s pretty much all I’m using anyway, but I am shocked that enterprise networking doesn’t even bother to do any GUI. Once upon a time Mellanox Onyx bothered to do a GUI and I could see some people light up, finally an enterprise switch that would let them do some stuff from a GUI. Then nVidia bought them and Cumulus and ditched their GUI.

There’s this kind of weird “turn in your geek card” culture about rejecting GUIs, but there’s a good amount of the market that want at least the option, even if they frankly are a bit ashamed to admit it. You definitely have to move beyond GUI if you want your tasks to scale, but not every engagement witih the technology needs to scale.

In a pretty high end high tech company, there’s still lots of people who see a terminal and think “ha hah, they are still stuck in old mainframe stuff like you used to see in the movies”.

My team determined long ago that we have to have two user experiences for our team to be taken seriously.

A GUI to mostly convince our own managers that it’s serious stuff. Also to convince clients who have execs make the purchasing decisions without consulting the people that will actually use it.

An API, mostly to appease people who say they want API, occasionally used.

A CLI to wrap that API, which is what 99% of the customers use 95% of the time (this target demographic is niche.

Admittedly, there’s a couple of GUI elements we created that are handy compared to what we can do from CLI, from visualizations to a quicker UI to iterate on some domain specific data. But most of the “get stuff done” is just so much more straightforward to do in CLI.

It’s worth a shot, but by and large the more reasonable conservatives are generally no where near those communities. Certainly the moderation of those communities are fanatic about Trump. The conservatives that you might have hoped to call Trump on his stuff have calculated that they can’t afford to challenge Trump even if they personally think he is in the wrong. The ones that have calculated otherwise have been pushed out of the conservative community.

Even my work has better OPSEC on a random stupid meeting with nothing interesting. They review every attendee to make sure no one unexpected is in the chat.