When I got the news that Linux Journal has ceased publication, I had to take a moment. I’d been published through them a few times in the early naughts, had worked for the parent company at LinuxGazette.com and A42.com, had met some of the coworkers over the distances and had hung out at Phil Hughes, the former publisher, in Estelli where I broke his carafe and had to get a new one… before I could speak Spanish well enough to know that carafe in Spanish is carafe.

2005 was a pretty good year for me, transformative in many ways. It was great to work with so many people rowing in the same direction; that I went off in my own direction again as I have done over the years speaks more to my own life. SSC is good people, and were the right team for a time for me.

It wasn’t that I expected Linux Journal to last forever. I’d visit the site now and again, but my own path had lead me into Drupal, back into C++, back into VB, into corporate .Net – or better, ugly stabs at using .Net for things that Linux would have been better at. Bills are bills. The down-turned economy (thank you, banks) had me doing things I didn’t like doing, where work was work to do.

I know people that I knew there had since moved on. My Costa Rican connection had gone on to Wisconsin, my Panamanian friends are half in Florida and half in parts unknown, last making biodiesel. It’s easy to wax nostalgic about there and then.

That’s the trouble with the digital age. Things change faster, and we have to change faster than them to stay afloat – and I know that LJ was trying to do just that while I was there (some of the stuff I worked on and advised the publisher on) just as we all do in our lives. And sometimes entropy catches up with us.

But there’s a glimmer of hope in there. Maybe they’ll find a way. It’s hard to say what will happen, but you don’t announce your own demise lightly.

Either way, it is the end of an era. It’s also the beginning of a new one, whatever it may be. That’s just writing and publishing in a digital age.