Weeknote #17 (20250112-20250118)

meta

Relatively solid week, I think? Starting to get into the swing of 2025, anyway.

did

  • busy week at work:
    • reviewed all the open augur and auspice issues
    • helped finalize an external PR fixing a bug in work’s website — the fact that my job is largely contributing, and helping others to contribute, to Open Source projects, continues to be pretty damn awesome
    • added a cool new avian flu outbreak narrative to the featured analyses on work’s website splash page
  • updated my Mastodon server to v4.3.3 and my Forgejo server to v10.0.0 — big upgrade week!

read

  • Egoless Engineering — this was really good, highly recommend this one:

    I think there’s an industry instinct that misery gets results. I think this is mistaken. Misery is a shitty proxy metric for results.

  • Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React — this one is also excellent, this is about the point where I muttered “fuck YES” under my breath:

    No other modern frontend framework is as stubbornly incompatible with the platform as React is.

  • If Not React, Then What? — because I was apparently on a React-hating kick when I bookmarked this stuff to read later?

    The truth is that every single package that is part of a repo’s devDependencies is, or will be, fully owned by the consumer of the package. The only bulwark against uncomfortable surprises is to consider NPM dependencies a high-interest loan collateralized by future engineering capacity.

watched

  • finished NCIS: Hawai’i
  • started NCIS: Sydney, which, interestingly, is an Australian-made NCIS spin-off, which, unfortunately, verges on self-parody most of the time

cooked

photo

Bumperstickers on the back of a Subaru, inccluding one reading "SubUWU", as seen in Salem, OR

Pretty much can’t even think of the word “subUWU” without giggling.