Weeknote #26 (20250316-20250322)

meta

I dunno, it was a week?

did

  • Slept way in on Sunday — not sure if it was lingering vaccine side effects or if discovering some non-painful sleeping positions led my body to decide it was time to catch up on what it has been missing out on — not at all how I planned to spend the day, but presumably I needed the rest?
  • Made some progress on the rubella build at work
  • Hosted a Hack Salem social meetup on Wednesday, which was attended by a whole grand total of one other person. Starting to wonder if maybe I should accept that the group had a good run, and just let it fade away…
  • Opened a couple PRs for work’s website, continuing to push on the conversion from Next.js’s Pages Router to the App Router
  • Saturday was the grand re-opening of Epilogue in their new location, and the weather ended up being unexpectedly nice, so I rode the ebike over there, had a cheesesteak and a beer, enjoyed a mystery shot, and then wrapped up the afternoon by riding back home via a couple taphouses for “hydration” stops. It was a good Saturday

exercise & shoulder recovery

  • Sunday: shoulder stretches
  • Monday: shoulder stretches in the morning; gym (shoulder stuff, bicep curls, Bulgarian split squats) in the afternoon
  • Tuesday: shoulder stretches in the morning; 2 mile walk in the afternoon
  • Wednesday: PT appointment in the morning; ended up not doing anything in the afternoon as my shoulder was extremely sore
  • Thursday: shoulder stretches in the morning; gym (shoulder stuff, deadlift, Zottman curls) in the afternoon
  • Friday: shoulder stretches in the morning
  • Saturday: skipped morning stretches, but mid-day gym (shoulder work, ezbar curls, Bulgarian split squats), followed by ~9 miles of bike riding (with a couple taphouse stops for “hydration”)

read

(My “to-read” bookmark backlog stands at 334 items as of the end of this week deep sigh)

  • I finished Killing Floor, the first Jack Reacher novel. It was a solid thriller; I will probably read more of them, I expect

  • Do One Thing

    This is something far beyond simple doomscrolling, this is full-on doom living. And it’s completely untenable. And yet most of the time it feels impossible to shake.

    As I mentioned on Fedi, this one was a very good read for me right at this particular time, and I expect I will return to this post over and over in the coming months

  • Separation of concerns in a bug tracker

    I think all three of these rants arise from the same root cause. A record in a typical bug tracker does double duty: it records factual information about a bug that exists, and it also records plans and intentions. Sometimes these go naturally together, but not always – and when they don’t, all of the problems above arise

    There’s some interesting ideas in here, but I also kinda feel like the last time I got to set up a Jira-based tracking system from scratch, I ended up with 80% of this collection of requirements with much less than 20% of the work of writing all the code myself — but I also feel like there’s the grain — which is to say, the irritant — of a real pearl in this rant

  • Quality, Maintenance & Craft

    In this current moment with AI reaching a fever pitch in the industry, there’s a palpable tension between those of us who have been working on the Internet for decades, and the young upstarts embracing vibe coding and building with almost completely generative codebases.

    Many of us possess deep knowledge and experience, having journeyed through different outcomes and encountered those moments when things worsen or improve.

    We design and code for better, and we design and code because we’re practicing a craft for our lifetimes: Internet shokunin.

    Yeah, this one resonated.

listened

watched

  • “The Terrifying Longevity of Ideas”, Benno Rice, PyCon AU 2023
  • Continuing to binge NCIS: New Orleans with TheWife of an evening; we’re into S5 at this point
  • A few episodes of Reacher S1, with TheWife
  • Caught both the Thorns match on Friday (they looked decent, but ended with a 1-1 draw) and the Timbers on Saturday (somehow pulled out a 3-nil away match victory but still felt pretty disjointed on the pitch)

cooked

photo

a bike ride for a cheesesteak and a beer? hell yeah.

a bike ride for a cheesesteak and a beer? hell yeah.

looking forward to

We’re going to have another burst of spring weather early next week; I’m looking forward to a couple nice days (before the rain comes back, because this is still but Faux Spring…)