Weeknote #60 (20251109-20251115)

meta

I had most of this written up, and then during my usual Sunday afternoon revise-and-publish time, I was on a plane …and then I just plumb forgot. Whoops.

did

  • Had a nice catchup phone call with an old friend, who I hadn’t talked to in far too long
  • Took the opportunity of the Tuesday holiday to put in a quality couple of hours at the gym, which felt good
  • Thought a lot — but not quite to the point of actually writing about it — about the differences between a recipe blog and a cooking blog, and what direction I want to take recipes.genehack.org

read

  • “In Praise of dhh”

    I have good news for you, though: assholes are a minority. People of conscience, people with good will and good intentions have always outnumbered psychopaths and sycophants. It might not feel that way but that’s because psychopaths have a structural advantage: normal people aren’t obsessed with climbing hierarchies and dominating others.

    Based on the author’s follow-up toot, this didn’t get the desired reception from the Rails core crowd, sadly.

  • “Be a Magpie. You’ll Get More Done.”

    We all want the security of following a proven system, the confidence that comes from doing things “the right way.” I understand that impulse. There’s comfort in both structure and in knowing that thousands of people have followed this path before and found success. But systems become crutches when we let them override our own judgment about what actually helps versus what’s just system maintenance for its own sake.

  • “I Want You to Understand Chicago”

    Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again.

  • “Talking Oglaf with Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne: ‘We’d stay up all night drawing stuff to make each other laugh’”

    No pull-quotes from this one, you either know Oglaf or you don’t, and if you don’t, you should. (Just not, ya know, at work…)

  • “Ten recommendations for creating usable bioinformatics command line software”

    This is an older paper (2013, so only 2 years ago, right? RIGHT?!?) that I’m cleaning out of my queue from $JOB[-1], but the ten recommendations are still completely relevant, not only for folks developing bioinfomatics CLI stuff, but any CLI stuff.

watched

  • The Timbers season, as it came to a rather disappointing end
  • Criminal Minds binge with TheWife, into S8

cooked

  • Sunday: grilled steaks, with side salad
  • Monday: chicken tortilla soup
  • Tuesday: braised oxtail over mash with pan gravy
  • Thursday: halibut en papillote, asparagus
  • Saturday: roast chicken, green beans

looking forward to

In Austin next week for work!