Weeknote #64 (20251207-20251213)

meta

Sixty-fourth weeknote? Holy powers-of-two, Batman.

did

This was another mostly head-down in the mud at work, as I continue to get spun up on this new (still not HR official…) managerial role. Frens, it is a bunch and it’s not leaving a whole lot of headspace for anything else.

We did do one cool thing this week: Friday night we visited Bryn Mawr Vineyards for the December Peak Harvest dinner. It was amazing, you missed out.

read

  • “thirty-six years later”

    There’s often a sense that women in the tech world make a big deal out of small events. But the myriad ways in which they are told their presence is illegitimate, that tells them that they don’t belong, is a constant pressure pushing them towards leaving technology (and game journalism, and the public sphere).

  • “They have to be able to talk about us without us”

    This is an extremely potent distillation of something I’m noticing about my new workplace:

    At nearly every organization where I’ve been in charge of onboarding team members in the last decade or so, one of the first messages we’ve presented to our new colleagues is, “We are disciplined communicators!” It’s a message that they hopefully get to hear as a joyous declaration, and as an assertion of our shared values. I always try to explicitly instill this value into teams I work with because, first, it’s good to communicate values explicitly, but also because this is a concept that is very seldom directly stated.

    It is ironic that this statement usually goes unsaid, because nearly everyone who pays attention to culture understands the vital importance of disciplined communications. Brands that are strictly consistent in their use of things like logos, type, colors, and imagery get such wildly-outsized cultural impact in exchange for relatively modest investment that it’s mind-boggling to me that more organizations don’t insist on following suit. Similarly, institutions that develop and strictly enforce a standard tone of voice and way of communicating (even if the tone itself is playful or casual) capture an incredibly valuable opportunity at minimal additional cost relative to how much everyone’s already spending on internal and external communications.

  • “Pony Famous” is a much pithier way of describing something we used to say back in the Olde Skööl Weblog Days: “Warhol got it wrong, in the future everybody will be famous for 15 people”

  • “Extending Git Functionality” is one of those “you don’t need it unless you need it but if you need it, you’ll want to look at this” blog posts, about just what it says in the title

listened

The Extasies - Transmission

watched

Still grinding Criminal Minds with TheWife; we’re into season 10

cooked

looking forward to

I’m off the last two weeks of the year, and you better believe I’ve got a mental countdown going… also, Mx18 returns from college this coming week, right before they magically transform into Mx19!