Weeknote #102 (20260906-20260912)

meta

A short week that didn’t end up feeling all that short, in the end. Long but unexceptional, mostly work, mostly routine. Meh.

did

  • Sunday, I updated my now page
  • Monday, Labor Day laziness bled into day-delayed Sunday scaries
  • Thursday, our team took third place at pub trivia again — but not until I won a dance-off, because we were originally tied with another team
  • The garden is pretty close to officially reaching “disappointment” stage — some of the cherry tomatoes are fine, we got some decent basil (but it overflowered and I’ve been lazy about pinching those back), but most of the larger tomatoes have blossom end rot, the Romaine all bolted after the first heat spike, and the pepper yield has been pretty low. I think I learned things, and hopefully next year goes better…

read

  • Finished up Heaven’s River and started the new Bobiverse book, Not Until We Are All Lost

  • “Bad Vibes Coding”

    When I write something that I have a dozen times before, and it works the first time, that’s the purest dopamine hit I get as a programmer. It’s all of the rewards of having something working, without the struggle. And it’s mine. It takes me back, Ratatouille-style, to when I was sitting in front of a Commodore 64 hooked up to an old TV set, typing in programs from a BASIC tutorial, learning how it all works. Being able to do it without thinking much about it means that I’ve learned it, that it’s a part of me, and there’s been a point to all of the repetition.

  • “Our Age of Silicon is Collapsing”

    It strikes me that the culture of the technology sector has preserved so much of the contemptuous, isolated nerd culture that thrived when computer science was still a niche discipline. When I grew up, being into computers made you a geek and it was not exactly a recipe for popularity. Subcultures tend naturally to grow via exclusion, but some foster egalitarianism while others tend to reify the hiearchical structures that pushed them to the fringes in the first place. Nerd culture was certainly the latter. It was competitive instead of collaborative, contemptuous instead of complimentary. That culture has persisted through the various generations of waging war on codes of conduct, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), or even on women in the workplace.

  • Current unread bookmark count: 169 (cheated a little here and deleted a handful that started 404-ing since I originally saved them)

watched

  • Finally finished off S3 in our Ted Lasso re-watch and moved into S4; by the end of the week we were caught up
  • Timbers versus St. Louis City on Wednesday was a wild ride; the Saturday match versus Dallas was a sad one

cooked

  • Monday: grilled sausages, caprese salad
  • Tuesday: mesquite-grilled tomato-tomatillo salsa, for mesquite-grilled chicken tacos
  • Wednesday: hamburgers
  • Friday: seared tuna