Category Archives: Week.In.Review

Week 2203

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The world is still nuts. The right wing forces in the government are attacking Dr. Fauci. Sinclair media, who own a huge percentage of local news tv stations, is going to release a truly insane conspiracy report alleging that Dr. Fauci is responsible somehow for creating the coronavirus. Tons of people are going to see it. One of my friends has been whatsapping me some really disturbing stuff that makes me worry about him – ‘context’ around the police beating a guy in a wheelchair, ‘privilege’ from some country music guy, etc.

Biden said Trump was the first racist president, ignoring the one who actually enslaved human beings. It’s gonna be a long 4 years even if Trump loses. It’s incredibly depressing because I really think Biden can screw this up, but even if he wins, he’s pretty conservative and will probably be a really effective block to meaningful change.

Effective work will have to bubble up at city and state levels before it makes it to a federal level.

Family

We bought a car! Now we own a hybrid Rav 4 and it’s pretty cool! Sam did tons of work and found a deal with 0 down, 0% financing for 5 years. So it’s just incredibly easy on us and cheaper than the Budget monthly car rental we’d been doing. I’ve put in a dash cam and it’s a pretty good generic car. I got us the car insurance as well and we saved a few hundred bucks by returning the rental car early. Celebrated with some Aperol Spritz’s and they are STILL the reigning champ drink of the summer!

Got an offer on one of the Brooklyn apartments and accepted it – looking to get the deposit on it and get into contract! Now we’re wondering do we really want to sell the last one or turn it into a rental instead or what. (I really love living there, I just don’t think we can fit back into it.)

Did a little more bike riding with Zebus – she wanted to ride her bike all the way to the bakery to get a cookie! I’m so impressed with her. She did it, too!

Swale found some educational plugin for minecraft that lets you do chemistry, found the recipe for latex and how to make balloons and then tied balloons to chickens so they could fly. He’s also been saying just the sweetest stuff to me. Lots of I-love-you’s and his own special praise to me.

We spent a $60 gift card from work on a crazy strong blender from Cuisinart and its grrrreat. Already made some milkshakes and smoothies and frozen margs.

My Laptop crashed! I was going to have to ship it out for a month to get fixed, but then it started working! That’s terrifying. Good thing I do a lot of git-push on my repos, back up important stuff to our Synology DiskStation NAS. I did a bunch of work as I set up a new account for work on Sam’s laptop to get my jumpstart script to be smoother on OSX.

DIY

Sam found a cool wallpaper and we struggled it up in the downstairs bathroom and it looks great and I never want to do wallpaper again. It’s so tricky!

In the backyard I got up on a ladder with a pole saw and cut down some branches from the mulberry tree in the backyard, months too late to save the trampoline under it from turning into a giant mulberry collecter/fermenter. I either need to get a sawzall or a mini chainsaw or something to deal with all the branches – my small tension saw isn’t realllly cutting it for this many cuts.

Kinda stalled on the patio for a while.

We’ve foamed up some cable holes in the walls, need to go spackle and paint them. Also started adding trim to the bottom of the bathroom sink cabinet – trimmed off one of the cabinet shims with a Dremel to make the trim flush. Also put in some under-sink rolling trash and recycling cans in the kitchen and put handles on the cabinets.

Reading

Fun week! I’ve put http://www.morelightmorelight.com/2020/07/24/after-the-cops/ in my Kobo, along with a new Annabel Scheme book by Robin Sloan. (I love a book that comes with a makefile to get an epub, but you can read it online if that’s not your jam.

Work

Did some stuff around making documentation easier, and thinking about how to make your docs and walkthroughs look good, but be testable. Nobody likes a stale documentation site! Also getting ready to launch in the UK. Office re-opening is postponed until at least September. I don’t see it happening.

Nerdery

I installed Regolith as a tiling window manager for my laptop and it seems pretty cool. Took a little while to get used to, but I’m wondering why it isn’t easier to just drag windows into tiling window manager with the mouse. I spend a fair amount of time fiddling with things to get them looking right, so why is this better then just dragging a bunch of windows into the right spot?

If you’ve got a terminal open right now try this:

http://wttr.in/?format=v2

Pretty cool! They have tons of formats available so you could make widgets on your desktop or tmux statusline.

Week 2202

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In the past week, the federal government used some very flimsy excuses to send federal “police” into Portland and take protestors into unmarked vans without identifying themselves. The scary times have gotten even scarier, the authoritarianism even more blatant. There is so much awful stuff going on that I can’t even take in all of it, much less do meaningful work on it. I’m trying to just do small things often. I’m trying to do things like donate to campaigns that will help, sign petitions, elevate small things that are going to turn into big things.

Since we’ve donated some large sums in the past, I sometimes get directly called by candidates. I resolved to take time to ask them specific questions about things that matter here since I often get called by them when I’m changing diapers or doing other family stuff. I spoke with Alex Morse, who is a Justice Democrat who is running for congress – he’s endorsed by Jamaal Bowman (who just beat Eliot Engel). We talked about his work as a mayor in western Massachusetts, dealing with police unions, restorative justice and combating systemic racism when you are the executive – he’s notable I think for actually working on these things. I also took some time to petition Nextdoor, a social network where local racism is really evident, to halt work with Police departments. Features like “send this to my police” really don’t take into account what happens after the police show up, and why this isn’t something to do lightly.

Family

We paid off the ticket from the fourth, met with a guy about solar panels ( we don’t use enough energy to justify the cost even with multiple incentives from the state). We’re also looking for electricians to add some outside outlets and a ceiling fan in the living room.

We sorted out better schedules for me to work and be with the family predictably during the day. It’s easy to both work forever when it’s in the house or to bunk off when something cute is happening. Trying to be balanced, so we solved it with a gCal that Sam can see with times that are marked out of office on my work calendar. That way it’s easier to know when “I’m definitely working, don’t bother me” and when “let’s take a break and play”. Making it visible to work lets folks there plan around when they shouldn’t expect me to be available.

We got Swale and Zebus some bikes! They rode them! It is cute!

The Brooklyn apartments are getting some interest on the market – 25H at least has some people viewing it. 25J is where the bigger mortgage sits, so I hope that it pans out quickly as well.

Nerdery

I added some better color settings to Jumpstart – and made installing ruby gems safe, similar to what I did earlier for node.

Also set up 2 way syncing on the Synology NAS drives in brooklyn and upstate so that everything is backed up everywhere. For the meantime at least, the upstate is the new primary and brooklyn is the secondary. I tried out Ranger as a terminal file manager. Also, I made a dumb little script to make memes easier.

After I told folks about Pingplotter on the cesspool/hobby network reddit, it inspired Toazd to write an even more complete and colorful version of pingplotter.

Work

Highs and lows in the ladder of abstractions, highs and lows success wise.

I worked very high in the ladder of abstractions, transforming a large backlog of tasks into a program of new product features and a big revenue opportunity. At the same time I had a pull request submitted and accepted to fix a client issue. I got a great review ( we use OKRs to have quarterly conversations around progress, so it is sort of like a review), and then my laptop died!

It’s a sweet little lenovo yoga 920 and was running Ubuntu and Windows, I was loving using it. But it’s really disappointing for it to die hard after 2 years. To get it replaced involves shipping it out, going through a 3 day quarantine, up to 9 business days to fix, then 5-7 business days to ship back. I’m lucky to have enough spare laptops in the house that we were able to get Sam’s macbook hooked up. My 2013 macbook air would have been fine, but the thunderbolt port apparently doesn’t work (first time I’ve ever tried it!)

I hope when I get the Yoga back it won’t be wiped and I don’t have to go through a whole setup process again.

Week 2201

Week.In.Review, , , , , , ,

I zoomed with a crew of mostly ex PWP folks to catch up and drink a beer and remember our sweet trip to Stowe this winter, my last snow trip of the season. Also got lunch with Ian Sudderth, always a pleasure.

Fixed this website!

Back when letsencrypt was launching I was trying to get it to work here and broke my .well-known directory, which is also where you prove you own your website to keybase.io. Keybase told me it didn’t think I owned my website anymore. Trying to fix that ended up making the front page of this work, but no hyperlinks anywhere worked, because I suck at .htaccess, the magic format for manipulating apache webserver redirection rules. Eventually I just removed many “fixes” and hey it works and I won’t touch it again for a few years.

Released Pingplotter

I published it here, made a screencast, and posted it on reddit. I also wrote down my recipe for making the screencast in case I ever need to do that again or it could help some other nerd. (That will publish next week).

Got on Mastodon

I had a mastodon account back when it bloomed, but I lost it. I’m trying to get back into putting my energy into things I own or where I’m not the product and the Fediverse is the party to be at. It’s decentralized, hard to shut down and open source. I’m trying to blog more (maybe you noticed), toot more, tweet less. I’m randomly chose a mastodon server to join and now you can connect with me at https://hostux.social/@mattk

Come Join Mastodon! Right now I think the biggest problem is that I don’t know who I want to hear from or talk to, but I’m gonna take it easy and spend more time just getting to know people. This guy Jonathon posts really interesting stuff about Africa all the time!

Started selling our apartment

We probably need more room now. So we’re looking to sell our place in Brooklyn. I love that place but it’s hard to imagine moving back with 4 people to that two bedroom. I wanted to stay there a bit longer, but you gotta roll with the punches.

Sweaty stuff

I entered into the hyrox virtual championship and I am super outclassed there! Also got some wooden gymnast rings for pullups and put them up on the big tree out back.

No zombie runs in a while, want to get one of those tomorrow in the rain.

Buying a car

Sam is doing most of the work on this, but we’ve been renting a car for months now and there’s no clear end in sight. Our goal is to own a car of some sort before the next time we’d renew the rental car. If we move somewhere we don’t need a car, we can sell it. But it’s time to stop renting – this is gonna last a while.

Week 3048

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Code

I had a comment from someone about my previous enthusiasm for Ditz, a distributed issue tracker. I still love Ditz, but it didn’t have enough of a community to keep it going. However, that got me to look at what’s current in distributed issue tracking and I’m really liking git-bug, which is very robust and good.

Not only does the command line work, but there’s a really nice terminal ui.

There’s a decent web view as well, but it seems to be view only.

Distributed issue tracking is great for people like me who sometimes write code without a network connection. You have your code and your issues to work on all in the same place! It’s probably terrible for project that have lots of non-technical commandline using folks working on them.

Week 3047

Week.In.Review,

Family

OMG. I’m doing something right or Max is just having a better life. Last night he drew me these amazing cards.

Hearts around dad I love you
Hearts next to atrociously spelled “Dad I love you you are my favorite“

Code

Not much motion, but I’m hip deep in some clever stuff around re-exposing imports from one namespace to another and our Python3 conversions. We are into the details here and it’s always a lot of grind.

Food

OMG. My dude Ian Sudderth threw a birthday party at Momofuku Ssam. It was more food than I could eat, more drinks than I could drink and I biked home so full my guts hurt.

Week 3046

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Grunting and Sweating

Amazing Trainer Christina, Deepa from work and I went to Obstacle Athletics on Saturday and had a lot of fun in their grown up playground. I got to do a lot of wall vaults and monkey bar work, ran up some wavy walls, balanced on beams and traversed long wall climbs. All were pretty cool. I also finally got to a place with a high rope so I could practice rope climbs!

Also finally got back to biking in! It’s beeyoootiful out.

Got to go to Georgia’s birthday party afterward and had a really swell time with my peeps there.

Politics

I’d vote for Biden over Trump – but I really think Biden will lose. He’s not even as exciting as Hillary was. There’s no reason to vote for him, just reasons to vote against Trump. Makes me wish again for Ranked Choice Voting. I’d love to see someone who has some enthusiasm get the nomination.

Skimmed the debates and it seems like Warren did great in her night as a real standout, committing to Medicare for all. On the second night, I didn’t check out as much but it looks like Biden’s skeletons are starting to become more known in the mainstream.

Family

Last week of school for Max Lazer! He’s coming out of kindergarten. I got to read a bunch of material that had never made it home before from him!

A book from my dad and a book from my son

Max also has been back at his circuits and seems to have figured parallel and series circuits.

Max Lazer Rainbow Shield

Zeezus on the other hand may have to go to a reform school.

Week 3045

Week.In.Review,

Family

We did the IEP review for Maxwell and the school has agreed to defer to the CBST.

This means the Department of Education will take a shot at finding an appropriate school for him. If they can’t provide one, we will find one. The hope is we can get something within the school system, but if not, we’ll do what we need to.

Zelda is getting very verbal and very sweet. Last night she cuddled max and lay her head on his chest, and said she wanted to watch “my Mackie sleep”

Reading

The Fifth Risk was very good. Lost Gods lost me very early on.

The Fifth Risk

The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Well, that’s terrifying. This is almost like Lovecraft in that the unknown unknowns are huge lurking civilization ending monsters. Oy vey.

I started reading Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi and it’s very powerful and sad. A lot of it reminds me of Maxie’s struggles. The surges and changes he experiences and the way neither he nor we are prepared or have tools to help him but we muddle through as best we can – they match this poor girl’s struggles. Sometimes I want to abandon a book because it makes me feel too much and doesn’t feel like an adventure, and I’ve felt that with this book.

Grunting and Sweating

I’m going with trainer Christina and my work partner Deepa to an Obstacle Gym on Long Island this Saturday before coming back for birthday parties in the park. I’m psyched to try some crazy monkey bars and experiment with new moves and obstacles. They have one of those American Ninja warrior pull up bar ladders!

Week 3044

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Books

Just finished up Tigerman by Nick Harkaway and it was a delight. A lovely struggle of a man who wants to be a father and ends up being a mysterious crime fighter, set against a post colonial outpost island sentenced to die and rotting as a Black Fleet uses the death of a nation to set up a zone without law. Really good fast-moving stuff of heroes and villains. Randomly checked out Lost Gods by Brom from the NYPL ebooks and it is holding up so far, though I feel irrationally suspicious that it will disappoint.

Also started The Fifth Risk after being reminded of Michael Lewis by the excellent Against the Rules podcast. I’m a bit full up on the mind bending horror of this age, though. My heart is really struggling for more meaningful ways to contribute within the time I’ve got.

Code

Got an hour or so over the weekend to make a wee bit more movement on the Trello release notes.

Researched X-API-Warn, X-API-DeprecationDate, DeprecationWarning (Python), Obsolete (C#), and @Deprecated(Java).

Work

I learned that you typically have 2 months of leaving notice in India and I can’t quite wrap my mind around it and all the implications of staffing and pacing of projects.

Also started working on an internal document around API deprecation policy. We do a pretty decent job of communication etc, but I want to make it a clear guide so that we can get better at it. Standards and checklists are good for things that we intend to do often.

Some good reading around this:

Family

Maxwell is sleeping on the couch nightly. He goes from the bed to the couch in the middle of the night, some sort of bi-phasic sleep thing I imagine. Zelda sleeps through the night for the most part!

Week 3043

Week.In.Review

Family

Finally got a date for Maxwell’s IEP review, so we can work with the school system to get him more appropriate education.

Max scrawls out "NO GRLS ULAWD!" for his door.
Max is, however working on his writing since has found a use for it.

Code

Spent a bunch more time exploring pytest to get through some testing. Discovered magic to skip tests, filter warning messages out, run only failing tests, and adding py.test flags to tox.ini – which is nice – I don’t like to have lots of different places for all the configuration to run.

Also started puttering around at night on yet another little project, based off of this fun idea from Alice Goldfuss. It’s just a cookiecutter project right now, but that makes it so much easier to get started with making something shareable. Cookiecutter is really good community scaffolding for python projects and I’ve been evangelizing it at work.

Work

Been doing a lot of organizing and going through our backlog to remove old projects or identify what we don’t care about any more. I want to also start tracking urgency for projects which is a function of size of request, time since request – with a wave function. A request that is 2 weeks of work but has been waiting a little while is more urgent – because you are losing the window where we can actually help the customer well. A small project that waits for 6 months is probably not urgent at all – by this point everyone probably has a workaround and it should probably be removed from the queue in that case. A large project that waits a little is usually ok unless there is a firm deadline.

This was all in service of better tracking our work and being able to present more intelligently about what we are doing. The presentation went well, so it paid off at least once

I also had a really good conversation about what is in the espresso pods at work and how does decaffeination work – love getting obsessed and delving into things with people. Of course I made a wiki page – people need to know how to choose their coffee!

Finally wrapping up the last items for our first wave of the Py2-Py3 conversion work. I’ve been a bottle neck on some of it, but it’s really important to lay good foundations for future work.

Buds

More axe throwing with The Lawyers. Then drinking. Then Korean food. Then Karaoke. I was best at the eating and drinking where I have a phenomenal amount of practice and natural talent.

I will spare you video of the karaoke.