• One of my coworkers said this week “You’ve been an engineering director and in leadership before, right? I appreciate your perspective; any advice and resources you’d recommend?” So that set my mind racing. I dunno. On one hand, it’s like, well, first, you grind out 10 years of 1-year of experience 10 times, but do it 50 times a year. On the other, keep a delta file and I also think about Secrets of Consulting quite a lot (content warning: I haven’t re-read it in a long time; I tried reading the same author’s The Psychology of Computer Programming more recently and couldn’t do it).
  • Work otherwise is in the final marathon of promo packets and performance reviews and quarterly planning and a reorg and oh, the next version of Ruby is released in 3 weeks and it’s go time. Then we do it all again. I love my team so much.
  • I finished reading The Final Architecture series. I didn’t enjoy it as much as Children of Time (“the octopus books”). After reading all the Gateway books and 3-body problem books, I’m a bit over the idea that there’s a malicious (or at least self-interested) group of people who are unhappy with the current value of the Planck constant and are doing something about it. I was into the subplot of alien criminality.

  • I finished Talos Principle 2, but I screwed up the golden gates thing, so I have to beat it again just to get the special special ending. I’ve been playing it in parallel with a friend and appreciate our back and forth:

    Me: I’m personally more worried about environmental catastrophe than AI, but i guess they’re intertwined. Material conditions that are unfit for life. Like some of the talos robots seem to touch on my philosophical question which is like: how do we maximize individual agency+satisfaction while also avoiding collective/systemic fucking-around-and-finding-out.

    Friend: we can see from the game the answer lies somewhere on the spectrum between having 1000 robits around a crumbling power source vs having a magic 3D printing pyramid for use to conquer the stars

    I also started playing Talos 1 and it’s much less chill than the 2nd game. I may not finish it.

  • For GoodJob, all of the things I want have been labeled “Help Wanted”. I do want to get the row-locking foundations in place myself, though I think the safe upgrade path for it might take a little while to straighten out. I think I have finally mastered advisory locks, so, of course, that means change it all up.
  • I ran bundle update on Day of the Shirt, which means I also upgraded to Shakapacker, which means that I have, once again, spent an entire weekend fumbling with Webpack configuration to get window.$ working. I also got a nice email from the owner of a t-shirt website that validated my thesis that no one visits websites anymore, let alone to buy t-shirts: the website owner got a (different) full-time job.