• I’ve now watched the Taylor Swift Eras movie twice, once at home, and a second time over the holidays with niece (completely) and nephew (partly). My most burning question is whether Taylor menaces the same dancer every show’s “Tolerate it”, or if they share rhetorical pain. My Apple Music Replay also ranked highly with Taylor Swift, though also apparently Andrew McMahon; unexpected.
  • I started playing Talos Principle 1 after beating 2, though it’s a lot more intense with guns and exploding things and so many timing-based puzzles. I’ve almost beaten it… but also took a break to play Super Mario Wonder which is much more fun fun (especially, again, with niece and nephew).
  • I finished reading “Babel”, started then stopped reading “Wolf Hall”, and am picking my way through “Less”. There’s several nonfiction books in there that I’ve read about chapter of, but nothing so memorable to note here. Prior to that I read “Translation State”, and realizing I didn’t remember half of what was happening, re-read the previous 4 Imperial Radch books, which only now makes me think I should read-read Translation State again for the clean sweep. And I guess I finished the latest Bruno book, “A Chateau Under Siege”, and it was fine (there’s only so many times one can describe Kir Royale, and I think we’re past it).
  • I believe the Crumpler Soupansalad Son-o is the perfect jacket-and-book-and-water-bottle-and-also-half-gallon-of-milk-and-greek-yogurt bag. It also hasn’t been made in like 15 years so I bought another one on eBay (I attempted to do this via Poshmark 6 months ago but it failed to deliver). Now I own two: my longtime bag in brown, the new one in black.
  • After 7 years of service, I’ve stepped down from my church’s Property Committee. The buildings are being sold. As Boenhoeffer wrote, albeit about Germany’s embrace of fascism and not a congregational vote on the role of real-estate within a small church’s modest investment portfolio: “If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.” I’m currently serving on zero committees anywhere; a special moment.

  • Reflecting on my past year at GitHub, I’ll just directly quote Rachel Andrew’s blog; search and replace as necessary:

    The layoffs at Google at the beginning of 2023, didn’t impact me or my writing team directly, however they cast a shadow over the year. I try to look at difficult situations through a lens of what I can actually do to change things or improve the situation. At my level of management I’m not privy to layoff decisions, but I can be there to support my team and make space to talk about their concerns. I can strive to make sure our work and the impact of it is visible, and I can make sensible business decisions to make the most of resources in a more constrained environment. And so, after the initial shock of it all, that’s how I’ve approached this year.

  • I’m slowly trending towards GoodJob v4.0. It’s looking like it will be a noop: a chance for me to clean up all of the migrations and deprecation warnings and probably stop support for Ruby < 3.0, but nothing noticeable otherwise. I want to have everything ready for anyone to opt into FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCK from Advisory Locks, but as a feature that won’t be part of four-point-zero. We’ve managed to get to 3.22 (that’s 22 minor releases!) without a breaking change.

  • I’m not big on setting yearly goals, but I liked this evergreen advice from Ask a Manager, so I’m gonna continue aspiring to that:

    ideally you’d try to see it as a funny story you can tell friends rather than a hurtful snub that needs to bother you