• I had my last day at old job. I got locked out of all my GitHub accounts at noon on Friday. At 2pm I did a tour of a coworking space for my new job. We’re looking at several spaces between where I live (SF) and my cofounder (Oakland). Both of us are looking forward to regularly being in the same space with a big whiteboard adjacent to somehere nice to walk around outside.
  • I helped publish the monthly April Newsletter for the Alliance of Civic Technologists. I’ve stepped back mostly to focus on website tasks, though I’m proud that the comms stuff I previously pushed on (“what if we just regularly re-published stuff from the network without committing to a lot of other words?”) seems to have been taken up. I also feel like my involvement has been good training for my conviction of like “the reason we’re doing it this way is because I’m responsible for it.” Not that I expected to defend a a five page website with Jekyll on GitHub pages in 2023 (when I put together with Bill Hunt and Molly McLeod), but the only way some people know how to engage is by aggressively wondering why you didn’t do it differently.
  • I tried not to think about (new) work all weekend. Saturday we got up before 5am to volunteer at a Bay Bridge swim; we worked registration and body marking (TIL some people are immune to sharpie). We took a dip ourselves, cafe for breakfast, then farmer’s market, cleaned up at home, met friends for tea (one of whom I’m trying to recruit to work with me; so it goes now), then to the protest, then a wine bar where we picked up some more friends in civic tech, then a gallery showing for some other friends from the swim club, then scrambled eggs at home for dinner. Saturday! Sunday was more sedate of swim, cafe, walk to Trader Joes, a different wine bar where I found agreement with a neighbor that being run over by a car is one’s most likely fate in SF.
  • I got up a LinkedIn post about my job change:

    Today was my last day GitHub. I’m really proud of the last 3 years helping build and support the Rails and Ruby developer community inside of GitHub and beyond.

    I also couldn’t pass on the new opportunity to work again on improving America’s social safety net. It’s been 3 years since I left Code for America and I’m excited about new options that have opened up with tech, telephony, and AI. I’m optimistic that we can fully close the loop in assisting, advocating, and escalating for people throughout their welfare journey and achieve significantly higher approval rates than was possible before. And do so sustainably; that’s the challenge!

    Here’s a nice write-up about what my cofounder and I are hoping to achieve.

  • I participated in totally normal global commerce by ordering a mechanical keyboard (75% Alice brown). It’s currently in Guangzhuo; we shall see what happens now.
  • I finished reading Polostan. It’s better than his last… 4 books, despite containing the phrase “girls’ bottoms in riding breaches” two times too many. I started Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver.
  • I started playing “The Witcher 3” which is neither cozy nor casual. I don’t know how many of the Witcher books I read previously because all evidence points to it being prior to 2014 when Pantheon’s new-hire perk was a Kindle. Seems like there are more books now.
  • We watched the White Lotus finale 🤷
  • On my first day as CTO, I reviewed all of our seat-based SaaS costs. $8 here, $4 there, $15 jeez 🫠 I’m already annoyed that my former employer charges for Branch Protection rules to block force-pushes on main 🙃