Now - November 2024

Back into the swing of things before the end of the year.

bluesky #

See how the sun shines brightly in the city

On the streets where once was pity

Mr. Blue Sky is living here today, hey

• Electric Light Orchestra

Feeling massively reinvigorated with how the data community has taken off on Bluesky in the last month - didn’t realize how much that meant to me until it came back! Being connected to a global network of friends and like-hearted people is wonderful.

left twitter #

I made an archive of my tweets and deleted them all on the old site. It was downright cathartic. I also learned a bunch about NodeJS while adapting Julia Evans’s code, which was a nice bonus!

started maintaining a recs page #

I also pulled down all of my twitter bookmarks and realized that my bookmarks had spread across a lot of different platforms 🤦. Mostly a personal discord server, which I find convenient for desktop + laptop + mobile use since I have it everywhere, but also sporadically in DMs to friends, Slack self-DMs, Twitter bookmarks, and sometimes in notes on my phone. Thinking about self-hosting a “better” solution by using something like LinkDing or LinkWarden, but those take effort which I haven’t yet committed to amidst all the other crap on my backlog.

Meanwhile, I looked over the collection of stuff I already have and decided that I wanted to start curating a recs page of my favourite content that I share with friends/colleagues fairly often. It was a fun diversion to read through some of my old favourites again and deciding if it deserved to make the list! It would be nice to eventually engineer it to be more like Derek Sivers’s book notes where I take actual notes on things I read and programmatically generate a page with synopsis + links to my notes, but for now I think this is a good start.

reading #

I’m currently trying to read:

• Felienne Hermans’s The Programmer’s Brain
• Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art
• Worm web serial (for fun)

hiring #

Further to ~ Bluesky is amazing, I’m forever surprised by how far my friend network and personal reputation seems to extend. Still struggling a bit with some corporate politics and getting our own soccer/R-specific posting, but it’s amazing how many people have been interested and already reached out.

Starting to interview the pool soon, but as of Nov 30 we’re still taking applications - send me a message on Bluesky, Slack, or Discord etc and I’d be happy to chat about it further!

enjoying pickup sports #

I signed up for weekly pickup/casual sports this summer, kept it up through the fall, and have been really enjoying it! I’m better than I thought I was at volleyball, worse at indoor soccer, and about where I expected for basketball. The pub social afterwards has been fun too, especially karaoke nights!

thirty years old #

I turned 30 this month. I think 20-year-old me would be gobsmacked at how much has changed for the better - massively more fulfillment than he thought was possible. Comparatively a tiny bit lonelier without being in a dedicated relationship, although knowing what I know now about that relationship I’m absolutely in a better place. I’d like to be physically, emotionally, and mentally healthier this decade. We’ll see!