Jay Hoffmann

I don’t know what to call this yet

  • Paranoia ahead of revolution

    I find the French Revolution particularly fascinating (it’s my Roman Empire, I suppose). Recently, I’ve been listening to the Revolutions podcast—which I seriously cannot recommend enough—and the host, Mike Duncan, spends a lot of time in the years and month leading up to the armed uprisings and tyrannical hold that would cast France into its brutal revolutionary era. During that time, the leaders of the revolution on every which side devised some rather crazy conspirancy theories.

    If anything went wrong—if a battle was lost, or a revolt broke out or a mob of people stormed the convention (and this type of thing happened quite a lot)—it was always the fault of some dark, shadowy movement lurking just beneath the surface.

    If you were a Jacobin or a radical, then it was the royalists behind everything. If you were a royalist or moderate, then those crazy radicals were brainwashing the masses against you. No one acknowledged the intricate and subtle dynamics or the shifting opinions that were truly driving events. Instead, everyone held their ideology as sacred and infallible, unable to fathom that opposition could exist without some hidden manipulation at play.

    Anyway, recently Nancy Pelosi told a bunch of pro-Palestinian protestors to “go back to China” where their “headquarters are.” . And Vivek Ramaswamy has openly suggested (or at the very least, strongly implied) that he believes Taylor Swif and Travis Kelce may be at the enter of some sort of Biden led psyop.

    Now I believe that they believe that at least part of what they’re saying is actually true. Their own beliefs are far too sacred and beloved to be subject to any real scrutiny, of course. As political discourse becomes more entrenched, this will be true more often than not. And though it will surely lack the fervor and terror of late 18th century France, we may be on the verge of revolution ourselves.

  • #19: Managing the what

    I have found that a lot about managing people comes down to trust. Earning, keeping it, directing it. And I guess, subconsciously or not, I have been collecting some articles over the past few months about how to give a team autonomy while still driving and focusing on accountability. So this is just a reference for those articles as they start to congeal in my mind.

    My unified theory on how this applies to management is still a work in progress, but I can start with an initial insight from Paul Taylor.

    People are downstream of the system

    And that’s a critical observation. Individuals in an organization are undeniably influenced by the systems and processes that are all around them. Often, when it seems that these processes are breaking down, it can actually just be an indicator of a deeper systemic issue.

    First, look at your systems with a critical ye. What you’re really looking for is patterns. What appears to be happening over and over. Where are the most common breakdowns in communications. These are gaps, and are great starting points. These recurring issues represent gaps and serve as excellent initial areas for improvement.

    But also, attack the why and make sure it’s shared. One strategy is to Manage the What, Not the How. This approach encourages clear alignment around shared goals through transparency. . It requires leaders to focus on defining the objectives and desired outcomes without micromanaging the specific methods by which the team members achieve these results.

    The key to exceptional management is to get great at defining the “what”. As a leader, you need to know how to create alignment, how to clarify what you expect, and how to communicate all of it.

    Clarity in communication and expectations sets the stage for a team’s success. When leaders excel in explicating the “what” – the objectives, targets, and benchmarks – they provide a clear direction for the team to follow, a clarity that enables the team to understand the purpose behind their work and align their efforts accordingly.

    There are nuances to this approach. There might need to be greater control over the how for team members that struggle to collaborate or are more junior. But on teams comprised of more senior, experienced individuals, the strategy of managing the “what” can be adopted as a systemic approach, empowering team members to leverage their expertise and take initiative. By establishing clear goals, leaders can trust their teams to determine the most effective “how” – the processes, techniques, and strategies – to reach those goals. In doing so, leaders encourage innovation and drive accountability through autonomy.

    All of which is tied up rather well by another article I have read, which extends the Cathedral and Bazaar metaphor to management. And I think it most clearly articulates the vision I have for myself as a leader.

    The bazaar manager is like the organizer of the bazaar. Leaders in this style tend to have a broad vision, a flexible plan, and a flat network of roles and responsibilities for the team. The manager acts as the facilitator, the coach, and the enabler of the team’s work, defining goals and objectives and providing guidelines, feedback, and resources, while empowering the team to define their own tasks, processes, and standards, encouraging them to explore and innovate.

    As a facilitator, the bazaar manager does not dictate each move but rather sets the stage for innovation and creativity. The managers role here is to provide clear goals and objectives-the what-while giving some latitude to the team to approach problems in their own unique ways.

    It is a form of leadership that trusts in the capabilities of the team members and their ability to collaborate effectively. And so trust remains at the center of it all.

    Chapter 34 of East of Eden begins like this:

    A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?”

    I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us…

    It’s a short, precise, poignant chapter. Around 900 words later, it ends like this:

    We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

    I want to write the whole chapter down and take it with me wherever I go.

    Oliver Sacks with a prescient reflection on the irreproducibility of the human mind:

    in contrast to a computer, that nothing is ever precisely repeated or reproduced; that there is, rather, a continual revision and reorganization of perception and memory, so that no two experiences (or their neural bases) are ever precisely the same. Experience is ever-changing, like Heraclitus’ stream. This streamlike quality of mind and perception, of consciousness and life, cannot be caught in any mechanical model — it is only possible in an evolving creature… One is not an immaterial soul, floating around in a machine. I do not feel alive, psychologically alive, except insofar as a stream of feeling — perceiving, imagining, remembering, reflecting, revising, recategorizing runs through me. I am that stream — that stream is me.

    Notes

    Today:

    • WP Mail SMTP check in
    • Scorecard
    • Publish this post
    • Review collections (add to async and management collections with what we have in “To Sort”)
    • Start prepping the paperwork
    • Book a vision appointment
    • Watch first part of Vonnegut
    • Garbages

    Add to notebook:

    • Have to do taxes soon
    • Spray for bugs  
    • Look at tree in backyard 
    • Carpet cleaning in playroom
    • Review Tina’s updates to core process
    • Check on Plugin updates
    • Follow up on Mail devlierability


    Week focus:
    – Visual regression workflow
    – Passport and elementary school docs and paperwork
    – Sportsengine – WP Mail SMTP
    – Sportsengine – prep next steps in combined deploy
    – Spray for bugs

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • Writing Goals as Narratives

    I’m as susceptible to productivity “hacks” as anyone else. I’ve collected different techniques and methodologies like so many trading cards; looked over, examined, and eventually put back on the shelf. I’ve hopped between a good old-fashioned notebook and a complex map of different apps and notes (and then back again). I’ve read books and blog posts and tried more free trials than I can count.

    But last year, I settled on something that just kind of… works. It’s not perfect, but it fits my brain. And I’ve made a conscious effort to put aside my once-endless search for a perfect system. The result has been some actual clarity and space in my thinking these days. Most days, I’m able to prioritize what needs to be done and leave a little time for writing and reading and all the other things I want to do. It’s far from perfect, but that’s kind of the point.

    For the first time, my goal isn’t to “get more organized.” This leaves me with an exciting question about where to focus.

    Goal Setting: The Old Way

    Usually when I’m thinking about goals, I’m really thinking about projects. I have a list of things that I need to get done and another list off to the side of things I want to get done. I take those lists, roughly sort them, and stack the blocks. Finish the projects, finish your goals It’s the agile-driven SMART goal methodology adapted to my personal life.

    Which can be effective in my work life, and setting goals for a team, but lacks the higher level thinking that those goals are usually informed by. 

    A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Kalyn Brooke’s latest post about setting a word of the year. It’s a way of centering all of your habits and goals for a year around a single concept. For instance, Kalyn selected abundance this year. It’s a goal setting strategy I’ve seen elsewhere and it can be a powerful way to center your life and focus.

    But that’s not exactly how my brain works. I like to stretch an idea out a bit and see if it has legs. Some of my goals and habits are interconnected, but they also can spin off in different directions.

    The Power of Narrative Goals

    So I’m going to give my goal setting a little twist. Instead of a single word, I am crafting small, past-tense narratives for each of my goals. This method isn’t just about envisioning an outcome; it’s about telling a story and reflecting on the milestones as though they’ve already been achieved.

    Writing goals as narratives that have already happened is a pretty powerful psychological shift. It is a recognition of what is possible in a year, and a way to work backwards from a final goal. Each story becomes a miniature act of self-fulfillment, a private victory etched into the year’s end before the journey even begins.

    For instance, I have a goal to mix things up a bit with my History of the Web project. I have no idea exactly how that’s going to take form, so rather than write out any particulars, I’m focusing on how I want it to feel.

    History of the Web

    I’ve launched a new site, a mixture of different types of content and various experiments. It has become a place of exploration, filled with different kinds of information, mixed and remixed into something that resembles a museum and a blog, digitally interpreted. There are places for people to donate and contribute.

    I don’t know if everything will get done. But at the end of the year I want to look back and be able to say the above has come true. It can guide my decisions and help me focus on the real meaning of the goal, rather than just turn things into a endless todo list I just have to get through.

    These goals are pulled from different areas of my life. Some are personal, some are career-driven and some are about side projects and passions. Together, they tell a story about where I want to be at the end of this year. But separate, each will be a self-contained story, a snapshot of success that acknowledges the interconnection of my goals without forcing them into a single linear path. They will allow for divergence, recognizing that sometimes the journey will take an unexpected turn or two.

    I’m hoping this will open new doors in my mind, and allow me to walk a path with focus and conviction. Here’s to the story that’s only just been written. Let’s see how it goes.

  • #18: Letting Time Use You

    The feeling of being overwhelmed, blocked by stressors of the mind rather than by an immediate physical threat, is uniquely human. And so is the desire to provide some sort of order to that in the form of “time management.” Both of these concepts, born from human ingenuity, more often than not result in a rabbit hole of wasted time, exacerbating rather than alleviating and making everything worse.

    Whenever something like that occurs to me, I think about the book “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman, an insightful and profound meditation on the meaning of time, existing within it, and learning to except is finitude.

    And its not just phillosphy. It’s an insightful and practical guide to accepting the limitations of time. However, what I find most intriguing is Burkeman’s ability to completely flip around time in your mind (emphasis mine):

    There is an alternative: the unfashionable but powerful notion of letting time use you, approaching life not as an opportunity to implement your predetermined plans for success but as a matter of responding to the needs of your place and your moment in history.

    Burkeman suggests thinking about time a bit differently then we are often taught, and that endless blog posts and books about time management seem to recommend. Instead of viewing life as a canvas to execute our meticulously planned visions of success, he proposes that we should react to the demands of our surroundings and our unique place in history.

    It’s a reminder to focus on our desires, to embrace what we truly want, and to let go of what we cannot control. It’s not about fighting time, but about learning to dance with it, to let it lead us through the rhythm of life.

    And so, this week I feel overwhelmed. Which is simply my mind telling me to be present, to lean into what I want, and to just fucking let it go.

    You get about a halfway through the Count of Monte Cristo and you realize that it is not actually one novel or one story or one tale. It is many stories nested and layered on top of one another that builds the portrait of a man and his time, and the never-ending march of vengeance. And what stories. Such fun. And so many more left.

    I just got to the fulcrum of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a reflection on the story of Cain and Abel and its potential meaning. After discussing it earlier, one of the characters of the book, Lee, recounts his own experience in subsequent years studying a specific sentence, and even a specific word, in the translations of the Cain and Abel story. It revolves around the Hebrew word tishmel, and refers Cain relationship to sin after he is cast out. In one translation, Lee says, the word “thou shalt rule” over sin, while in the another it is said that “Do thou rule.” In the former, a promise is made, and in the latter, an order is given.

    But after years of study, Lee and the scholars he refers to found a new meaning for that word. “Thou mayest.” Our ability to conquer sin, Lee says, is up to us. It is a choice.

    This is an essential part of the novel, and is a focal point for all of its various characters and motifs. And is interesting because of how profound it could be. But on the other hand, it is possible that it is not even true. All of which warrants some inspection I think. I’ll be reading up on this.

    The meaning of Tishmel in Steinbeck’s East of Eden. (Just an intro, I want to look into it more and write a proper post)

    little project in each area of his life at any given time. It helps prioritize and choose what to work on in that moment:

    I artificially limit myself to having one major and one minor active side project at a time, my agility goes up because I’m not doing ten projects at once, I’m doing one or two. When one project finishes, I move to the next best idea that fits the available slot. I will never be taking on too much and it’s easier to say “no” to new distractions if I have to substitute projects.

    I love the no nonsense approach. I worry that I allow “projects” of my life to go on for too long and simply become routine or habits. But maybe that’s a plus.

    And speaking of one thing, here’s one trick to help with decision making in teams: decide how to decide.

    John Burroughs on what it is to live life:

    We may fancy that there might be a better universe, but we cannot conceive of a better, because our minds are the outcome of things as they are, and all our ideas of value are based upon the lessons we learn in this world.

    Notes

    Add to Revolutions Podcast
    Finish goals as narratives post
    Scorecard review
    East of Eden Quotes
    Add to management and Async colleciton about everything going on with the team
    Read Brainpickings
    Monthly fiiiaces
    expese report
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #17: Our Personal Worlds

    Kening Zhu has a suggestion. Use your digital space to build a world, and don’t worry so much about an audience.

    instead of “building an audience,” build a world. build a digital garden-ecosystem, that exists — first and primarily — for itself. a world that doesn’t need likes, traffic, subscribers, or clicks — in order to validate its existence.

    My thinking, in this moment, has become much slower. I have tried to focus my mind on building thoughts, and layering together ideas. And so the idea of building a world, my world, is appealing. This year, I want to begin creating my own.

    Writing about our quest for knowledge and answers, Steinbeck once described the ways in which we try to erect a world around our beliefs:

    An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones.

    And this is a key point. Your world is never done and it will often need to be recreated. A world builds over time, and it responds to the changes of our lives. We can’t be afraid to scrap what we have and redraw our own maps.

    If I were to build a world around my ideology and my passions and my thoughts, what would that look like? What are the chapters and how are they organized? What grows from it? I’m not sure yet.

    In the midst of an invasion into Belgium that early French revolutionaries believed would “liberate” the country into liberty, only to have their own values turned against them by a foreign country that felt much more like it was being occupied, the infamous Robespierre had this to say.

    Freedom can never be found by the use of a foreign force

    Robespierre would go on to be rather forceful about freedom not too long after that, but it’s an interesting anti-war sentiment that rings true all these centuries later in our post-Enlightenment age.

    Steinbeck, on the reason for being:

    The truest reason for anything’s being so is that it is. This is actually and truly a reason, more valid and clearer than all the other separate reasons, or than any group of them short of the whole. Anything less than the whole forms part of the picture only, and the infinite whole is unknowable except by being it, by living into it.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #16: The build vs buy dilemma for personal decisions

    AKA The Tinkerer’s Dilemma

    As is probably true for people like me who work in code, and futz around in different note taking apps and personal blogs, I am what you might call something of a tinkerer. And so I often am faced with something like the build vs buy dilemma. But this internal tug-of-war does not revolve around organizational purchasing decisions. It’s more a battle of personal choices, of opting for one methodology over the other.

    By “build” I don’t mean crafting a full-blown application from the ground up. I’m talking about putting together a collection of some light coding and no code solutions. This gives me something more closely aligned with my own personal workflow at the expense of all of that technical, maintained overheead.

    On the other hand, “buy” doesn’t necessarily imply shelling out money for acquiring an off-the-shelf application (a lot of these apps are free). It’s more like buying in, embracing an existing approach and methodology. It’s about capitulating to a particular way of doing things, and trying to bend it to your will.

    My notetaking and general organization tasks have been served by Obsidian for the past few years. Its unique blend of features suits my needs perfectly, and I’ve managed to create a system that is good enough, and that I don’t mess with all that much.

    The other day, though, I got to thinking about something different. I had an urge to develop something similar to a second-brain app – akin to Obsidian or Roam, using my personal WordPress site. I immediately started mapping out all of the different blocks and plugins and little features that I would want to see in something like this.

    And then a night passed. And I thought about it. I began going over the realities of this new project. That initial flash to my brain was energizing, but time makes fools of us all. There were enough details to consider and challenges to overcome and time investments to spend to make the whole thing immensely daunting. Regardless, the very notion of this venture sparked a sense of intrigue and excitement that is, to my tinkerer’s mind, worth exploring. At the intersection of creativity and practicality, I found a new project that’s brimming with possibilities and potential learning experiences. Maybe one day I’ll give it a shot.

    Cassidy is kind of annoyed at React. She’s not the only one.

    Reading through one of Cory Doctrow’s recent posts about the open web, I like that he paused on a point that I find particularly important about the web.

    The web wasn’t inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee’s decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a completely opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as “branded communities.” The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn’t even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

    The web wasn’t inevitable. It was a gift at the intersection of a perfect circumstance. That’s why so many people have attempted to control it and centralize it and turn it into something that it’s not. Next time somebody tries to tell you that such and such platform embraces free speech, just remember that the web is open. It’s free by default.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #15: Finding focus in the new year

    I’m thinking a lot about focus this week. There’s something about a new year that makes you look forward. I spent the last year trying to clear away time for things that were important to me or to my work: larger projects, time for reading books, for spending time with my family, for writing here and on The History of the Web.

    And that was, somewhat to my surprise, pretty successful. At work, I have been spending more time on priorities. In my personal life I’ve been able to find the time I wanted for writing and reading and organizing my thoughts.

    Now I’m looking forward with a bit of a question mark. I don’t actually know what my goals are right now. What I’m looking to get out of the next year. I’m ready to try something different. So I did what I usually do. I searched around. It brought me to a new book about mindfulness called Peak Mind by Amishi P. Jha. It seems practical and approachable. Clearing my mind and finding focus? That sounds right up my alley.

    I’m looking forward with a flicker of uncertainty. My goals feel a bit hazy and out of focus. But I have settled on one thing—I’m ready to share things up and try something new. I poked around some search engines and checked a few things and stumbled onto at least one intriguing book. It’s called Peak Mind by Amishi P. Jha. It appears to be a practical guide to mindfulness and meditation, a practice I am admittedly a little wary of. Yet, the idea of clearing my mind and focusing better? That sounds like something I could do.

    I’ve returned to Steinbeck for the third time in less than a year in his culminating work East of Eden. It is broad—in length and in scope—but maybe its most admirable quality is how much it takes its time. Grapes of Wraith oscillated between its socially charged narrative and didactic monologues injected by Steinbeck himself. So it’s most brilliant moments live in either the world of the story and its dynamics or in Steinbeck’s soliloquies.

    East of Eden feels different. As it drifts along, Steinbeck pulls on various threads. Different characters, different locales, and all the contrives of an exciting plot. As you read, however, you realize that Steinbeck is pulling from different POVs which blend together a contradictory worldview both confused and in awe of the march of progress.

    And then Steinbeck will do what he does best. Sits himself in the middle of a scenario as a conflict converges and extracts the truth and message in it. East of Eden is fascinating for its thematic density and allegorical connections and autobiographical story. But it’s also sharp and personal and familiar and in the first quarter of the novel, that’s what I’m enjoying the most.

    Things I wrote this week:

    John O’Donohue on the artifice of beginnings:

    When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence. All our beginnings happen within this continuity. Beginnings often frighten us because they seem like lonely voyages into the unknown. Yet, in truth, no beginning is empty or isolated. We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown. This is not the case. Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced… We are never as alone in our beginnings as it might seem at the time. A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us. To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #14: Holidays and the nature of conflict

    Here at the holidays for, let’s say, reasons, I am thinking about the nature of conflict, and specifically personal conflict and standing at either end of one. There’s this great post by Adam Mastroianni about conversations. Good ones and bad ones.

    On the nature of conflict, Mastroianni boils it down to the miscues of givers and takers transforming conversation into a zero sum game:

    Neither givers nor takers have it 100% correct, and their conflicts often come from both sides’ insistence that the other side must convert or die. Rather than mounting a Inquisition on our interlocutors, we ought to focus on perfecting our own technique.

    The solution is what he calls doorknobs. Mastroianni’s thesis is that good conversationalists offer affordances in conversations for others to jump in, which is what he refers to as doorknobs, places in a discussion for others to enter. Those doorknobs need to match your personal style. There are givers and takers in a conversation, and takers must present doorknobs with potentially oppositional statements, while givers can invite others with questions.

    Blogging in a Vacuum

    There’s a lot to love about Henrik Karlsson’s A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox, starting with the name. It’s an in-depth analysis of the way in which ideas move around in the web, not through self-contained circle but outward like a large river system, collecting different branches along the way. Karlsson has a lot to say about the function of a blog, not as a niche source of viral content, but as a way of producing clarity in thinking.

    He also has some advice. Some very good advice:

    You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.

    This is a blog that not many people other than myself read. And that’s okay, because it’s some of the most clear thinking I do all week putting posts like this together.

    Wasn’t this supposed to be fun?

    I’ve been catching up on some of those that have written or spoken about the general decline of quality on the web. And there is a lot to say about unfettered algorithms, viscous echo chambers and wanton neglect from custodians of the webs largest traffic sources.

    But also it is very much true that things just aren’t as fun anymore. Writing in the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka sums it up pretty well:

    The precipitous decline of X is the bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be. Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser. These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago.

    Fun, or even discovery, isn’t the primary goal of the web or any source of information on it. It can, rather, be a very serious place just as the world outside the screen can be.

    But there is this idea that I think a lot of people had of the web. That if you connect a bunch of people from all over the world and get them talking, shouldn’t that be at least a little fun? And eye opening and engaging and nuanced and filled wall to wall with the thrill of discovery of new voices and perspectives.

    The walled gardens have closed us in, and now it sometimes feels like there’s no escape.

    Transparency in team communication

    A couple of articles I read were about how to communicate better on a dev team. There’s the practical guide: How To Create Compound Efficiencies In Engineering. A list of a few best practices to bring some efficiency to a team over time. My favorite tidbit was adding tags to PRs that indicate the estimated time to review, and the risk level, which gives team members better context on how much time they’ll need to set aside.

    Pairs well with Paul Robert Lloyd’s talk on Design Histories and recording the history of a project through decisions made. It is essentially a public blog devoted to a project with a focused hiearchy. Not all that dissimilar to what Automattic has been doing with its internal P2s for the better part of 20 years. But design histories have an added benefit of focusing strictly on the types of changes and decisions that have shaped a project, thus giving you a full view.

    A design history looks both forwards and backwards.

    New posts show the team where a service is going, older posts tell the story of how they got to where they are now.

    James Baldwin on Shakespeare:

    The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him.

    Notes

    New projects to add:

    Projects to complete:

    • Atlassian trello migration
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #13: Writing is Magic

    It is so hard to communicate to another person what is in your mind. It is thee greatest endeavor to try, and the exercise of writing is on of the more concentrated efforts you can make to try. It is certainly true that writing is magic, in that provides clarity both for yourself and for others. There are very few other practices that, simply from the habit of doing it as often as you can, will make you a better thinker. But writing does that.

    And one key to that is the friction of writing. The resistance that it brings to your mind that is uncomfortable. Your brain will even try to trick you into thinking that it is a waste of time. As I spend time writing this post I know no one else will read, I can somewhat believe that. But I will walk away from this more clear than when I started, and that is definitely not nothing.

    Notes & Errata

    I’ve been enjoying reading through entries in People & Blogs, which is more or less what it sounds like: interesting conversations with people that maintain personal blogs. There’s a nugget of wisdom in every single one, and they are fun, quick, reads.

    Tom King’s Vision Series

    Is just about the best damn Marvel books I’ve ever read. They are steeped in canon, but somehow still set apart from things. The prose rivals that of any great novel and the art is expressive and interesting and detailed. There is such a completeness to it all.

    At the center of the story is what is at the center of many things when it comes to Vision. What is it to be human? What is it to love and be loved and to build a family and to be hated and to risk everything and to stumble and to fall and to dig a hole so deep you don’t know if you will ever get out. And what is it when all of that is wrapped in a superhuman, infallible package that cannot err and refuses to break course.

    The P vs NP narration is an incredible series of quotes. And the final lines:

    “That was very nice.”

    “No. It was kind”

    No one knows what the hell they’re doing

    All those headlines about smart algorithms and machine learning and piles and piles and piles of data, and social networks still have no idea how to push the stuff people want to see to them. I mean they do. We just want to see the stuff our friends were posting. But that would’t keep us scrolling on the site, so they have to resort to dumber and dumber tactics to trick people into staying on site.

    Case in point, a recent discovery on the Garbage Day podcast that Facebook is promoting a ton of content from a single blogger writing on a Christian Fundamentalist site in his spare time, simply because a whole lot of people are responding with the word Amen, thus making the content “look” positive and engaging.

    After Revolution

    A new book this week, The Count of Monte Cristo. I’m somewhat familiar with the story, though I had no idea it was this long (the audiobook is 47 hours). So I think I’ll be at this one for a while.

    Alexandre Dumas was the son of a Haitian general born into slavery, turned French revolutionary who was one of the top generals for Napoleon before he lost favor and was temporarily exiled. Dumas based a lot of his characters on his father, who he had a deep respect for, though he only knew him for a very brief time. Of his father, he wrote:

     Still today, the memory of my father, in every form of his body. In every feature of his face, is as present to me as if I had lost him yesterday; it’s a fact, in short, that I still love him today; I love him with such tender affection, as deep and as real as if he had protected my childhood and as if I had the good fortune of passing from childhood to adolescence supported by his strong arm.

    All of which is to say that the French Revolution is very much the backdrop for the book, and it is hard to not read it as a reverence for the revolutionaries, and his father for their convictions. Already in the first chapters, Dumas explorers the cost of being uncommitted in one’s own convictions, and the price of innocence in an unjust world.

    Notes

    For tomorrow

    • Email Ciaite back
    • Fried Rice
    • Deploy reeund workflow
    • Call the plumber
    • Clear out the office
    • Deploy refund workflow
    • Talk to Tina about single decision log idea
    • Sportsengine retainer tasks
    • Sportsengine reach out to don abouto build proceess
    • History fo the web – ideas and links for Geoff
    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • #12: Web Components, Web Technologies and Things that Last

    The magical moment of web components and design systems

    There’s something in the air this holiday season that’s got everybody talking about web components. Scott Vandehey sums it up nicely: Web Components are Having a Moment. A lot of this was kicked by off by some reason posts about using “Light DOM” vs shadow DOM (which Eric Meyer concisely summed up for us). The basic difference being that, at the expense of losing some features of shadow DOM and greater encapsulation, you can very easily style a web component from outside the web component. And for a lot of people, that’s enough to make it click.

    But for me, the light bulb moment came this week when I got around to reading Brad Frost’s recent deep dive into design systems, The Design System Ecosystem. This is the line that caught my eye:

    We’ve helped organizations build design systems in a multitude of technologies over the years, but as time goes by we now heartily recommend one specific technology to build a core design system for the web: Web Components. Web Components are a standard, part of the web platform itself. That means they’re interoperable with any web framework or technology, they’re lightweight, they’re themeable, and they’re self-contained.

    Brad has been doing this kind of work for a very, very long time. And he works with heavy hitters in the enterprise world with tons of legacy systems and tangled implementations to sort through. The kind of thing I find myself in each and every week as well.

    And for that use case, Web Components fit like a glove. They can be layered on to just about any system and be fitted to adapt it. Combine that with some selective components that utilize Light DOM, and you may even be able to swap in pieces of a UI layer, ad-hoc and as needed, as time goes on, bundling in the JavaScript with the component, but without having to change any of the CSS or styling for a site.

    All of this has prompted me to do a couple of experiments on my own, and so far I am quite enjoying the simplicity of web components, and the fact that they are just web technologies all the way down.

    What it’s like to write on the web

    Here’s a conundrum. We have a medium that’s been around for thirty years. It’s the major source of information around the world, and it’s the most prolific and vast streams of words, and media several orders of magnitude over. And yet it’s often still talked about as a proto-medium, something lesser than. Decades ago, authors like Steven Johnson (who wrote Interface Culture and is now working on NotebookLM over at Google) were trying to figure out how the medium of hypertext was going to separate itself from others and become a fully expressive new form.

    And in some ways, it just never has. Megan Marz reflected on that very disconnect in her piece, Poets in the Machine. Lamenting the lack of critical recognition that online writers receive simply because they happen to be writing online, she writes:

    The public record of literature in the 21st century is full of gaping holes where these things should be. The missing material is right there on our screens, but it slides past with little formal acknowledgement. While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down.

    And yet, online writers helped to define a new voice, one that would be impossible without the web. It’s a style that Johnson participated in, and helped to define. And it’s one that has now made it’s way into other forms of popular culture. And so I don’t know if I agree with Marz that online writing even needs formal recognition, but I do think it’s a disservice to set it apart from “serious” writing so callously.

    A Mindful Universe

    I listened to an interview with Marcelo Gleiser on the Why is this Happening podcast, and they briefly talked about Gleiser’s book, The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future.

    I thought what Gleiser had to say on what a mindful universe means was one of the most poetic and clarifying ideas I have ever heard:

    And if we weren’t here, with the narrative of creation or trying to figure out what the big bang is or what an atom is or what is democracy, the universe would not have a voice. And so one of the fundamental things that the only reason we have a voice is that we exist in this planet that allow us to be here…

    … And so the mindfulness is that with the emergence of humans in this planet that started to ask fundamental questions about existence, the universe gained a mind, too. So in a sense, the universe is thinking about itself through us.

    John O’Donohue on the light that lives within us all:

    There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • Bleak House and Narratives

    Bleak House is a sharp critique of industrialism and capitalism, and Dickens skillyfully intertwines his critique with a captivating narrative, masterfully elevating his message. And it gets me every time.

    He is often able to take his not-so-subtle criticism of modern governments and capitalism and infuse with narrative intrigue to make the former more engaging.

    On its own, Dickens’ extended commentary on the hypocrisy and absurdity of bureaucracy and greed might seem dry and overdone. But by weaving these commentaries into a page-turning story, Dickens keeps the reader engrossed. He doesn’t merely place these two elements side by side; he combines them.

    Take, for example, Sir Leicester, who often conveys Dickens’ strongest criticisms of Britain’s nobility. From his estate, Leicester judges the lower classes and finds the notion of them ruling laughable. Dickens sets up Leicester’s criticism by referring to a time when aristocratic rulers were absent due to a verbal dispute.

    This stupendous national calamity, however, was averted by Lord Coodle’s making the timely discovery that if in the heat of debate he had said that he scorned and despised the whole ignoble career of Sir Thomas Doodle, he had merely meant to say that party differences should never induce him to withhold from it the tribute of his warmest admiration; while it as opportunely turned out, on the other hand, that Sir Thomas Doodle had in his own bosom expressly booked Lord Coodle to go down to posterity as the mirror of virtue and honour. Still England has been some weeks in the dismal strait of having no pilot (as was well observed by Sir Leicester Dedlock) to weather the storm; and the marvellous part of the matter is that England has not appeared to care very much about it, but has gone on eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage as the old world did in the days before the flood

    This is the kind of thing that is gripping and amusing in short bursts. With his overwrought prose, Dickens exposes the frivolity of the ruling class, and in fact, it’s very uselessness. And on its own, that’s plenty powerful and insightful. And it highlights the disconnect between the victims of modernity, and its progenitors.

    But then Tulkinghorn, Leicester’s lawyer, comes in. Behind Sir Leicester’s back, Tulkinghorn has been engaged in a cat and mouse game with Leicester’s beloved wife, Lady Dedlock. He has recently come to the conclusion that Lady Dedlock once had a daughter out of wedlock with a wayward naval soldier, who died shortly after. He has yet to reveal his discovery to either Lady Dedlock or Sir Leicester, but means to lay his cards on the table to her, to engage her in a conversation about it.

    So when Leicester asks Tulkinghorn about this very disconnect between his own aristocratic caste and the lower classes, Tulkinghornn points to pride. Then he tells a story.

    The captain in the army being dead, she believed herself safe; but a train of circumstances with which I need not trouble you led to discovery. As I received the story, they began in an imprudence on her own part one day when she was taken by surprise, which shows how difficult it is for the firmest of us (she was very firm) to be always guarded. There was great domestic trouble and amazement, you may suppose; I leave you to imagine, Sir Leicester, the husband’s grief. But that is not the present point. When Mr. Rouncewell’s townsman heard of the disclosure, he no more allowed the girl to be patronized and honoured than he would have suffered her to be trodden underfoot before his eyes. Such was his pride, that he indignantly took her away, as if from reproach and disgrace. He had no sense of the honour done him and his daughter by the lady’s condescension; not the least. He resented the girl’s position, as if the lady had been the commonest of commoners. That is the story. I hope Lady Dedlock will excuse its painful nature.

    And just like that Tulkinghorn, and by extension, Dickens, drops a narrative bomb into the middle of the chapter. With only a slight nod to Lady Deadlok (“I hope Lady Dedlock will excuse its painful nature”), he reveals the whole the story at the center of the book. It’s a bold flourish of dramatic irony, but it’s also a brilliant dovetail off his rebukes of the ruling class. Tulkinghorn’s disdain for the “pride” of the Rouncewells (which we will find out later is not nearly as arrogant as Tulkinghorn makes it out to be), shines more of a light on his own deceitfulness than it does his target.

    And in Bleak House, Dickens does this over and over again, chapter after chapter. And I love it every time.

  • #11: Navigating the end of year scaries

    There is a strange and unsettling feeling that happens in December, as time rushes forward and slows down all at once. And so it becomes a balancing act of sorts. Here are the kinds of things that I am personally trying to balance:

    • I have a really exciting new direction for History of the Web I’m trying to mock up right now
    • I’ve been trying to sell this damn dining room table on Facebook Marketplace (which, by the way, fuck Facebook Marketplace). It’s not going well.
    • Balancing a couple of client projects, and a fun internal one as well
    • Presents. We’re buying them, wrapping them, putting them under a tree. Trying to get ahead of it all this week.

    But anyway, I like to end the year with some focus and something new. And that energy is going to be put into what I have going on with the History of the Web right now. To mock up the site, I’ve been using WordPress’ full site editing a whole lot lately, and I want to write that up this week. The results have been… mixed, but I think it’s more liberating than it is limiting.

    The key is in the results, and I can often get bogged down in the details. Full Site Editing helps me to focus away from that and figure out solutions with what’s already there. It’s not perfect, but hey that was standing in the way of good anyway. By next month, I expect to have something out.

    I am getting to the end of reading (listening to) Bleak House. And as it all comes together in the final chapters, I’m struck by the emphasis on the power of the individual even inside an overwrought and broken down system. It is only through the compassion of John Jardynce that Ada and Esther are given a chance at all. It is only through the tenacity for truth of Mr Bucket that an innocent man does not go to jail. Sir Leicester’s final act with his wife is to forgive all, and Dickens pauses to praise this gesture:

    His noble earnestness, his fidelity, his gallant shielding of her, his generous conquest of his own wrong and his own pride for her sake, are simply honourable, manly, and true. Nothing less worthy can be seen through the lustre of such qualities in the commonest mechanic, nothing less worthy can be seen in the best-born gentleman. In such a light both aspire alike, both rise alike, both children of the dust shine equally.

    Much gets stuck in the mud in Bleak House. And those that embed themselves within government and the law and all manners of buereaucracy are eventually ground down by it. But those that cut through that, and simply act out of their own goodness (Jardynce, Woodcourt, Esther, Bucket, Mrs. Bagnet, etc.) are able to advance the world forward nonetheless. And that is a powerful message.

    Just one more thing to add. Michael Silverblatt’s interview with David Foster Wallace about Infinite Jest on the former’s radio program Bookworm. Silverblatt is a fantastic interviewer and immediately interrogates Wallace on the particularities of the novels structure, which he compares to fractals, and the journey to find the message inside of the book. And Wallace quotes from a similar refrain which is that his job is not only to challenge but to entertain, so despite the labyrinth of a plot and structure, he strove to fid clarity for his readers.

    Martha Nussbaum, on Proust, and a possible explanation for why the exact matches of dating profiles so often miss anyway:

    Intellect’s account of psychology lacks all sense of proportion and depth and importance… [Such a] cost-benefit analysis of the heart — the only comparative assessment of which intellect, by itself, is capable — is bound, Proust suggests, to miss differences of depth. Not only to miss them, but to impede their recognition. Cost-benefit analysis is a way of comforting oneself, of putting oneself in control by pretending that all losses can be made up by sufficient quantities of something else. This stratagem opposes the recognition of love — and, indeed, love itself.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

    Stuff fro today:

    • Read brainpickings
    • Scorecard review
    • Bleak House Notes
    • $500 in index fund
    • Comic and book lists

  • Travelers in landscapes from our past

    A post thanksgiving flurry into the holidays always has me thinking about the future. And I spent a lot of this year reading what I want to read. Maybe next year I can focus on writing what I want to write.

    Reading

    If I could find a through-line for a few articles I’ve read recently, it would be this: the web, and the culture of its development, is unraveling at the seams even as it finds new forms. It’s a runaway train.

    First, a sendoff from the creator of Omegle, which at the very least offers an interesting perspective. From reading it, I have no doubt that Leif had the best of intentions with the site, but he so clearly wants to cast himself the hero he seems to have missed the point. The web started small and you could build small things for small groups of people. But then it got bigger. Much bigger. And the job of keeping everyone safe got bigger too. And just about everybody failed at it, from the tech giants at the top down to the Omegle’s of the world.

    Then, a couple of entries from Garbage Day trying to make sense of what is starting to feel like a pivotal moment. In TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden, a fascinating piece of digital archeology, Ryan traces the backlash of the latest panicked news story and finds that (surprise, surprise) it was the backlash that seeded a bad take’s virality, not some cultural movement.

    And then, commenting on AI and copyright, Ryan points out that we have, in fact, done this all before. And everyone needs to stop being ridiculous.

    My hunch is that we’re just speedrunning the Napster era and will end up with an AI-protected class of creators and institutions and a wilderness of AI-powered piracy beyond that. In fact, seeing as how I can’t currently generate a picture of Mickey Mouse dabbing in Midjourney, we’re probably already there

    Are we doomed to repeat these same cycles over and over again, faster and faster each time? Personally, I’m losing faith in our own ability to capture the world’s information stream and turn it into connection and empathy rather than chaos and ill-will.

    Reading a talk from last year, weathering software winter, offers at least one way out. Slow down and rebuild. The founders of Hundred Rabbits take everyone through their journey building emulators and games on old hardware and old software built to actually last. It is not “infinitely scalable” and it doesn’t exist in the cloud. It is simple and resilient and enduring—values we have lost track of.

    Watching

    I recently watched All Quiet on the Western Front, based on a novel I quite enjoyed. And so it’s hard not to think about the same stories contrasted in two mediums.

    And this is what I would say on that point. The book is concernned with the humanity, or lack thereof, of war. How old men send the young to die in waves to accomplish very little. And there is a lot about these young men—little more than boys really—growing up and searching for identity amidst great tragedy and horror.

    The film touches on this, but it is far more preoccupied with the aesthetics and mechanics of war. It structures the narrative in chronological order, to its credit I think. But it also focuses quite a bit on the machinery, on the mechanics of trench warfare, on the contrast in rhythm between the peace negotiations and the frontlines. All of these create a picture of a useless war and senseless violence. But I do think it loses some of the humanness of the book.

    At one point in the film, the wise, older comrade Kat pauses to cotemplate what will happen when these war-torn soldiers return home.  

    We’ll walk around like travelers in a landscape from the past… I ask myself if I wouldn’t rather just sit around a campfire with you… and eat fried potatoes, with the skin on.

    It’s a memorable highlight that captures some brief moments of calm in between torrid chaos. But many other times the film trades long, contemplative passages from the book for general platitudes (i.e. “I’m a pair of boots with a rifle”).

    Thich Nhat Hanh on the essence of self:

    It’s funny how much our surroundings influence our emotions. Our joys and sorrows, likes and dislikes are colored by our environment so much that often we just let our surroundings dictate our course. We go along with “public” feelings until we no longer even know our own true aspirations. We become a stranger to ourselves, molded entirely by society… Sometimes I feel caught between two opposing selves — the “false self” imposed by society and what I would call my “true self.” How often we confuse the two and assume society’s mold to be our true self. Battles between our two selves rarely result in a peaceful reconciliation. Our mind becomes a battlefield on which the Five Aggregates — the form, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness of our being — are strewn about like debris in a hurricane. Trees topple, branches snap, houses crash.

    This isn’t about chaging anythig that we are doing, but it’s about settiing a vision and a mindset that I think will motivate people more and attract the right kind of people ot the company.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote
    • Focus this week
    • Sportsengine: Launch WP 6.4
    • Site Architect Demo

  • Choosing WordPress hosts for my personal site

    At some point or another, this site got hacked. I’m really not sure if it’s my fault or the hosts fault (which I’m not even going to mention, because I think it’s the former), but I was having trouble with my current host anyway, so it’s host switching time!

    If you’ve been doing this for a while, I’m sure you’ve been on this ride before. For me at least, it usually always goes the same way.

    1. Look around for possible hosts
    2. Try and compare features, performance, and price
    3. End up on random subreddits and forums with lists of pros and cons
    4. Pull your hair out trying to decide
    5. Just kind of land on one

    Which I started to spiral down. I queued up a bunch of comparison posts, and Reddit threads and Trustpilot scores. One person loved one host, and a bunch more hated it. This one seems complicated. This ones seems faster. It’s enough to make you crazy. So I tried to simplify a bit.

    (As an aside, one resource I at least found useful was the WP Hosting Benchmarks site, which conducts a performance review of WordPress hosts once a year. It’s opt-in for the hosts, which I actually think is a plus. If hosts are willing to opt-in, it means they give a shit, and that says something right there).

    Anyway, I came up with some parameters that helped me narrow it down:

    • From a price perspective, I wanted to keep it kind of cheap. Maybe around $20/mo. I’m only maintaining some smaller sites and I can do a lot myself. It’s limiting, but I’m sticking to it
    • I want something WordPress optimized. It doesn’t have to be WordPress specific, but I’m running all WordPress so this is important
    • No shared hosting. I’ve tried it in the past. No thanks. VPS or semi-dedicated is fine, but nothing fully shared where the seller is just overselling a bunch of space
    • Cares about performance and security. No one’s perfect, but I want to see this front and center.
    • Doesn’t limit me on sites. What can I say, I like side projects.

    I compared a bunch of different ones, and there were three that stood out, given the above parameters:

    • Krystal Hosting, which is the most straightforward of the bunch and seems run by some quality folks
    • 20i, despite being one of the larger ones, has a good reputation and has been doing some interesting things with cloud services
    • HostXNow, which is about as no-nonsense you’re going to find and has by far the most performant packages for their price

    I feel certain that I would have been completely satisfied on any of these three. But I went with HostXNow. I found them to be really friendly, have just enough features, keeps their packages inexpensive. And their servers are incredibly fast. I’m writing this post inside of the block editor right now and it’s handling it very well. The only thing I found missing was a built-in CDN, but I will probably just run any high-traffic sites through Cloudflare.

    Anyway, hopefully this is my last switch for a while. Until next time ?

  • What’s the next move?

    Parenting a toddler is getting up at 1AM for your toddler with an ear infection and at 3AM to help them find a squishy ball they lost in their bed but it all being worth it for the endless joy it produces.

    Short week, Thanksgiving. We’ll see if I can get some inertia.

    Reading

    I finished The Bullet Journal method for the second time. I got a lot out of it again, even though this time was more of a skim. One thing I’m focusing on is logging more than just simple tasks and events. This stood out (emphasis mine)

    You can view your Bullet Journal as a living autobiography. It allows you to clearly see what the rush of life tends to obscure. You can track the decisions you’ve made, and the actions you’ve taken that led you to where you are. It encourages you to learn from your experiences. What worked, what did not, how did it make you feel, what’s the next move

    If I could sum that up, it’s probably: slow down and think about it. That’s a lesson we can all learn, but one that I’m particularly thinking about for how I log in my journal.

    That used to be something came so naturally, especially in my college years, when I considered a future in academia. And I’m not sure if its the natural distractions of life or the interruptive modern era that makes that so hard these days.

    Some hope for the future of the web? A good point made in in Today in Tabs about a decade or so ago, when publications like The Awl began to break through with a new form of independent media:

    The Verge seems to be doing fine, some of the others kind of still exist, pretty much everyone is laying off staff and making ominous noises about replacing the rest with AI soon. But if I know one fact (and I do) it’s that there will always be people with no other interests or life skills except finding out what’s happening and writing it down. You can give them big paychecks, but it won’t make them work any faster. You can fire them, but it won’t make them work any less. The moneyfolk come and go from media for reasons I will never understand, but when they’re gone—when things look the most bleak—that’s when your true reporter goblins come out to play.

    Who knows what the future of the web holds, and who knows what journalists and creators will do? The only thing that’s certain is that once a generation, they are counted out, and once a generation, they find a new path no one had thought of.

    Drive is a bit repetitive, but it certainly… drives… home its point. Intrinsic motivation is a very really think and it can be encouraged and it is a bit counter-intuitive. But once you wrap your head around it, it starts to make a lot of sense.

    Writing

    Maya Angelou, echoing the kind of thing you hear all the time from writers:

    Writing is a part of my life; cooking is a part of my life. Making love is a part of my life; walking down the street is a part of it. Writing demands more time, but it takes from all of these other activities. They all feed into the writing. I think it’s dangerous to concern oneself too damned much with “being an artist.” It’s more important to get the work done. You don’t have to concern yourself with it, just get it done. The pondering pose — the back of the hand glued against the forehead — is baloney. People spend more time posing than getting the work done. The work is all there is. And when it’s done, then you can laugh, have a pot of beans, stroke some child’s head, or skip down the street.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus
    Publish Weeknote

  • Steinbeck’s resistance

    I am finishing up Grapes of Wraith, and the back half has me convinced that Tom Joad is one of the greatest characters in fiction, and that Steinbeck’s humanist, agrarian solution to the problem of inequity is elegant and timeless.

    The novel, to me, is also half-treatise. He lays out the problem clearly. People are hungry and need work. And instead, they are met with cruelty and neglect. Centralization, the logical extreme of capitalism, results in inefficiency and inhumaneness.

    Nowhere is this more clear than in Chapter 25—a chapter that ends with the title of the book—where Steinbeck lays his message out, rejecting subtlety in favor of clarity. And the message hits home. America, and its people, are withering. Needlessly. Endlessly.

    The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce…

    …There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

    And the solution is simple and plain. Return to the Earth and cultivate it. Help your neighbors. Build a community. Use the government to fill the gaps of equity. And if all else fails, resist.

    Tom Joad resists. He is drawn to, and he can’t escape it.

    Tom leaves us with a powerful declaration conveyed to his story, but really told to us, the reader. It’s not a threat, but it sort of reads like one. Tom, in the wind, aims to help folks wherever he can.

    I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build, I’ll be there, too.

    Tom will be there. He still is.

  • Inspiring, really.

    I’m returning to the kinds of things you return to at the end of the year: focus and progression. I do feel as if I have had a handle on focus for quite some time, even more so since I’ve been able to process the lessons of Four Thousand Weeks. But that focus has been directed on minutia for the most part. Makes sense. Having two small kids has you swimming in a lot of minutia. But I do feel as if I’m in a good place to try and progress forward my focus. And that’s what I’ll be trying to do.

    Reading

    I read a post once with some incredible and straightforward advice about reading:

    Read fiction in as few sittings as possible, but take my time reading nonfiction. Immersive storytelling benefits from few interruptions. Nonfiction benefits from reading only short amounts at once and reading multiple books at once. Always have at least two nonfiction books going.

    So I’ve picked up two nonfiction books: The Bullet Journal Method and Drive.

    I first read The Bullet Journal Method back a little bit after it was published in like 2018. Of course, by then, the bullet journal was a pretty popular concept and there were lots of people doing that. Since then, I’ve pretty much always had a notebook around, but I’ve definitely tried out different digital approaches and apps. But I’m back to a notebook (and a single notes app)(it’s Obsidian)! And I’m reading the book as a refresher.

    Drive was recommended to me. I don’t know a ton about it, but I am very interested in setting direction and focus (there it is again) among teams. At this point, the introduction was worth the price of admission.

    And the always insightful Ryan Broderick on the current cycle of viral clips which are staged as podcasts and crafted on TikTok specifically to spark an outrage cycle on Twitter in a ruse that is so obvious it doesn’t even belong in a Bond film. Anyway, Broderick sums it up nicely.

    There are a few big takeaways here for me. The first, and funniest, is that X users have become so right-wing and reactionary that they’re spending their time raging over literal ads for porn. The second takeaway is how savvy new porn operations have become. They’ve built these labyrinthian networks of SFW viral content on major platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that guide users to their OnlyFans pages. And the final takeaway for me is that at our current late stage of Web 2.0 everyone is having such a Bad Time Online at such a consistent level that you can build an entire media company off of short videos of young women saying random stuff that makes weird men angry. Inspiring, really.

    Watching

    Lupin Season 3. Constructed evenly and methodically as always, even as it raises the stakes. The threat of violence has been an incredible foil in every iteration of Lupin, because it is such a clumsy and vicious instrument. And Assane’s ability to weave around and manipulate violence, even when confronted with dire circumstances, makes him that much more of a hero. Always a blast to watch. The music is incredible.

    Notes

    Check Asana
    Clear out Reeder
    Check Inbox Note
    Read through emails
    Go through “To Sort” In Raindrop
    Set a weekly focus

    Week Focus:

    • EOS: Set everybodys rocks
    • Site Architect: Get demo up
    • History of the Web: send out nenwsletter
    • Keep setting up new bullet journal
    • Quality rock: kick off document where I’m trying to corral all this stuff

  • Thinking is an active pursuit

    Thinking about how to keep things small this week. Everything these days feels so big, and we’ve invented these big and complicated systems and procedures for trying to manage just how big it all feels.

    So this week I’m trying to think small. How can I give myself time and space to simply think? How can I simplify? How can I manage the breadth of news in the world without being overwhelmed?

    Doing

    I just finished a slide deck on web history. Specifically, the history of layout and grids and all the things we tried until we got to 3 line CSS solutions that start with display: grid. Hoping to turn that into a talk some day, but I’ll just drop this picture of Bill Nye’s first website for now:

    ALSO PUBLISHED:

    Reading

    On his blog, Ploum describes how the users of the web have split the two. One the one side, the ad-infested, barely usable experience of browsing mainstream sites and social media. Across the divide, the small web. The considered web. The thoughtful web that deals in ideas and clean layouts. Ploum concludes fairly decisively.

    It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can’t stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.

    Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.

    One great word of caution. If you think your team has a culture problem, it may be time to look inward.

    This one’s from a little while ago, but I finally dug into Casey Newton’s slight departure with Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter. Here’s the thing that’s been sticking with me:

    The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

    It’s kind of one of those obvious things. I spend too much of my time distracted. I’ve been trying to take some time to stare at a while for a little bit and see what happens. See what comes into my head. Then I write that down. So fucking obviousl

    Plus, a quick read on writing culture challenges. Something that is always super interesting to me. I’m in awe and strive to be part of a team that emphasizes communicating through writing.

    Watching

    As an American Jew with skepticism about the Zionist project that increasingly feels like it can’t exist without the subjugation of another people, I have complicated feelings about the current conflict in Israel. But this video is making the rounds now, and it is eye opening.

    And Patrick Willems embarks on a murder mystery to try and answer the question, who killed cinema. The culprit may not be who you think… (it’s not Marvel. Or maybe. Kind of).

    Notes

    Tasks:

    • Write Purdue Case Study
    • Sort out Sportsengine tasks about DNS

    For this upcoming week:

    • Presentation to Geoffs class
    • AI Blog Post
    • Prep for EOS

  • Mapping out my ideal notebook format

    I’ve experimented with a lot of different notebooks and a lot of different formats. Over the years I’ve adapted an almost bullet journal approach that I quite like. With the new year coming up, I’m going to jot down how I want to approach this year coming up.

    We’re going to go with a Leuchtturm1917 A5 Notebook. Why? The paper is nice but honestly it’s mostly because it has two page markers. Dot grids, though I’ve spent plenty of time with blank ones.

    First things first is a calendar view. I’ve tried both the running calendar down the page and a full calendar layout. I’m going to draw out a full calendar layout. I almost got the Monthly planner for this reason, but it was a little big for my mind. So I’ll just draw it myself. I like just having all the days laid out because otherwise you end up having to write in dates outside of chronological order, and that can be frustrating.

    Then some sort of Project List. I just kind of want a project list with maybe some way to mark things as completed. Not any description of the projects, but they’ll match my current and archived projects in Obsidian.

    Then each month I do a month view. It has that months events, project focuses, and list of tasks. Task get copied from month to month.

    Then a weekly view which outlines the days of the weeks. For each day, write down any meetings I have, then my primary project focuses for each day. Throughout the day I can use it to mark tasks and track those as well.

    Once I get things going, maybe I’ll post some pictures here.

  • Man, distinctive in the universe.

    Fall begins. My kids are sick. But several years in, I may actually know how to handle it. We’ll see next week if I’m right.

    Reading

    Continuing with Grapes of Wrath, which I completely understand most people read in High School. I did not. And I do love it. It has some of the most keen and insightful reflections on the nature of people in the faith of unspeakable adversity.

    And this you can know—fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

    But at the center, it’s all heart. It’s just about a family trying to get along, alone, but together

    They were afraid, now that the time had come—afraid in the same way Grampa was afraid. They saw the shed take shape against the light, and they saw the lanterns pale until they no longer cast their circles of yellow light. The stars went out, few by few, toward the west. And still the family stood about like dream walkers, their eyes focused panoramically, seeing no detail, but the whole dawn, the whole land, the whole texture of the country at once.

    Watching

    Finished the final season of Sex Education, which was a really well done show, but one that kind of falls short in its final season. For good reason, there is a lot of length given to the auxiliary characters, and they all shine (Eric especially, who finds his purpose in brightness), but Otis and Maeve fail to ever really connect with the heart of the show. Still, it was a good send off, and one that gave some time to properly explore its edges, where it was always most interesting anyway.

    Kevin Kelley on listening:

    Listening well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them “Is there more?” until there is no more.

  • The Infinite Jest Review

    A long time ago, I read Infinite Jest and I have what amounts to complicated feelings about. I think I fall firmly into the camp of people in which the book was not transcendental or life-changing, but still impressive to behold in its scope and depth.

    As I’ve been looking back through my notes on it, I read through this review from The Atlantic that came out at the time the book was published. With the benefit of decades of hindsight, it is much simpler (in some ways) to read this book these days. Every complicated plot thread or connection or motif has been meticulously explored these days. Which is why it’s so interesting to read Sven Birkerts try and make sense of the novel at its release. He has a really clear grasp on it, and situates it as an important reflection and manifestation of the country at the turn of the century.

    But the artistic intent in Infinite Jest overrides such considerations, or at least places them in perspective. Wallace is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction. He is carrying on the Pynchonian celebration of the renegade spirit in a world gone as flat as a circuit board; he is tailoring that richly comic idiom for its new-millennial uses. To say that the novel does not obey traditional norms is to miss the point. Wallace’s narrative structure should be seen instead as a response to an altered cultural sensibility

    And it’s a good reminder that Infinite Jest may be important for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which is that it is a perfect expression of the waywardness and uncertainty at the very tip of the 20th century.

  • Being in Time

    It’s one of those chaotic weeks. Overscheduled. A lot going on. One thing goes wrong and it all goes down like dominoes.

    And yet it’s actually kind of fun. There is a lot of joy in activity and a quickened pace. It makes me wonder that my brain’s default setting always seems to try and seize on balance and routine. It’s easy to think of David Foster Wallace’s “this is water” parable in moments like these. But also, the way Oliver . Burkeman extended that story in Four Thousand Weeks (emphasis mine):

    Soon, your sense of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you’re using time. it stops being merely the water in which you swim and turns into something you feel you need to dominate or control, if you’re to avoid feeling guilty, panicked, or overwhelmed….

    Instead of simply living our lives as they unfold in time—instead of just being time, you might say—it becomes difficult not to value each moment primarily according to its usefulness for some future goal, or for some future oasis of relaxation you hope to reach once your tasks are finally “out of the way.”

    I’ll be thinking about that this week as I try to stay present. As I try to live my life and let it unfold.

    Reading

    A few articles I had some time to read.

    One was the original review of Infinite Jest in The Atlantic which offers a really fascinating perspective on the book that’s much fresher than what we have these days.

    Also, two articles that work well as a pair. Building an innovative agency (and why you might not need one) and what to do with your agency team about this whole AI thing people seem excited about. The key, it would seem, is one of those things that are painfully obvious once you see someone articulate it so clearly, as Nicholas does. You need to set up the preconditions for innovation to emerge so that when an opportunity presents itself, you are ready. Put another way, the worst time to innovate is at the exact time you want to be innovative. You should have already started.

    And I was really saddened by what Allie Nimmons had to say in her revealing and incredibly honest post about why she is leaving the WordPress community behind. It is a huge loss. Lots hit home, but especially this:

    There is a huge disconnect between the people making the “real” money with this software and the people who are trying to earn a fair living.

    Ursula K. Le Guin on what it means to write history:

    History is one way of telling stories, just like myth, fiction, or oral storytelling. But over the last hundred years, history has preempted the other forms of storytelling because of its claim to absolute, objective truth. Trying to be scientists, historians stood outside of history and told the story of how it was. All that has changed radically over the last twenty years. Historians now laugh at the pretense of objective truth. They agree that every age has its own history, and if there is any objective truth, we can’t reach it with words. History is not a science, it’s an art.

    Notes

  • Men made it, but they can’t control it

    Thinking about HTML tables this week. Not only because I’m going to be talking to a class about that very topic soon, but because it seems that we are in the HTML tables phase of technology’s next big Internet-driven cycle (it would seem): AI and language learning models.

    Anyway, what do I mean by that? We’re forcing it, basically. We are using the technology of AI in a clunky way. It is unrefined and depends on hacks, rather than going with the grain of the technology. When the technology recedes into the background, becomes more minimal, and less intrusive, than we may truly be on to something. Until then, I can’t help but feel like we’re using tables for layout.

    Reading

    Read through The End of the Googleverse. The web has been reported dead before. The Post-Google world is more interesting to me than not.

    Speaking of Google, I could take a look at their NotebookLM, which I was surprised (and kind of pleased) to find had at its helm Steven Johnson, the co-founder of Feed and writer of many books including Interface Culture.

    Notably, much like the web, what’s absent from the next wave of AI tools are any sort of concept of transclusion. Ted Nelson never quite cracked that technological nut, and we are so well past it that nobody even thinks about it anymore.

    Bleak House continues, Chapters 31 through 37. Much is revealed and we are quite expeditiously arriving at the point at which it will all collapse. Lady Deadlock has made herself known to Esther. Richard has fallen to the Jardynce sickness. Tachyhorn is onto Deadlock. And the world continues to simply turn, in a way only Dickens can describe:

    Now there is a sound of putting up shop-shutters in the court and a smell as of the smoking of pipes; and shooting stars are seen in upper windows, further indicating retirement to rest. Now, too, the policeman begins to push at doors; to try fastenings; to be suspicious of bundles; and to administer his beat, on the hypothesis that every one is either robbing or being robbed.

    On to The Grapes of Wrath. If I could write like any author, oh man would I want it to be Steinbeck. There is so much pathos in every passage of the book. Every word choice is perfect.

    Yes, but the bank is only made of men. No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

    Harrowing, and true, and poignant. But also, the rhythm of that excerpt is right on point.

    Watching

    Fully caught up to Only Murders in the Building

    Octavia Butler on writing:

    The first, of course, is to read. It’s surprising how many people think they want to be writers but they don’t really like to read books… The second is to write, every day, whether you like it or not. Screw inspiration….

    Forget about inspiration, because it’s more likely to be a reason not to write, as in, “I can’t write today because I’m not inspired.” I tell them I used to live next to my landlady and I told everybody she inspired me. And the most valuable characteristic any would-be writer can possibly have is persistence. Just keep at it, keep learning your craft and keep trying.

    Notes

    Maybe there’s someothing to a public and shared Aboard board that can be used to collect History of the Web type resouroces innto different categories, or mabe collect it there everytime a footnote is made

    For today:

    • Move Notion finances into Google Drive
    • History of the web ideas
    • Mow the lawmn
    • Do all the laundry

  • Consuming films like Coca-Cola

    Reading

    The conclusion of two books: Sculpting in Time and Just Keep Investing.

    On Sculpting in Time I will say that it is an incredibly unique perspective and view of cinema—recognized by Tarkovsky as a wholly artistic pursuit and a unique medium focused on the compression and rhythm of time. And these are accurate, and well thought out, though perhaps a bit dated these days, as the cinema has receded into the narrative over form in greater and greater strides over the last few decades. This has caused more than one person to lament lately about the state of content, but thankfully Tarkovsky precedes that view and entirely rejects it.

    He concludes the book with a look at the responsibility of the artist. The responsibility is, of course, to represent one’s own personal vision faithfully. But, there is also a responsibility to create true art, even when it is challenging, rather than popcorn movies for pure consumption:

    People cease to feel any need for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume films like bottles of Coca-Cola. The contact between film director and audience is unique to cinema in that it conveys experience imprinted on film in uncompromisingly affective, and therefore compelling, forms. Th e viewer feels a need for such vicarious experience in order to make up in part for what he himself has lost or missed; he pursues it in a kind of ‘search for lost time’. And how human this newly gained experience will be depends only on the author. A grave responsibility!

    I found it interesting, when talking about Stalker, how bothered he was when people asked him what the mysterious “Zone” at the center of the film was:

    People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films

    I wonder what he would think about Star Wars and Marvel movies, where every offhand storyline requires a huge backstory and every plot thread needs resolving.

    Just Keep Investing more or less reiterates the title over the course of many chapters. It’s good advice though.

    Watching

    I saw an interview with Karim Lakhani about the future of AI. I think in many ways it represents well the popular view, and presents a nuanced vision for what’s to come. One thing that gave me pause was when Lakhani pointed to AI as a place to substitute whenever one is doing tasks that require thinking. This is a useful starting point, but I think that it hides the technology and makes AI feel too much like magic.

    Final Note

    I was reminded of this excellent quote by Oliver Burkerman (in Four Thousand Weeks) from this week’s Marginalian:

    Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about.

    Notes

    Meal Plan: Meatloaf + Breaded Chicken using new breading

    Focus

  • Did we tell you how the marmoset saved us from Hitler?

    Reading

    It was a big Tarkovsky week. From Sculpting in Time, I finished Chapter 5: The Film Image and Chapter 6: The author in search of an audience. The way that this book builds, he often returns to the same point over and over again, each time layering something new on top of it. So first, we talk about the filmic image as an objective and personal vision of truth, then we talk about the mechanics of how it creates that truth, then we move to a discussion of how the film auteur can use the camera to tell their own truth and the responsibilities of an artist.

    The image is indivisible and elusive, dependent upon our consciousness and on the real world which it seeks to embody. If the world is inscrutable, then the image will be so too. It is a kind of equation, signifying the correlation between truth and the human consciousness, bound as the latter is by Euclidean space. We cannot comprehend the totality of the universe, but the poetic image is able to express that totality.

    Watching

    Starting out on Welcome to Wrexham.

    Solaris is a poetic film, as much as I’m sure Tarkovsky would want to deny this. And I don’t mean that it is lyrical, but simply that it’s aim is to use filmic language to communicate emotional experiences, rather than to advance a narrative. And in this case, it actually does a good job of doing both. It is an intriguing enough scenario to motivate a suspension of disbelief, but it is pointed and disjointed enough to feel viscerally. It is a story of love and loss and there is much to find welcoming for all of its distncing.
    Quick synopsis: A psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a mysterious, living ocean to determine if it is worth continuing explorations, but finds instead a station mostly empty and haunted by hallucinations from his past.

    The story from Marginalian this week is about Virigina Woolf and her experience with the Nazis

    Did we tell you how the marmoset saved us from Hitler?

    Todos

    • Review the digital organization guide for talks
    • Remove your name from electro freeze contacts
    • Upload recent trainings videos
    • Review AI notes, add my own
    • Follow up on codeowners PR in Salesforce

    Focus Next Week

    • Write my blog post
    • Virtual Retreat
    • Sort out next steps on the AI project