Recently, January 2023

last updated 2023-01-05

Happy 2023! The fresh start. The clean slate. Especially for Alejandra and I, everything feels new. That's because we welcomed Meadow into our lives at the end of last year. We've both been on parental leave, and time is simultaneously whipping by and standing still.

The last six weeks has been entirely spent with Meadow, learning how to be parents. It has been much more of a challenge than I naively expected, especially at the start. It's already getting easier as we get to know her and become more confident.

For a few years now, I've channeled my enjoyment of writing into {Upstream Tech}. I admire folks who have the deep archive of their public-facing writing, and some formats, like Tom MacWright's "Recently" have a cadence built in that I love. I'm going to try it - thanks Tom for the inspiration!

Reading

Books finished recently:

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
{Angle of Repose} by Wallace Stegner (plagiarizing Mary Hallock Foote)

Good stuff on the net:

Just started

You're Paid What You're Worth: And Other Myths of the Modern Economy by Jake Rosenfeld

Listening

We've had Even A Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 1969-1973 on the record player, and a Miyazaki soundtrack amalgamation instantly lulls Meadow to sleep.

Watching

Re-watched Chunking Express (1994), which is in Alejandra and my's top films.

Since we've been listening to so much Ghibli soundtrack music we re-watched Castle in the Sky (1986)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) which had an unexpected and brilliant soundtrack

On the net:

Elsewhere

I rewrote {mmx}'s compiler in Lua, substantially simplifying the logic by integrating some "lessons learned" and shedding extra features that added a lot of complexity. Part of this migrated away from {mmxup} to markdown to improve interoperability with other applications, like Obsidian. The source is here.

I've been playing with uxn, which feels like I'm exercising my brain getting back into the stack machine mindset. One of my favorite assignments in college was building a Universal Machine. This class was formative, and it's been a joy to play again in a similar language.

Watching talks from Handmade Seattle set me on a short jaunt learning about local-first applications. Okay, it's true I run a business primarily built on cloud technologies and subscription models, but these models are too often applied by default in ways that only harm users and communities. And we are exploring ways for organizations to run some of our technology (like our forecasting models) themselves on their own infrastructure. I'm excited for a resurgence of local-first applications with collaboration as a first-class consideration. Earthstar is another interesting technology that could enable a new kind of user ownership.

I wrote two quick posts, one about {hosting your own Mastodon instance} and another about {running a basement server on old, forgotten hardware}.