Chris Brooks Newsletter 037
Welcome to May - summer is just around the corner!
1. 🚘 Where I've Been Traveling
We started the drive from Napa on April 7, spent the weekend of April 11 in Tulsa for a wedding, then landed in Melbourne FL the weekend of April 18. The usual great adventures along the way: dispersed camping out west in beautiful scenery, the perfect spot to watch the conclusion of the Masters, possibly the worst wine we've ever tasted in Alabama (not sharing a link to this one), and a great meetup with campervan compadres Jim and Jill at Reed Bingham State Park in Georgia.
After a week in Florida we rolled out heading north, detouring to Tallahassee for an outdoor Wilco show with Waxahatchee. The concert was amazing and we loved wandering the downtown area. Julie is becoming a Wilco superfan.
We arrived at Keuka Lake on May 1 and are settled in to our cold weather cottage. Sailboat is rigged, gardens cleaned out and ready for planting, and we are waiting for the rains to stop so we can start engaging in more outdoor activities.
2. 📖 What I've Been Reading
Articles:
Friend Allen wrote about his love for and approach to organizing paper notebooks
Brett McKay from Art of Manliness updated his take on Planet Fitness, very much aligned with Julie's and my perception. The best monthly subscription we've been paying for years now.
Books:
Still grinding my way through Wind and Truth. No excuse for going slow: the book is action packed and a creative departure from the prior books in the series (in a good way). I'm just reading enough outside of bedtime.
Listened to Klein and Thompson's new book Abundance. This is a short read and listen and so worth the time. It gives solid rationale for both sides of the vast political divide in the United States to reconsider some of their positions.
3. 🍿 What I've Been Watching
TV Shows:
The star of the month was The Pitt, the ER medical drama set in real-time ala 24. The stars aligned and we watched my sister and partner while in Florida. Everyone looked forward to sitting down and watching a few episodes each night.
Watched the latest season of Full Swing, pretty meh.
Julie and I concluded our watching of the latest and final season of 1923. So so melodramatic and unbelievable, but the landscapes made it somewhat worthwhile.
Now in anticipation of our upcoming Scotland trip we are watching Outlander which we had started and fizzled out on before. In comparison to 1923 I think it holds up well! The violence and torture are a bit hard to take. We've finished season 1.
Movies:
On sister Jennifer's recommendation we watched Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party. Fun to see Cameron Crowe at this stage in his life (close Fast Times proximity) and the movie was OK. Good companion to a podcast I'll talk about below.
YouTube:
This is a good video to watch (and platform to try) if you are a non-programmer interested in trying some vibe coding. More on that below.
4. 🎶 What I've Been Listening To
Music:
It was my choice in the exclusive album club of which I'm one of only two members, and my latest pick was Taylor Swift's Folklore. This was my original introduction to Swift's album work and hooked me into becoming a Swiftie back in 2021. Jim found highlights but alas will remain firmly in the "not a Taylor Swift fan" camp.
Tons of Wilco leading up to the concert in Tallahassee, with particular focus on the recent works Cruel Country and Cousin.
Podcasts:
Friend Matt R turned me to Life of the Record podcast, ostensibly for me to listen to The Postal Service record Give Up, but of course I went straight to Big Star's #1 Record, the Replacements' Pleased to Meet Me, and Petty and the Heartbreakers' Long After Dark. The first two are perfect Memphis bookends (with Pleased to Meet Me having the Big Star tribute "Alex Chilton") and the third a must-listen to before or after you watch the aforementioned Heartbreakers Beach Party.
Switched on Pop did an episode last year on Fleetwood Mac that is a good launching point for some rediscovery and contemplation of Rumours, particularly Buckingham and Nicks. The deep dive into the rhythm of "Go Your Own Way" (almost certainly sussed out from listening to the Song Exploder episode), reflections on how "Dreams" was received at the time, and an on-the-mark treatise on their influence on modern pop. Dreams is just two chords with a few melody lines overlayed, solo over-dubbing by the bandmates (they couldn't be in the studio together at this particular juncture), with lyrical brilliance. Sounds like Billie Eilish or even Jeff Tweedy! Listen to the end to learn about the new-to-me Cunningham Bird cover / tribute album to the impossible-to-find classic Buckingham Nicks.
5. 🎮 What I've Been Playing
Played a game of Forest Shuffle with Jim and Jill while camping in Georgia; that's it on the boardgame front. Still doing another Baldur's Gate 3 run on my Steam Deck.
6. 🤖 Good Vibes
I started dipping my toes in the world of AI-assisted software development to help me better support my computer science seniors at Western Oregon University. I'm coaching and evaluating all of the senior capstone project teams, and their work is required to be C# / ASP.NET / MVC / Azure. I'm either 20 years removed from hands-on experience with those technologies, or in the case of Azure cloud hosting firmly in the "never done it" camp. C# and ASP.NET came back quickly for me given my deep background in C, C++, Java, and C# (all from the 90s and early 00s). MVC (model-view-controller) is a pattern I use regularly with other tech stacks so that hasn't been hard either. Still, I need to be able to be of real use to my students, which includes regularly creating demo screencasts for them to explain specific topics. Microsoft's GitHub Copilot in VS Code has been very helpful in bringing me (back) up to speed.
Having some development projects in my personal backlog, I decided to embark on a series of experiments building personal "vanity" apps to scratch my own itches. I first built two lightweight financial data apps (quotes and option chains for SPX) in Swift/ iOS and then Python / Flask. Then I went all-in with AI-assisted development using Windsurf (OpenAI just bought them) to build a golf coaching app for personal use. The big "ah ha" for me was the power of using the AI to build a spec and then a series of prompts to use to build the app. I'm using the app now and continue to refine it, at times using my own skills and at times reverting to using CoPilot in VS Code.
My current experiment is building a US National Parks and Monuments visit tracking app. This time I'm using an approach closer to what son Jacob recommends, working in ChatGPT (via my Plus subscription) outside of my coding editor and doing everything in VS Code myself. Sometimes I'm copy/pasting from ChatGPT into the editor, other times I'm just using the guidance. I'll write up that experiment soon.
Next up will be an experiment with a platform more designed for non-coders, as I think the two approaches I've taken so far still require some solid understanding of the frameworks and languages being used. I'm considering val town for that.
-Chris