Spring is coming but the heat dome we are driving towards makes me feel like we are jumping straight to summer. 100-105f highs next week? Jeesh.

1. Where I've Been Traveling

Not much travel, but we did take Rory out van camping at a Napa Valley state park. It was a great adventure and he did very well.

Yesterday Julie and I departed Napa in our van for a 3+ week adventure to Arizona and Utah. Some golf, some National Park camping and hiking, and a concluding backpacking trip in Cedar Mesa are on deck.

2. What I've Been Reading

Articles

1. A Hacker News poster titled I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion hit the front page and the comments are gold. If you've ever felt like programming passed you by, this thread will make you reconsider.
2. Simon Willison published a thorough guide to Agentic Engineering Patterns—how to design loops where AI agents plan, execute, and iterate on tasks. Essential reading if you're building anything with LLMs beyond simple prompts. I've shared with my CS students.
3. Compound Engineering from Every presents an AI-native development philosophy where each unit of work compounds into the next. The Plan-Work-Review-Compound loop is a good mental model for how AI-assisted development actually feels in practice.
4. Seth Godin on AI Slop—short and sharp as usual. Humans also create slop.
5. The Path to Ubiquitous AI profiles Taalas, a company converting AI models into custom silicon. Their chatbot is so ridiculously fast that you'll think it is running inside the browser.
6. Welcome (back) to Macintosh is a well-documented critique of Apple's macOS priorities—persistent bugs in Time Machine, Spotlight, and Finder while resources go to aesthetic redesigns. The latest MacOS release is such a backward step. Their executive reshuffle is hopefully a sign of self-awareness.
7. Introducing Glaze from Raycast lets you create desktop applications through conversational AI. The "app store for AI-generated apps" angle is interesting.
8. H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery—an investigation into an upside-down "H" on Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple in Chicago, tracing through archival photos to discover the error was introduced during the 2014-2017 restoration, not by Wright himself. Delightful rabbit hole.
9. Gruber settles the important questions: I Am Nothing if Not a Man of Science—a blind taste test of Trader Joe's peanut butter cups vs. Reese's. No suprise: TJ for the win.
10. Unsung Heroes: Flickr's URLs Scheme celebrates the elegant, human-readable URL design that Flickr pioneered. A nice reminder that thoughtful design is in the details. Almost makes up for Flickr and Yahoo's egregious missteps through the years.
11. The New York Times published Coding after Coders—a long-form look at what happens to programming as a profession when AI can write most of the code. Thoughtful and worth your time regardless of where you land on the question.
12. A Reddit user wrote a solid guide on Claude Code for Non-Coding Projects/Work—using Claude Code for writing, research, and knowledge management rather than software development. Useful if you've been curious about stretching these tools beyond code. Today I'm wondering if Claude Cowork is a better direction for non-coders.
13. The Piano Bar Teaches Us What Lives and Dies—a meditation on communal music, what songs survive across generations, and why the piano bar might be one of our last truly shared cultural experiences. Songs I probably need to learn for the guitar: "Pink Pony Club", "Wagon Wheel".
14. America and Public Disorder—a piece on the current moment in American civic life. I feel like Julie and I started a conversation about this 10-15 years ago in Portland as we started to feel uncomfortable walking the Burnside corridor in Portland from Powell's Books to Voodoo Donuts.

Books

1. Finished The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman — book 3 of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Julie and I are listening to the rest of them on our coming road trips.
2. Read Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century by John Higgs. He treats the 20th century as a series of paradigm shifts (relativity, the unconscious, modernism) rather than a linear narrative. Higgs also wrote Love and Let Die which I covered last month.
3. Finished a sorta re-read of An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson — the first volume of his WWII Liberation Trilogy covering the North Africa campaign. Dense but excellent military history. I had listened to the abridged version about 20 years ago.

3. What I've Been Watching

TV Shows

1. Binged Tehran seasons 2 and 3 over the course of a week. Israeli spy thriller on Apple TV+ — tense, well-plotted, and the kind of show where every episode ends on a cliffhanger that makes it impossible to stop.
2. Continuing The Pitt season 2 with Julie — our regular evening watch together. Still strong if overly on-the-nose expository at times.
3. Gave up on Shrinking season 4. It ran out of things to say.
4. Started Monarch: Legacy of Monsters — enjoying it more than we expected.
5. Caught some of the Winter Olympics with Julie and Carolyn — curling and women's hockey were the highlights. Lotsa curling. Even had a drawn-out conversation with wargaming friends about whether the mixed doubles format is more entertaining than the traditional 4 vs 4.

Movies

1. Went on a Timothy Dalton Bond run: The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill. Dalton remains the most underrated Bond — darker, more grounded, and closer to the Fleming novels than most of his peers. Licence to Kill in particular holds up well as essentially a revenge thriller that happens to have Bond in it. My Bond actor ranking: Daniel Craig, Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan, George Lazenby.
2. Zodiac (2007) on Netflix — a rewatch. Fincher's procedural obsession is on full display and it's just as gripping the second time. This got back on my radar because of the Killer in the Code podcast which started strong but faltered after 5 or 6 episodes.
3. The Power of One (1992) — watched after finishing the Bryce Courtenay novels last month. The film compresses a lot but Stephen Dorff and Morgan Freeman (and Daniel Craig!) make it work. A nice companion to the books.
4. I Love You, Man — I watched this because of the Rush references and enjoyed it way more than expected.
5. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) — Julie listened to the audio book so this jumped our queue; the Coriolanus Snow origin story. It was pretty good.
6. Patton (1970) — George C. Scott's opening monologue alone is worth the price of admission. Maybe my 5th viewing? We are headed to the Patton museum near Joshua Tree later today.

4. What I've Been Listening To

Music

1. Song Exploder: Iron & Wine—Sam Beam breaks down one of his songs layer by layer. I've been playing "Such Great Heights" a lot on the guitar.
2. Uproxx ranked Every Sturgill Simpson Album ahead of his new album Mutiny After Midnight. Hard to argue with Metamodern Sounds at the top.
3. Album club with Jim picks for the month, both outstanding: In Rainbows and Trans-Europe Express.

5. What I've Been Playing

Boardgames

1. Inside Fields of Fire III – Part 1: Overview on InsideGMT has me excited for the next installment in the series. I've been playing the original Fields of Fire and it's one of the most rewarding solo wargames out there.
2. Still more BCS, via Arracourt with gamer friend Allen.
3. Wrapping up my Holland '44 game with Doug. It is coming down to the last turn, unusual for this game and very exciting.

Videogames

1. I played some Blue Prince but have set aside for a while.
2. Because, reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, got my excited to try another turn-based RPG. Solasta: Crown of the Magister is a perfect fit.
3. Also dipping my toe into the preview release of Slay the Spire II and looking forward to trying co-op with Jacob and Matthew.

6. What I'm Attempting

1. Trying to figure out how to teach CS in this new world.
2. digiKam 9.0.0 just dropped—open source photo management with face recognition, geotagging, and a powerful search. Worth a look if you're trying to get off Google Photos or iCloud. It is my Adobe Lightroom replacement, an app I miss dearly but it deteriorated so badly at Adobe. digiKam isn't great, and makes me want to tackle a big coding challenge: a MacOS native photo library asset manager combined with non-destructive editing.
3. Proof—an agent-first document editor built for humans and AI agents to collaborate. Free, no login required. Interesting take on what a writing tool looks like when designed around AI from the start.
4. Kiwix Library—offline access to Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, Stack Exchange, and more. Download entire knowledge bases for use without internet. Great for travel or just peace of mind. I set up a February 2026 Wikipedia with an Orion browser (Firefox) extension.
5. Over the last 3 months I've undergone my biggest golf swing and grip change ever. It has been slow and frustrating but I feel like I've turned the corner where I'm finally better than when I entered the process.
6. Trying to write more, via 100 Days to Offload.

Next month I'll have a full rundown of our van road trip.

-Chris