First week back
It seems silly to think of a “first week back” after only having been back for a week, but jet lag has a way of making even comfortable beds in comfortable...
Paris II
Paris was, to me, a city where it was impossible to stay jaded. I loved the way you order espresso with cafe un cafe noisette (noisette meaning hazelnut, a...
SEA → SLC → CDG
Writing this en route to Paris, via Salt Lake City. (I volunteered to give up my seat for $500 and my only penance is getting in three hours later, which...
What's new with you?
I am very bad at lulls in conversation. There are friends with whom I am comfortable in silence; these are the close friends, the chess-at-breweries friends,...
Snow days
There are so many things I want to tell you about, to make up for lost time. I was in Vegas. This was my first time in Vegas, and it was ... not quite what I...
The Big Apple!
If cities are machines designed to produce interactions between people, New York is the largest and most efficient one to which I've visited. It was, in...
2019, part one
On the last day of the year, I wrote about it. It was a weird and mostly fun year, and 2019 seems poised to be the same. I. On the first morning of the first...
Wake up early!
I realized this week that I have become the coworker who talks obnoxiously about waking up early. It is great. (You should wake up earlier.). Aristotle has...
All the buildings of the living
The advantage of having written this newsletter for over a year and a half now is that I can mark the deja vu of things: this time last year I was writing...
Thoughts on thirty minutes of Xcode after two years away
Oh god, this again. Swift is really nice. It's a shame about the rest. How did a path to a font get hardcoded to /Users/jmduke/Downloads? Why did I suddenly...
Hitting resume
How do you start something? When I was in Richmond, I stopped by my mom’s CS class to answer some questions about being a ‘real’ programmer (a title and...
How I pack
Ada Limón: Every time I'm in an airport, I think I should drastically change my life: Kill the kid stuff, start to act my numbers, set fire to the clutter...
Five Recommendations
Some things I've done the past few weeks that I recommend: I recommend dogsitting. Specifically, dogsitting these two dogs in Magnolia: Maggie and Max....
Carving marble
I haven’t written about Buttondown in a while because I haven’t worked on anything on Buttondown worth writing about. This is for a couple reasons: It was...
The New Phone: A Review
I mean, it's a phone. And what do you use a phone for nowadays? You are never too far away from a laptop; you still hate sending texts by tapping on glass....
Ten lessons from XOXO
For whatever reason, this floors me. It felt like one thing for Judith Bronte’s work to find me in this way; fed into a recombinatorial machine, cut into...
Bluemont Park
I am struck by how, except when you're young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If...
Centrifuge
If you have spent the past week or two in Seattle, you know that it is has been a bizarre hellscape. The smoke (some coming from northern Washington, some...
What I've learned about Jira
A task should correspond with exactly one deliverable. The task should be written not as if it's going to be read for the next two weeks by your current team...
Seven days in Kaua'i
Hello! I'm writing this from Lihue Airport, waiting to board my flight from Kaua'i to Seattle. (I am not sure if it is Lihue Airport or Lihue International...