my san junipero
i'm thankful that a designer who is known for being very picky about pixels (somewhat unfairly, i think) DMed me to ask if i wanted only part of his feedback about the new app i was working on from his designs or all of it because he didn't want to "overload" me, which was a kind gesture but also made me feel some dread about how bad it was gonna be but i asked for all of it and then when it came in actually the review was very positive (most of his notes were about new things that hadn't been specified in the designs) and among other things included the line "I've got to say you absolutely nailed the layout," which made me feel very proud of myself as i had fucking sweated over that layout! (i'm thankful for the PerfectPixel chrome extension which I use to overlay images of his designs from Figma on top of my work since i find i can't trust my eyeballs or Figma alone.)
i'm thankful that later in the day i got a different legacy app that i've been migrating from an old repo into newer React and TypeScript in a new repo finally running correctly, after a pretty satisfying cycle of "get an error / fix that error / get a new error / fix that error / get a new error." i'm thankful to have multiple different projects going at the same time at work, which i know is hard for some people because of context switching, but i've found is really useful for me, both for reasons of efficiency (sometimes i'm waiting for a review or for someone else's help on one thing and i get more done if i can shift my focus) and also balance (the more plumbing-y intellectual exercise of figuring out how to make this old machine new again is very different from the more design-y labor of creating the new one from scratch).
i'm thankful for this incredibly fast variation on github copilot and for GPT 4 which i use every day all day for work since even if it's not as good as it used to be in the halcyon days of fall 23 it's still invaluable and i can't imagine being an engineer without it now. i'm thankful for this incredibly fast AI image generator, which is very fun to play with (i'm thankful for EC's prompt hack that asking it to make your images as if they were felted is both cute and good at reducing distortions). i'm thankful as someone for whom an earlier era of tumblr (which i came to after starting blogging on wordpress) was the peak of my online life to have learned that tumblr and wordpress are going to be used for AI training data, which i know is something other people are (fairly) mad about but which i actually literally need to be the case so that when the time comes for me to enter my san junipero the simulation can be as rich as possible.
i'm thankful as if the ghost in the machine was speaking to me the buttondown CMS just locked up as i typed that and i'm thankful that the app is so good about saving my progress that i didn't lose anything and could start again right where i started.