March 17, 2025

Week in Review 2025-03-17

Busy week at work. Weekend out of town, and a St. Patricks special: photos from Ireland.

Hello, regular readers, and welcome to the new ones!

This is Luis, with the latest issue of my newsletter. I write this newsletter to share my passion for photography, cities, and technology, along with interesting links I find over the week(s). This newsletter will be (as long as possible) free, but if you like to support it feel free to become a paid subscriber (pay what you want), or buy one of my photos.

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Busy week. Work has been going on fast. Facing deadlines always adds to the rush of life. And deadlines in software are kind of a blurry line, there's always something to be improved, a bug to be fixed, or a new functionality to implement. So that has been the week on the profesional level.

I sometimes wonder if deadlines are worth it. Is the stress worth it to get something delivered in an arbitrary date? Most probably for the majority of software the answer is no. Of course there are exceptions.

Anyway. Besides work, the week finished with a trip to Texel. It was a very wholesome weekend. We got to spend it walking along the coast, eating amazing seafood, and enjoying being in nature. Photos will be coming soon.

Photography. As today is St. Patricks day, let's celebrate with a couple of shoots from Ireland. I took these ones back in January when we spent some days visiting friends and exploring Dublin and the Irish nature.

The first captures are from Glendalough. A set of two lakes, surrounded by mountains. It is a popular spot to go for a walk, and enjoy being in the nature, not only for humans, but also for dogs, they were having a great outdoor time!

Light in photography is almost everything. And Ireland provides some spectacular light in between the clouds. What was supposed to be a very quick stop in Lake Guinness got prolonged because light made its entrance, and what was already a spectacular view improved dramatically with the light being filtered by the clouds. It was definitely one of my favourite places!

Of course we went to the Rugby, what a great game!

An not only the game, the atmosphere was quite good, and getting to see everyone so excited when Leinster came back to win was a great experience.

Getting to see the Cliffs of Moher was a great experience. I have always enjoyed being out in nature and feeling the scale of the world, and being in the cliffs was one of those experiences.

Photography has given me the opportunity to capture nature, show it, and apriciate more the inmensity of the world. Both on the scale of nature, and on the ability of humans to inhabit it.

To check more of my photos from Ireland, and more, follow me on:

• Instagram @natera.jpg

• Pixelfed @natera

Notes on equipment

All the photos were taken with Fujifilm X-T 50. And using the lens Fujinon 16-45mm.

Week links

Weeknotes

• Jochen’s Weeknotes 2025-03-10

Mastodon

• There’s no such thing as a “self-made billionaire.”

• My mom accidentally referred to cryptocurrency as “kleptocurrency” this morning and I think I’m going to call it that from now on! 🤑

• One thing many software developers, especially web, seem incapable of understanding is that a tool can provide a productivity benefit to the dev individually—improve the developer experience if you will—while at the same time having a catastrophic effect in the software product as a whole. Devs didn’t learn this with React and I personally doubt LLMs will be any different.

• Most jokes about typography are unjustified.

• Ex-Twitter (Short X) is broken for hours now, the backend seems down. Tesla boycott, Starship exploding again, and now X with a major outage. It think this is not just bad karma, but the result of bad choices, and I can't deny a bit of Schadenfreude, driven by satisfaction that the Universe sometimes works as I expect.

• Common Groundmade with code#digitalart · #generativeart · #creativecoding · #abstractart · #art

Thanks for reading!

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About this newsletter

I'm Luis Natera, a software developer, network scientist, and data/cities/tech nerd. I have an interdisciplinary trajectory (architecture -> sociocultural studies -> network science -> software development), you can read more about me and my career here.

This is a weekly newsletter about photography, cities, and software.

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