At the end of a long road
It’s been a wild 2 months here, wrapping up big work projects and reflecting.
What I've been reading
Not a whole lot, sadly. It’s been a lot of work wrangling, so I haven’t been reading much.
However I’ve been playing more games, which has been exciting. I’m about a quarter of the way through Coffee Talk, which I’ve been loving. I’m also midway through Dishonored 2, which is a bit of a mixed experience. I love the worldbuilding, I love how dark and cynical everything is, but I can’t say I enjoy playing the game? I’m just extremely bad at it, so I need to save-scum all the time.
I’ve also got a stack of other games ready to play in the next few months:
I’m going to try writing quick reviews of them as I finish each one, if you’re curious!
What I've made recently
The biggest thing has been the (not so) secret work project I was tackling. At the beginning of the month, we migrated our app (Noko) from a very old version of Rails to the latest one. I’ve been working on this, in some form or another, for 4 years. The long and short of it is that the field’s wide open for us now, it’ll be a million times easier to add new features and polish up the app. In the next few months I’ll probably do a series of articles about the specific problems we ran into during the process, and how we mitigated them.
I also put together some of my thoughts on where music tech is at right now. It’s a fascinating hybrid of hardware and software; where the core underpinnings have been around for 30+ years, but we’re just now ready to utilize them. I’d love to get your thoughts on them!
I also switched my weekly bread over to a brioche, which has definitely been the way to go. Specifically, I’m using Cook’s Illustrated’s No-Knead Brioche as a starting point, but I’m having to adapt it slightly for a sourdough starter (still dialing it in, I haven’t gotten the rise I want yet).
What's on my mind
…Them
But mostly what happens next! This Rails upgrade has been the longest project I’ve tackled in my career, and it painted pretty much every aspect of my life during that time.
There’s a lot of interesting possibilities to tackle at work, and they’ll get done in time. But outside of work is a wide-open field. I’ll have a lot more free time on my hands, particularly since I’ll be more efficient at work. I still need to mull it over, but I want to try focusing on working in public, specifically, talking more about stuff after it’s finished. I don’t like talking about stuff while it’s in-progress, but I can definitely make time for postmortems.
But most importantly, I am going to make time for hobbies again. I didn’t bust my ass for 4 years to gain the time to... checks notes work more. I’ve actually got a dark and spooky synth track that I’ve been working on!
How's Kira?
She’s good! We August by seeing my cousin and her pups, which was a fun trip! We got a hike in, did some shopping, the dogs played in the back yard; overall it was a blast!
We’re getting excited for the cooler weather, so we can actually hike down here again. This summer has been brutal, and we need to hit the trails again.
Talk soon, especially with more fun stuff to share!