l33tminion | Entries tagged with work

I went to PyCon in Pittsburgh last weekend, once again traveling on my own dime and time, per the new way of things at Google. At least they comped me one of their sponsor passes for reg.

Cory Doctorow did the opening keynote, on his theory of the current malaise in the tech industry. Which was quite an opening to the conference: We'd like to thank our sponsors and now here's Cory Doctorow to rip them a new one. I'm a big fan of Doctorow, and think he has a lot of insight. I really do think tech companies have gotten themselves to a point in consolidation-friendly and competition-unfriendly political environment where not only are things getting shittier for users and other stakeholders, the companies have also really painted themselves into a corner and are suffering from stagnation (even in an environment where there's some really amazing development in technical capabilities). Doctorow highlights Jay Saurik's phrase about how the DMCA (and similar laws promulgated by treaty agreements and free-trade deals) prohibiting the circumvention of digital locks makes a de facto crime of "Felony Contempt of Business Model". Doctorow's suggestion that countries should retaliate against tariffs with IP liberalization instead of retaliatory tariffs (i.e. making it possible for their entrepreneurs and firms to compete with US big tech instead of just revenge-taxing their own consumers) is certainly an intriguing possibility!

I think the world Doctorow envisions would be so much better for a lot of people, including software engineers specifically. For those at startups, sure, you could actually get your "compete with the big players" start-up funded, for one thing. But also for those at big companies, which could actually compete with their rivals, instead of just carving out separate fiefdoms and taking occasional all-in/all-out-double-time shots at someone else's crown.

I got to spend a lot of time with my colleagues, especially meeting members of the new Python Team and catching up with members of the former one, many of whom seem to have settled into some really cool Python work at Meta (working on Instagram's high-performance CPython fork or the Rust implementation of their Python type-checker). It's so heartening to see people who enjoyed working with you and are happy to see you and would enjoy to work with you again. (Not that I don't get that on my current team, it's just very reduced.) And I ran into Itamar, a colleague back from my ITA days, and Allen Downey, my CS professor from Olin. Spent most of my time at the convention center, but got to take in a bit of local color. Ate some big sandwiches at Primanti's anyways.

I spent Friday morning in conversation with Cory Doctorow at the PSF lounge in the expo hall, wandered the expo floor, caught talks on new Python features that I hadn't read up on before (e.g. template strings, the effort to escape once and for all from the Global Interpreter Lock), heard about people's fascinating projects. All the talks will be posted to their YouTube channel over the next week or two. The Python community really is a pointedly liberal and activist one, too, there's a real insistence on "Python is for everyone". Python really did carve out a unique niche in its balance of usability and "batteries included" power.

After getting back: This week has been pretty busy with a lot of city and school events. This evening was Somerville's Slice of the City pizza-party get-together for our neighborhood. Tomorrow morning, Erica's class is participating in the Argenziano Wax Museum, an event where the third graders portray people from history (this year focusing on figures from the American Revolution). Tomorrow evening is Argenziano Heritage Night, a big cultural festival at the school that Erica looks forward to every year.

Current Mood: busy

Last week was a stressful week, and it was capped off by layoffs hitting my immediate area of the Goog. The layoffs were maximum chaos style, insta-cutoff, no transitions, total surprise for us but also several levels up the management chain. I'm still employed, but my team, which had gone from twelve active engineers at the start of last year to six by the end (not due to layoffs, just attrition, but organizational factors were in play), is now further down to four (with three active because one is on leave). I'd already thought things were pretty reduced, but now they're downright osseous (as in "cut to the ____" or worse, "we're _____"). I don't have a foot out the door, but at this point I feel like I ought to have both eyes out the window. I updated my resume, which I hadn't done for a long time.

This weekend was a pretty good break, at least. Did some cooking. I took Erica to see the latest special exhibit at the MFA ("Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits"). I've been enjoying playing Death's Door, a humorously spooky indie adventure game which in aesthetic seems somewhere between the newer 2D Zelda games, Persona, and Dark Souls.

Solo-parenting tonight and tomorrow because Julie is making a day-trip to the land of finance. Busy busy.

Current Mood: exhausted

Some of my extended team was in town this week, so there were some team social things. Went to Flight Club in the Seaport, a darts place with bowling-alley-style computerized scoring. I'm probably better at darts than bowling, but pretty terrible at both. Still was fun, the food was quite good there, too.

The weather has been a little more overcast and foggy and cool, but reasonably nice.

This weekend, I did a bit of cooking on Saturday afternoon. Made homemade refried beans and seasoned beef and tortillas for tacos. The tortillas turned out as good as I wanted this time, I got the consistency right and prepared the pan right and didn't forget to add a little salt.

We decided to have a family movie outing, so we went to see Paddington in Peru at the Assembly AMC this afternoon. And we watched the previous installment in the series at home yesterday, which I paid half attention to while I cooked. Those movies are not at the top of my recommendation list, but they're okay.

Current Mood: okay

It's been a week of very busy work. I've been digging some of the new AI coding tools, and man the stuff is pretty mind-blowing. My work this week involved grinding through a lot of complex refactoring, and it sure helped with the boilerplate.

What else: My trip with Erica back to Boston last weekend was very uneventful, compared to the way out. Perfectly smooth.

I tried to get in some cookbook cooking during the week. Last Sunday, I cooked Ana Sortun's recipe for tuna and fennel sarikopites (a phyllo-wrapped stuffed pastry, wound into a spiral shape) from her cookbook, Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. Sortun describes first cooking this in the kitchen of Sari Abul-Jubein's restaurant, Casablanca. The owner was tickled to have a dish on the menu corresponding to his name. (I was curious what Abul-Jubein has been up to since Casablanca closed in 2012. Apparently he only managed a few years of retirement before going back to work as a real estate agent for another decade. Some people are bad at retiring.) Anyways, the sarikopites turned out great, and Erica really enjoyed working on it.

This weekend, Erica's selection of cooking project was challah, a recipe from Melissa Clark's Kid in the Kitchen.

Current Mood: hungry

Snowy morning this morning. So much not to write about this week.

At work, my manager abruptly left the company due to [reason redacted by management; as near as I can tell he wasn't technically laid off but maybe something of the sort]. So that's three changes of manager since I changed teams only three years ago, in addition to the engineering headcount dropping by half in the past year.

In the news, the US executive department seems to be trying to do reorg-by-Elon-Musk, specifically having Musk do the equivalent of cutting the power to whatever he doesn't like at first glance. I want to emphasize that Musk is inevitably going to find a bunch of stuff conservatives find dumb / expensive, specially since they take both "helping people" and "raising the reputation of American democracy" as non-goals. So don't get caught up in an eternal Gish gallop about whether this or that program is a good idea, on the premise that it's reasonable to judge that from a title and headline amount.

Musk is a guy who believes he is able to acquire at-a-glance expertise at basically anything, but he's also a dum-dum who uncritically takes up stupid right-wing conspiracy theories. He's become very conspiracy minded, and seems to see smoking-gun evidence of massive fraud in observations adequately explained by "old computer systems are old".

Having the (advisor to the) President line-item manage the whole government regardless of whatever Congress says is also not how our Constitutional system is supposed to work, but all Republicans in Congress seem fully in support of this approach, and that's unlikely to change until they manage to really obviously break something.

Let's see, what else... maybe a little media talk:

I finished playing The Outer Wilds. As I said earlier, I really recommend you check it out spoiler-free. It's a really remarkable example of knowledge-as-progression in a game. As is often the case in such games, key bits of information are eventually obtainable in some explicit form (e.g. writing or diagrams, something that is diegetically explaining the thing). But in this game there are so many instances where you can figure out those key insights just through careful observation and deduction, which is really rewarding

I also finished the second season of Megalobox, which was really very well done. I think the remarkable thing about that is how different it manages to be than the first season, which is a pretty typical sports story, an underdog-to-champion arc. The second season jumps ahead to start in media res a story about being a former champion, struggling with the

Finally, I've returned to playing Dicey Dungeons. Still a very fun and funny game, but some of the challenges are quite tricky.

Current Mood: tired

Well, I got in a few days of regular writing before I dipped beneath the waves again.

Today is Halloween, and it's not even the scariest day in the next week. I really do want the madness to end. 2017-2020 was objectively nuts, and that was before the realignment within the Republican Party had really completed and Trump was still being arm-twisted into hiring people to important questions who resisted his dumbest ideas (a major restraint for someone so bad at in-person confrontation). Stuff like this is going to be hilarious if he loses (Four Seasons all over again), but for now I just can't deal with the fact that it's so close.

Took Erica trick-or-treating and she had a good time time, except for encountering someone in one of those stilt ghost costumes that she found completely terrifying. The weather was warm today, high of almost 80, so the evening was summery.

Work is very busy, and once again one of my more senior colleagues is changing teams. Too much churn this year.

Current Mood: sore

The Halloween events continue. Friday, there was the Character Day parade at Erica's school (a K-3 event, so her last time participating). This evening, Julie took Erica to a haunted house at Harvard, which apparently Erica found more than a bit scary.

This afternoon, we all went to see The Wild Robot, which was pretty fun.

Work has been pretty busy, as my team has been ramping up on phase two of a big project. Speaking of which (belatedly, I missed mentioning this here earlier), the end of the first phase of that means a good chunk of our work has been publicly released, it's out in alpha on Android Jetpack (announcement blog post), the cross-platform C++ core is on GitHub here. I'm doing a lot more web graphics studying at work, spent some of my time last week on the WebGPU codelab here, which was pretty interesting, it's a powerful API.

Current Mood: awake

Today, went to Boda Borg for the first time with some of my work teammates as a fun event. Was pretty fun, I probably enjoyed it more than Level99. Afterwards, we went to Mineirao Steakhouse for lunch, which was delicious.

After an abbreviated workday, went to a Dads of Camberville Dad's Night Out event. A very nice break to get a night out for myself after a lot of extra-hard work on the home-front. This one was at The Sea Hag in Harvard, a new-ish (2023) bar from the same owners as Grendel's Den. Food and drinks were very tasty, and the staff were very hospitable and on top of things. Was good to see various people in the dads group again.

Current Mood: cheerful

I'm sure I was going to write about a lot of things. Maybe I'll get to some of them some day. It's been a busy time: Being between jobs only makes entrepreneurs busier so I'm doing a lot of fort-holding-down.

But not this weekend: This weekend I'm at PyCon in Pittsburgh! That was going to be the site for '20-'21 until that got canceled by circumstances, at which point SLC was already lined up for '22-'23. But I guess the local organizers weren't totally scared off because they're back for this year and next.

PyCon is always a lot of fun. I was sad to miss it last year (for the first time in ages), but there wasn't conference budget and it's a bit of a haul. This year, well, there still isn't budget. (I at least did get a conference sponsor pass and a dinner with colleagues, but that was all the Google contribution to the T&E.) But it was close and I didn't want to miss it again.

This PyCon is coming just in the shadow of Google laying off almost the entire Python Team (the team still exists, but this was basically a geo-reorg-by-layoff). That was one of the most demoralizing things Google management has done from my perspective since the maximum-chaos-layoffs of 2023. Maybe it hit me even harder. I'd worked pretty closely with that team if only as a 20%er, they were really top-notch. I would've considered joining them in 2022 if there'd been an opening. It's a really bad way to treat any of the groups involved (the "great work, you're out of a job" old team, the one conveniently-located satellite member now tasked with picking up the pieces, and the new team with some big shoes to fill in an area they're less expert in than the people who just got canned).

So even though Google wasn't recruiting at PyCon in 2022 and wasn't sending employees to conferences in 2023, this is the first year where I've felt I was on the other side of the table. I've gone from feeling job security at Google was very solid, a "probably still be doing the same in another five years", to feeling I could get cut at any time for no discernible reason and my odds of dodging things for another five aren't that good. Really makes me think I should keep my ear to the ground. At least.

This didn't stop me from getting a lot of work done during the conference anyways. Certainly puts me in a productive mood.

It was great talking to people at the conference, and attending talks and open sessions. I mean, you can always catch the talks in recording after, but it's inspiring to be there. There's a lot to celebrate.

Current Mood: busy

There's been a cold going around, and the whole family has been under the weather this week.

I guess I can say that Julie's out at Jura (as of some time ago, the cause of all the chaos the last many weeks at this point), so she's looking for the next thing. That's about all I can say about it.

I can now say that I have had the opportunity to successfully defend myself (and my condo association) in court. I sure hope my work on that project is done now.

Next week, Julie is going to a BiotechBikers event in Girona, Spain. Seems like it will be quite a fun cycling trip.

Erica has become quite a skilled Ticket to Ride player, though she's still quite put out when I win.

I went out with Julie last night to Gufo, an Italian restaurant which has opened up in the old Loyal Nine space on Cambridge Street. Still sad that Loyal Nine is no longer with us, they were one of the town's greatest dining experiences all the way through the pandemic and only declined after. But I'm glad such a great space isn't staying vacant. The new place seems to have done some substantial renovations (extending the bar, adding a full-sized pizza oven to the cafe space, upgrading the covered porch (a thrown-together plywood-construction COVID era addition) with sturdier materials). Was really beautiful and the food was fantastic.

Current Mood: cheerful

Busy, busy week. The solo parenting is going swimmingly. Erica went to a friend's birthday party Sunday, and I got to catch up with my favorite bartender, Fred Yarm, who's now at Josephine, right in my neighborhood. (Unfortunately, this week also came with the news that Fred's previous venue, top Boston cocktail bar Drink, closed abruptly, along with Barbara Lynch's other Fort Point restaurants, amazing counter-seating fancy Italian diner Sportello and try-hard French-cuisine Michelin-in-exile Menton.)

There are more layoffs at my employer today. I'm still employed (for now lol), but there are more dismaying cuts on my former team.

The election year buzz heightens as the prospect of another four years of Trump madness approaches, capped off with a debate between the two final also-rans. The January 6 rhetoric was also quite a bit louder this year, with Trump all but saying he'd do it again, and even a bunch of Republicans reversing course on very obvious truths said January 7 three years prior. We're in an election year where the one remaining anti-Trump Republican on the ballot is running on a blanket pardon and total impunity for Trump.

And the sort of person who can't state the extremely obvious when it's politically inconvenient, as a brief aside to another Republican scandal of the week. But of course she's speaking to people for whom it's inconvenient what their ideological predecessors were fighting for freedom to do. (Hilariously, the discourse about Haley's "gaffe" led to this response by Trump, for whom nothing is politically inconvenient.) Anyways, the Confederates have truly had their revenge on the Republican Party. I suppose if you told them the way that had come about was "strange coalition politics", they couldn't be too surprised.)

Speaking of Confederates, it's extremely strange (and seems extremely perilous) that the application of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment might have an impact on this year's election. Sort of blame the drafters of that amendment and also I guess of the Amnesty Act of 1872 for not being more forward-thinking on this one. Poorly drafted legislation is always the trouble of the courts. But in a sane world, it would be irrelevant as Trump would have been impeached, convicted, and removed and barred from office in emergency sessions of Congress on January 7, 2021. (Putting aside that in a sane world he would have been convicted and removed earlier, and also not elected in the first place.)

It's an odd situation that the President of the United States, having exhausted all legal methods of challenging those elections, sought to just throw out the elections from whichever states were his closest losses, as many as it takes, whatever it takes to get there: Maybe get Congress to ignore the states' duly cast votes, or the Vice President unilaterally, maybe it legally counts as "disputed" if you put forward some other election results that are just fake (!), or like maybe if stuff gets delayed other stuff can be done (???). Raise a mob to be there, some voicing nebulous willingness to kill someone, if that helps. (The mob never got the chance to drag Pence or whoever to Schrodinger's gallows, so it remains somewhat un-collapsed how serious that plan was.) Shambolic is the word of the day when Trump's around, but as shambolic as that coup attempt was, it was an attempt. And our nation is politically unable to deal with such an attempt when it's short of success. Still. (An attempt that comes less short is, of course, not going to be "dealt with".)

It's madness. The lack of imagination. I wish Republicans could imagine what if Gore (as VP and candidate) or Clinton (as incumbent President) did anything even remotely like that in 2001. These people will pretend they can't or say it was like that. It's deranged. Why are we doing this again?

Current Mood: crazy

It's been busy the last few weekends. Two weekends ago, took a trip to the aquarium with Erica and Mary. Last weekend, Julie was out of town all weekend for college reunion. Saturday was a rainy day at home, but we did a bunch of stuff. Sunday we went climbing in the morning and then to Somerville's Halloween street festival in the afternoon.

This past Thursday, Google had their first office family event for some time, at Boston Lights at Franklin Park Zoo. Really beautiful, though I miss the old winter holiday parties, which are likely to remain a thing of good times past.

Despite that, and despite the weekend of solo parenting going pretty well, I felt pretty crushed this week. Friday, I felt a bit better, and the weather was really beautiful. We went out for dinner that night, joined by one of Erica's friends, Mabel. Saturday also had beautiful weather, and Julie went to the zoo with Eric and Mabel and Mabel's dad, while I had a relaxed day closer to home and went to the Union Square Farmers Market (last of the season) and did some cooking.

Today, the weather is cooler and rainy. I took Erica to a friend's birthday party in the morning. Erica has been in a very stormy mood today, but now she's working on her Halloween costume with Julie.

New Mario game is pretty fun.

Current Mood: tired

I haven't posted in so long. I've been tired. Julie's been very busy. What else is new.

A concrete wall around my condo complex is crumbling, and it's gotten to the point where one of the fences on top of the wall has collapsed. So some of my time has been spent embarking on the organization of another major renovation project.

Generative AI stuff has me feeling the most like I'm not keeping up with technological developments that I've felt in my career. Feel like I'm in the wrong subfield. So often feel like I don't have the energy to learn things. At least I am excited to use the stuff. A whole lot of UI stuff is going to get real interesting over the next five years. And as a maintenance coder, I'm sure there will be a lot of incomprehensible stuff for me to debug for at least a few years.

This week, I'm visiting my parents and working from Cleveland over Erica's school break, while she gets some grandparent time.

I have had a little time to play some games. Did a playthrough of Omori, a little indie RPG that might be described as "Earthbound-esque surrealism crossed with devastating childhood trauma". It is quite a game, despite some flaws, and one where any spoilers really do mar the experience. I also played One Shot, a top-down puzzle game with some clever puzzles, a pretty fun bite-sized game. Most recently, started playing Citizen Sleeper, a text-heavy cyberpunk RPG that's really drawn me in.

Current Mood: tired

Too much going on, here and around. So multipost time:

The Biden docs - So it turns out that Biden and everyone left classified docs everywhere in the course of their work? It definitely seems that several things are broken with how this sort of stuff is managed, but it's super-aggravating that's going to be the basis for equivocation between Biden (and Pence, and whoever) misplacing a few confidential things in the course of their work and Trump (who AFAICT did not work) just walking out the doors with boxes and boxes of the stuff because he thinks he's still President, and then trying like seventeen contradictory coverups when people noticed he was just waving the docs around to whoever. At the very least.

Been meaning to say something on the topic for ages and failing. Why does the situation have to be so dumb?!

The SOTU - Seems it went well for the Democrats, when it garners feedback like this and this. Even Trump had some positive words. (What happened, he watch the speech alone? Get Trump into a one-on-one with Biden and Trump will wind up liking the guy. Temporarily, anyways. He's malleable.)

Google's AI push - Gonna be "fun" with the "Google goes all-in on something" push, hope it goes better than last time. So far this hard steering (maximum chaos layoffs, product launches timed by external factors) does not seem to have helped the company in investors' eyes. The most amusing framework (though not exactly totally accurate, it over-implies the market does things for reasons) is that the James Webb Space Telescope managed to cost Google more than NASA.

On more prosaic work notes, the new desk space is working out pretty well. Same building, higher floor, but just across a connector from one of the new building's new cafeterias.

Weathering the weather whatever the weather - For February, this weather is wild, and that first letter is upside-down. Might make it through the whole winter without a significant snow-day, we'll see.

Tunic - I started playing a new game, an old-school Zelda meets Dark Souls number and it is glorious. It's fun and beautiful and charming. The aforementioned mashup of elements aside, a key feature of this game is that it captures one of the interesting aspects of exploration in old-school gaming by putting much of the interface in mysterious runes, not really explaining how things work in the game's normal flow, and giving you a beautiful but partially-complete manual, written in an unknown language with a few familiar words, with penciled-in margin notes. Some real nostalgia there, I suppose (it's potent anemoia in my case), for those who had some experience playing import-only games from a nation with a long tradition of video gaming innovation and also throwing in a few English words for spice.

The further twist is that the pages of this manual are a collectible item in the game. Don't ask too much about how that works diagetically, I don't know that there's a coherent explanation for that at all, but it's really effective in making knowledge about how the game works (whether figured out through collection and interpretation or unguided exploration) a well-won prize, while still handing out key bits of knowledge that end up being as much "the thing that unlocks the next area" as the in-game items.

Magic - New set's out, as the ancient evil that wants to compleately perfect Magic's multiverse by turning everyone into Geiger-esque cyborg monstrosities has broken the shell of the world (of Mirroden) and launched their omninvasion, with the heroes' plan to stop that definitely not going as planned. The set's pretty fun so far, at least there's some new stuff to shake up Standard. I played two rounds of sealed today, cratered 1-3 in the first but went 7-1 in the second (limited matches in Magic: Arena go to the first of seven wins or three losses). That second match had it all: Managing to overcome an opponent who played two copies of The Eternal Wanderer (wish my sealed pools were like that, that's for sure), braining an opponent with that third ability on The Filigree Sylex, and combining Paladin of Predation and Sylvok Battle-Chair to defeat my last opponent two ways simultaneously.

Current Mood: awake

I've been feeling under the weather this week, though maybe better as of today.

Packed up for a desk move at work at the end of the week. Now that the new building is open, everyone's getting shuffled. Feels like the end of an era even though I've only been at current desk for a year. It's a new Google Cambridge with the shiny new building coming online, and it's a new Google post maximum-chaos-layoffs.

A whip of arctic air drove temps below zero yesterday night and today is extremely cold and windy, but it's back up to 40 tomorrow.

Mystery Hunt puzzles and solutions are up now, so here are some of the fun puzzles I worked on this year:

Scicabulary - The first step of this puzzle is figuring out what's in common between clues like "doughissant", "uationedy", and "foon".
Apples Plus Bananas - Grocery store math logic.
Diary - A couple of layers of figuring out what the puzzle is about, one of which I helped my team solve.
Baking Bread - Time to cook!
Dispell the Bees - For once a relatively straightforward (if still quite tricky) puzzle, once you solve the first clue.

Current Mood: awake

After the short week where we got back from vacation, had a week where Julie was away for conference travel, MIT Mystery Hunt, and another week another conference for Julie. So I've been busy and not getting to write.

Mystery Hunt was pretty fun, though it ran long. But there were a lot of innovative twists and overall the structure was interesting. More detail later when the solutions are published, if I remember.

Julie's birthday was mid-Hunt, so we (all of us, including Erica this time) went out for dinner afterwards to celebrate, Monday evening at Puritan & Company in Inman. The restaurant was basically empty on that drizzly Monday evening, but the meal was amazing. Erica split the steak with me (I love it when she's willing to try something from the full menu instead of getting a plain pasta or similar upscale kid's meal fare), we had apple Paris-Brest for dessert. As a dessert drink, I got the bar to make me a Coffee's for Closers, a Fred Yarm creation which I'd been really wanting to try but hadn't gotten to previously. (Seemed a bit unusual to order off-menu just anywhere, though it is three-equal-parts-ish, where the -ish is an additional egg.) Was as amazing as I'd hoped, and my hopes were very high.

I've done a ton of organizational work in the house with Erica's assistance over the past few weeks. Installed more storage closets in the garage, replaced the pressed-into-service-as-toy-bins Pack 'n Play crib and playpen with more compact toy-bin shelves. Sent off several boxes of hand-me-down baby toys and books to my baby nephew, Simon. The Pack 'n Plays were gifted to our new-ish (new, but we got even newer neighbors on the other side just recently) neighbors who have an even newer baby (born shortly after the turn of the year). I recall from Erica's tiny years that having a few extra good places to put the kid down was really convenient, pretty sure at some points we were running three crib equivalents in a two-bedroom condo. So I'm happy to see those put to good use.

The weather this week has been mild. Last evening I was loosening my jacket. Felt like the wrong season except for the bit where it was pitch black at five. Overnight things cooled a bit and we got a scattering of precipitation (various types) and the morning was several flavors of damp. Large fluffy flurries descended leisurely later in the day, without much sticking.

Google announced (and implemented) layoffs today. Not great. I'm still employed, at least.

Current Mood: accomplished

Trip to Texas for Christmas was pretty great. Managed to get there in reasonable time, flight delays in both directions but only a bit. Glad we weren't on Southwest. And the warm weather that followed that cold snap made Dallas quite summery for much of our stay.

Was wonderful to spend Christmas with Julie's family (her parents and sister's family). Plus New Year's and the twin cousins' birthday and Erica's. The twins are three now, and they've definitely grown up strong. They're talking in full sentences, there's so much they're interested in, they're great. Erica had a great time playing with the twins (it's always a delight to see her with younger kids, she really shows a lot of care and patience) and with her cousin Emilia, who she likes and admires so much.

We had some great food, home cooked and out on the town. And we visited the Fort Worth Water Gardens, which was a very cool and unusual park.

January is shaping up to be an exhausting month. Julie had a last-minute work thing this evening, and she's gone for conferences the bulk of next week and the following. I am trying to do some early spring cleaning and more work on optimizing our storage setup.

Current Mood: busy

This week has been pretty crazy.

Halloween was on Monday, so there was lots of Halloween stuff all weekend. Julie took Erica to a Day of the Dead event at the Peabody Museum on Saturday. Somerville's last street festival of the year was on Sunday, and we went to a Halloween event at the Waterworks Museum near Chestnut Hill Reservoir Sunday morning.

This week at work I've been busy dealing with an important production issue. Unfortunately one that I caused. Trying to deal with technical debt is perilous in that you're extremely likely to get last-minute bit by the pitfalls you're trying to eliminate. So I've been very focused. It is, as always, a good opportunity to learn.

I've also been focused on the home side of things. Julie had a conference in Toronto on Wednesday. Was going to be a day-trip, but the outbound morning flight was cancelled, so she left early, on Thursday evening. Then the return flight was canceled, so she couldn't get home until late tonight.

I still managed to keep up with chores and cooking and fun with Erica. Mostly we had dinners at home, but we had dinner out at Saus tonight (vegetarian fast-food and fries), and Erica was awed by the Impossible nuggets. We're watching a bit of "Is It Cake?" on Netflix, it's fun.

Character Parade at Erica's school is tomorrow, she's dressing up as Chester the cat from Bunnicula.

There's other stuff I want to write about and I keep not making time to write.

Current Mood: tired

Work is busy. I've been trying to trade off school pickup weeks with Julie, but often end up covering for one thing or another. Multiple last-minute schedule changes per week. Startup life.

Erica's reading skills are really coming along.

This week was exhausting, but I had a little time to recover this afternoon, at home alone doing laundry and cooking (an osso buco beef and beans). We went out for brunch earlier in the day. Yesterday, I went to the farmers market, and we all went to a bit of the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo, which is fun. Long time since I last went. Erica was very excited as she is about all things books and art.

Last weekend, had an evening out at the science museum Friday and pizza dinner with one of Erica's school friends (almost a disaster since I hadn't realized that although the museum is open late Fridays, the cafeteria is not, but we got things sorted somehow). I took Erica to the zoo on Saturday, and we went to the Boston Public Library on Sunday.

All in all things are going all right, though still feeling a little stressed about *gestures broadly*.

Current Mood: tired

It's been a while again. Things have been busy.

Much of last weekend was taken up by Honk!, we went to that in Davis Square on Saturday and Harvard Square on Sunday. Saw Sarah and Steven and baby Sam there, the "fancy tea in the park" group met up in the park at Davis on Saturday, and Sarah was walking Sam around the festival in her coloring-book dress (a whimsical bit of participatory fashion art that always makes me smile) on Sunday. Little Sam's walking around now, too. Definitely a lot of vicarious fun to see babies in that stage. So much to do!

We also happened across an early performance in Union Square Plaza Thursday night.

Sunday morning, I did some cooking: Mixed greens with feta, homemade salsa with heirloom tomatoes and a mix of roasted and pickled hot peppers, chili in the instant pot.

Later on Sunday, I dropped by the Vans store with Erica for some new shoes. Her current shoes still fit, so I thought I should try up a half size, but turns out that current pair had really stretched out and she was a full size up.

On Monday, we went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for a bit.

Today I had a dentist appointment mid-day for a cleaning. And had a solo-parenting evening, Julie was out late for some work event. All went smoothly.

A little further back: Last weekend Erica went to a friend's birthday party. The party venue ("Jump On In", with bouncy slides and whatnot) ran things very efficiently, the kids had a blast. And we did other weekend-y things? I assume. It seems so long ago.

Work is busy, lots of C++ template wrangling, and a mix of writing doc and trying to clean up the design I'm documenting.

There's a Magic: the Gathering sealed tournament for the latest set at the office for the first time in few years. Fun to play with some of my colleagues again.

Current Mood: chipper

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Sam's L33t Journal

(Secret Master Plan Draft v0.2)

Entries tagged with work

Disenshittification

Skeleton Crew

Darts on the Board

Back in the Kitchen with the Kid

The New Management

Hollow Eve

Task Acquired, Task Completed

Feasts and Quests

Docs and Talks

That Now Can Be Said

Sort of the Obvious Answer

Wonderous / Crazed

Wake Up, Sleeper

Weather Whatever

Snappy Saturday

Dark Spring

Mixed-Up Weather / Holiday Trip

Fondant's Not Real

Off the Bone

October Festivities