Sam's L33t Journal

This past weekend I was at PyCon, which this year was in Long Beach. (Plans made in 2024-ish, presumably, so ahead of the recent catchphrase of the city's tourism marketing, and also ahead of any connection between that catchphrase and anything software-related.) A lot of the technical talks focused on big coming-to-fruition performance improvement projects in Python and lots and lots about AI: How that's up-ending security on both the attacker and defender side, how it's ushered in a somewhat nightmarish Eternal September for open-source maintainers, and the use of gen-AI models in software engineering (models which are themselves writing and running a whole bunch of Python code). It was great spending some time with some of my colleagues from other teams, especially Google's core Python Team. It was also nice that I had the full support of my company in attending the conference, actual conference travel budget for the first time in some years.

One sad thing that's been on my mind close to home recently is the death of a Somerville man in a tragic escalator accident in Davis Square station. The accident happened in February, but it's getting more news attention now as more information about the circumstances has been made public. It's really dismaying that there were so many bystanders who missed possibly life-saving opportunities to help. I really hope people realize that someone incapacitated at the bottom of stairs is much more likely to be an emergency, and at the bottom of an escalator is definitely an immediate emergency. People need to know about the E-stop and know that's a thing they can and should use in that situation. (And also possibly big-red-button awareness is going to be an increasingly important thing in a variety of everyday contexts going forward.)

Today's bonus link is a short story, Isabel Kim's take on Omelas.

I'm traveling for business for the first time in quite a while. Once again making a brief sojourn in the Valley of Blasted Sand.

I'm trying to arrange for the fence to be fixed at my house, since the snow removal service was trying to see how much you could compress a giant pile of snow against a fence before you are basically just trying to knock the fence over with a snow-plow. (Not very much. To their credit, they are covering the repair.)

I wanted to comment about the insane anti-trans legislation passed over the governor's veto a few weeks ago, but I'm at a loss for words. Insane fascist nonsense. Why is "maybe just don't harass anybody" always a bridge too far for these people?! Seems like it's always the "party of small government" trying to establish the Federal Pants Inspectors.

Made it down to the Seaport Winter Market this weekend. The hot-chocolate-filled ring croissant that Lakon Paris was serving up was the winning treat of the event. Those really are some genius patissiers.

I watched Murderbot, based on Martha Wells sci-fi series about a rogue security android (sort of) that has slipped the systems keeping it enslaved which, plagued with anxiety, is using its newfound freedom to keep its head down so it can spend more time watching its favorite TV shows. And, of course, keeping its head down means dealing with the latest batch of odd-ball idiot humans who are doing their best to get themselves killed. Alexander Skarsgård plays the lead, and aside from some cool effects on the main character's armor and helmet, the show tunes down the degree to which the protagonist looks like not a normal human so that the viewer can be hurled into the uncanny valley purely on the strength of Skarsgård's performance (IMO a good decision). It's funny and dramatic and the rest of the characters and cast are great as well. I think the shorter episodes worked well with the pulpy source material. Definitely recommend this one if you like this sort of thing, especially if you already like the books.

The news continues to be terrible. The President responds to mass killings with essentially "stuff happens" and double homicides with, insanely, more or less "it's that guy's fault for being annoying about not liking me". Half the White House is gone with ever more ambitious plans to replace the wreckage with who knows what. What remains is being covered with ever more tacky and outrageous displays. We're hurtling towards another unnecessary war for oil. The nation has been made a laughingstock, and we deserve it.

My team's Android Jetpack library made it to its first stable release. A big milestone.

I'm exhausted and looking forward to winter break. I hope I can get some rest.

My mom was in town last weekend for her high school reunion, and it was a pretty great visit. Friday evening had dinner with cousins Amy, Josh, Sylvie, and my Aunt Milly at Dosa & Curry. There was a lot of stuff going on for HONK! Fest all weekend. Julie and I took Erica to the festival in Davis on Saturday, and we all went with my mom to the Harvard Art Museum on Sunday morning before going to the parade.

Monday was a rainy, quiet day at home, but I decided to do a cooking project Erica had been planning, she wanted tomato soup with pesto grilled cheese. So we baked milk bread and made pesto and made the soup with fresh tomatoes and herbs. I made the soup more or less according to this recipe, but I didn't broil the veggies after baking, added more garlic and herbs, used a can of coconut milk instead of cream, and also added a can of tomato paste. For the fresh herbs, I used all the fresh tarragon and sage in the packets I got from the supermarket. Which was an ounce each, so a questionably large amount, and I would have felt like a fool if I'd ruined the soup on that account. I thought it turned out great, though, and fortunately everyone else liked it, too. I really love sage, though. Season your food more, it's fine.

New people are starting on my team at work this week. Busy, busy.

I should write something anything.

Erica had a few weeks at Creative Arts Camp at Tufts. Several of her school friends did the same session. Seems they did a lot and had a lot of fun.

Now Erica is off with my parents at Cascades Dance Camp. We all met my sister in Baltimore for the hand-off. Was great catching up. Very nice trip.

Work is keeping on.

I've been reading The Secret Garden to Erica.

I had dinner with Julie tonight at Too Hot, a new Sichuan restaurant in Harvard Square. Incredibly tasty, made me sweat almost as much as the weather.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.