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Last year I dramatically fell into the world of watchmaking. I’ve often been mildly interested in watches and how they work but just assumed it was something too hard to do. I don’t remember where it started exactly this time, somewhere between Nat and I just deciding to try a DIY watchmaking kit or getting lost in the Wristwatch Revival YouTube videos, but when I say dramatically fell…
It’s been a bit over 10 years since I first became an engineering manager—minus a couple non-manager roles in the startup world as a lead engineer. That realization and my normal end of year productivity reboot has had me thinking a lot about how I operate outside of the core mechanics of how I do things—namely how I have changed and how things operate in my head. The thing is, I’ve…
My wife and I have worked on our YouTube channel from time to time and one thing that comes up regularly is how we capture video differently. We normally use our iPhones as that’s the sort of best middle ground of good video and convenience. However, I often get fancy and use apps like the new-ish Blackmagic Camera App to record ProRes 422 HQ / Apple Log footage on my iPhone 15 Pro.…
I’ve recently been making some updates to the theme that drives this site, internet-weblog . I’m slowly updating it to follow more modern standards and add new features. First was a bugfix to support newer versions of Hugo , followed by two new features: Open Graph metadata with featured images and automatic dark appearance support. If you have things you’d like to see please let…
As little as I blog here it might be a surprise that I’m starting a different blog but here we are. Over the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time learning Italian, learning how to cook Italian, and learning about my family history and genealogy. So much that I just want to talk about it all the time. Most people don’t want to hear me talk about Italy all the time so it’s an…
I almost forgot to blog this year! It’s now the last minute—9pm on December 31—and the only thing I could think of was to write was a sort of ‘Year in Review’ of the movies, TV, and music I’ve enjoyed this year. It is something I’ve wanted to do before anyway, so why not start the tradition? So if you’ll indulge me here are a few interesting movies, shows, and…
I really like the idea of “asking a lot of dumb questions to learn fast” and while I don’t think this is a dumb question it’s kind of dumb in that it’s a controversial question on the internet. Maybe I can learn something at least? So here it goes. Why are so many developers so smitten with monorepos? What’s a monorepo? From Wikipedia , it’s a…
Yesterday, I made a very minor update to my Hugo internet-weblog theme that drives this site. The micropost formats looked different to regular posts but I cleaned it up a bit more making it a little lighter feeling. Additionally I improved the menu to not have a background, which always bugged me a little. I published it and thought I broke something, but then learned that newer versions of Hugo…
A lot of times when I would start a side project, I’d try to pre-plan all the work I’d think I’d need to do on it—building a large todo list. This makes sense because my work is often trying to plan and execute on engineering projects. The only problem is, time is limited to some nights and some weekends for side projects, so… I’d never actually work on the list. I started…
I’m constantly overwhelmed with all the things I want to do. From learning new languages to buying an FPV drone to blogging on this site—it’s almost a task just to keep up with the new things I want to try or learn. Unfortunately it often leads to me doing nothing or just watching YouTube. It was YouTube though that brought me across the idea of an “Energy Portfolio” . The…
I’ve written from time to time about productivity on this blog. I definitely think about todo lists and productivity too much and constantly try different things. Earlier this year I went back to paper even just to keep track of all the things I need to do in a day. Well… starting a new job gave me another opportunity to evaluate how I track todos… and I’m back to using Things 3 , but…
First week at Adobe was great, I’ve learned a lot already, started meeting the overall team, and have started a couple small learning projects. At one point I joked I was “drinking from the firehose”. One person shared the gif below and another said I found the “marble in the oatmeal”. A first week including UHF references might be the best first week.
Last week Nat and I took part in a video editing challenge from the folks at TMS Productions . Most of the footage comes from them, but I added a few shots of me typing a script to add a bit of a story. Honda’s Rebel website has a tagline of “Escape the Ordinary” which I thought would play nicely with the idea that someone is writing a screenplay about riding this motorcycle to…
One of my favorite things about learning languages is learning different idioms from different cultures. I first noticed this when learning German and learned that the equivalent idiom to “That’s water under the bridge” is “Das ist doch Schnee von gestern” (“that is snow from yesterday”). Tonight in studying Portuguese I learned that instead of “I…
After last month’s adventures into SwiftUI with my little weather app , I thought it would be interesting to recreate the same project, but in Android’s upcoming version of a declarative UI framework, Jetpack Compose . I’m curious how it compares to SwiftUI and what the Android development experience is like in 2021. I’ve been developing on Apple’s platforms in some form since the…
You may have noticed lately that I’ve been blogging a bit more regularly. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do with my site but always found reasons not to do it. A lot of times the reasons were just being busy—which is kind of a fake reason. Other times it was I just didn’t know what I wanted to write about. So I’d like to talk a little about what changed in my blogging mindset, what tools…
That ten-week Japanese class I mentioned has finished. Next up is level 2 which starts in a couple weeks. Reflecting on what I’ve learned has been really interesting. The books this class go over are written to be simple and have common words repeated often. Those words I think I’ve learned pretty well just by reading and rereading the short stories. It feels great to read a story in a…
It was hot at Eno River State Park, but the sky was beautiful! We didn’t do too many photography trips in June, only going to a few places—but those places were great! It had been more than 5 years since we went down to the beach, which is absurd—it’s only about 2 hours drive from here. We finally fixed this with a day trip to Kure Beach, NC. This walkway at Fort Fisher looked like it was being…
Why is it that I can remember the lyrics to songs that I haven’t heard in 10–20 years? It blows my mind every time, it’s like my brain back then heard these songs and said “ this is required for survival! ”. Last week I played Better than Ezra’s “Good” for the first time since maybe the late 90s and I remembered every lyric. How can I channel this super…
Interviewing is hard and there are a lot of problems in the industry and the processes that we use. A lot of companies rely on a half to full day interview cycle to both get an idea of the candidate’s skills/fit and give the candidate an idea of what your team is about. 4–5 hours is hard to give both employer and candidate a complete picture of what it’s like to work on this team. I think about…
I’m up way too late tonight, but for an investigation into Jetpack Compose , Google’s declarative UI system like SwiftUI. After wrapping up my little SwiftUI project I thought it would be interesting to see what the Android developers have in coming. Also Android Studio runs on my M1 Mac now! Some early things I’ve noticed, State is not as easily definable as SwiftUI and getting…
I realized last week that meetings are liquid —like cats! I cleared a few things off my calendar only to find things suddenly pop up in those time slots. I actually think this is fine, my role is about helping the team I work with but it can get draining. So depending on what I need to do, I’ll create some private meetings for myself to block off time to get focused work completed. I still…
A while back I got into an argument with a friend about the lifetime of code “now days”. He argued that code written in C and C++ was much more likely to continue working forever, needing fewer updates, and being generally more of an asset. My response was generally “code is a liability, not an asset”. We should strive to create good code, but too much changes in the industry year to year and…
Now that we are halfway through 2021, I was looking at the movies I’ve watched so far. The count is already at 41 movies but we don’t have a goal like our 2020 goal of 100 movies . Some of the highlights for me are Nomadland , The Forty-Year-Old Version , The Midnight Sky , and Space Sweepers . All worth checking out if you haven’t seen them.
Barbed Wire Fence in an alley off of Chapel Hill Street I’ve been meaning to make more photo posts here over the years and always forget. I am posting over on flickr somewhat regularly but I’d really like to keep this as the source of all the things I am doing and will do. Unfortunately I don’t really want to flood several photo posts here so instead it’ll be a medley of my…
Using an iPad to take notes in a side by side multitasking is actually pretty nice. Tonight I loaded up a few more WWDC videos on the left and Craft for notes on the right. Of course this could have been an article, a YouTube video, or anything really. I’ve been trying to be more diligent in note taking and this is a pretty good option. I’m looking forward to some of the new features…
I’ve watched a lot of this year’s WWDC sessions—like over 30 this weekend. This year just seemed to be really interesting and I’ve really enjoyed many of the videos. Also, I’m super excited about DocC and can’t wait to start building better documentation! One thing has been bugging me. After watching Meet async/await in Swift , Meet MusicKit for Swift and Meet StoreKit 2 sessions…
I’ve started taking a ten-week-long online Japanese class. The idea is to learn with stories. It’s been interesting and a large departure from just trying to learn Kanji. I’m about 1/3 of the way through Remembering the Kanji and I still can’t read actual sentences or understand content. It’s a fun book but I think I need to make more progress with basics first. I can…
I’ve been starting to read more articles and books about being a better Engineering Manager, so far I’ve read some great books like Crucial Conversations and An Elegant Puzzle . Today I found this Github resource that’s a booklist for Engineering Managers by @jesselpalmer . It has the books I’ve already read and many more!
So… I’ve been thinking about replacing my 2015 MacBook Pro and Windows PC I built in 2016 with something new. I decided to pick up a new 13" M1 MacBook Pro. It’s definitely much faster than my old Mac, but the battery life is unbelievable. I’ve been working on it all night since unboxing it. It started around 60% and 8 hours later I’m only down to 30%.
The falls at West Point on the Eno. If you look close there is a Heron. Throughout the Pandemic we’ve tried to keep doing things—but safely. This has led to a lot of walking through local parks. In most cases there are fewer people and enough space to stay distant. This park was really nice and I can’t believe after living here for 20 years I have never been. The mill reflecting in the…
Organizing Triangle Cocoa —CocoaHeads and NSCoder Nights—changed my life. My career was mostly focused on .NET programming for AutoCAD and I dabbled with Mac programming on the side. When the iPhone SDK was released I fell in love with it. I started learning as soon as it was possible—I went from dabbling to “taking it seriously”. There was a lot struggle in learning alone, none of my…
I borrowed a Mavic Pro 2 to potentially use for future One Charge Trips episodes. First I needed to practice so I made a small video of my first flight. Of course… I also crashed.
I picked up a used a7s recently and started carrying it with me. Walking to my car from work seemed like a good opportunity to practice taking some photos of downtown Durham. I’m still learning the camera and forgot to switch it to RAW, but I found a few nice images. Hill Building The Hill Building from Parrish St Looking down Parrish St
I‘ve done Inktober before and never finished the month. I‘m going to go for it again but this time not on paper. Linea , my favorite app for sketching on iPad, has released a new set of templates to use in the app specifically tailored for Inktober —complete with all the prompts.
Another episode of One Charge Trips was a visit to Hillsborough, NC to see the historic Occoneechee Speedway . It was a really hot day and we walked a lot! Really fascinating to see a place reclaimed by nature.
It‘s been at least two years since I last wrote about TODO lists and I‘ve tried several different options from going back to the Bullet Journal , trying OmniFocus again, to using Agenda for notes and todos. Through all this I still wasn’t feeling like I found a great system and easily could convince myself to ignore a todo or have to do weird things like moving tasks when I couldn’t…
We continued our weekend One Charge Trips this weekend and went to the Hopscotch Festival in Raleigh. The performances by Phantogram and Chvrches were great. We found some good seats without people in front of us or behind us, so we could sit or stand when we wanted. It also gave me the opportunity to be cooler than my daughter who just went to a Jonas Bros concert this week.
Sunday after a quick lunch at a small diner in Raleigh, we took our new camera over to Umstead Park in Raleigh. We walked down the “Sycamore” path until we reached a small creek with some running water. It was a nice mini-adventure and it’s always good to get some exposure to trees! I wanted to test the video with my Deity microphone, I think it looks and sounds pretty good! I…
I bought a new camera today and I’m super excited to go take some photos with it. It’s a Sony a6400.
Watching the US Open—and really all tennis—is fun but I can’t get over the odd behaviors they direct the cameras to take. They’ll have shots shaming fans who move during a point to ultra zooms into a player’s arms or legs. I’m just imagining the director saying “now zoom into the clock and slowly rack focus”.
I shared some photos earlier , but we released our first video for One Charge Trips this week. Check it out and subscribe!
The Whirligig Park is very nice. This weekend was the return of our One Charge Trips adventures where we travel to interesting locations from our house on one charge of our electric cars. This time we visited Wilson, NC and it’s wonderful Whirligig park . The sky was perfect for taking photos of Whirligigs This airplane whirligig fits well in the sky It's almost like some sort of colorful…
Cross Platform development for most mobile apps is just simply not worth it. Sure, there are great open source options like React Native and just plain C++ but you end up spending the same time trying to be clever and “share code” when you could have just built your product with all the platform has to offer. There seems to be a lot of realizations this year with Dropbox dropping their…
I did some updates to my hugo theme, “Internet Weblog” to update support for newer version of Hugo. I realized I never gave it a meaningful version log so I hope I didn’t break anything for anyone using it. If you use it and see problems please let me know!
A friend said they were going to do Advent of Code this year and I thought, hey I should too! I’ve wanted to do it for the last couple years but always forget. Anyway, it started today and I just completed day 1. I decided to only use my iPad Pro with Swift Playgrounds. 😬
📚 I’ve been listening to the Hamilton book by Ron Chernow since we saw Hamilton the Musical last week. First, I hear the music from the show in my head while listening to the book and omg this book is long. Still 29 hours to go.
🎥 I saw “Bohemian Rhapsody” with my daughter tonight, it was good and Rami Malek knocked it out of the park. I’m pretty sure the entirer 3rd act was the Live Aid concert and I’m ok with that. 😀
Tonight I tried to design an app prototype on the iPad Pro using Marvel and Affinity Designer. I’m slow with the tools because they are new to me but it was really fun to think through a product without just jumping into Xcode or sketching ugly rectangles.
Thanks to the new iPad Pro and my iPhone X, I just spent a minute trying to swipe up on my test iPhone. I've already forgotten about the home button. 🙃