JavaScript, math, maps, etc
Back in 2022, I wrote Web technology optimism hour , highlighting the things I thought were cool about the state of technology. Time flies. Let's do it again. It's still easy to be pessimistic, but it's nice to mine your feelings for the positive ones. The elephant in the room is AI, but I don't feel like throwing another post into the gravity field of that topic. Without further ado: TypeScript 7…
I'm still writing my journals on paper . Makes it about a decade of notebooks, most of them Field Notes , kept in the archival wooden boxes [1] . Writing by hand helps me remember and process life. Finishing notebooks give me the feeling of closing a chapter on those problems, at least for a moment. Paper notebooks are also a very flexible medium, as most teenagers can confirm: you can take train…
June was a big month: I went to Porto & Lisbon, and had a lot of life stuff happen. I'll get into the trip once I get my rolls of film developed. Three rolls at a new photo developing place: fingers crossed! Reading I finished reading Intermezzo ( of the bag ) and it was fantastic. I've always liked Sally Rooney's books but this was the one where the writing style really clicked. Also, The Vegan .…
A section of trail in Switzerland May was a big month! The highlight was a cycling trip around Lake Konstanz, passing through Konstanz, Bregenz Austria, Stein am Rhein in Switzerland, and Meersburg. A farm in Bodenseeufer, Germany We passed a lot of operating agriculture, growing apples, strawberries, and other fruits. The route is very continuous, mostly flat, and popular with retirees. It's very…
I've been reading the new Sally Rooney novel, Intermezzo . It's really beautiful. The perfect kind of novel to read slowly. She manages to write prose that's engaging at the micro and macro levels - beautiful sentences, as well as lovely long narrative arcs. I've been trying to read the dialog with an Irish accent in my head. It's a good book for reading in a park, and in Brooklyn we have a lot of…
I spent a lot of time outside in April. The first two weekends I did long bike rides: from Brooklyn to Tarrytown along the Old Croton Aqueduct trail , and out to Rockaway Beach via the Marine Parkway Bridge & Cross Bay Memorial Bridge. Then, I ran the Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon. I wrote some notes about the experience over in /micro . I properly trained for it this time, and it felt good…
When I started this blog in 2011 , I built it using Jekyll . Jekyll served me well for fifteen years. It was fast enough, and though it would take me an hour or two to get the system reinstalled when I switched laptops, it mostly just worked. But late last year, I was in the midst of updating all of my local installations to the latest versions of their runtimes, and when I tried to update Jekyll…
The mascot of ATmosphereConf is a goose, accompanied by the motto we can just do things . I thought about this line often while I was in Vancouver for the event. Everyone was active: writing, managing communities, building side projects or businesses on Bluesky, and building Bluesky itself. The energy was fertile and optimistic. Even deep critiques, like Erin Kissane's beautiful Landslide or…
I have a bunch that I want to write about this month, but that'll all be in different posts. Just got back from Atmosphere Conf in Vancouver and settling into a false Brooklyn summer. Reading I read so much this month but have little to share here. Despite trying to keep a rich, diverse information diet, a lot of the articles blur into the same thing, and I've been reading too much on Instapaper .…
I haven't made anything with AT Proto. Okay, technically, I did made the Bluesky ThinkUp Tribute , which syncs with your Bluesky account and sends a nightly email about who changed their bio or handle on the website. It's a great little utility and I rely on it constantly. But that doesn't integrate very deeply with AT Proto. I've fallen into the cycle of reading about AT Proto but not building…