Weeknotes: 2025-W02
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Summary
Turned out to be an exemplary week, with relatively productive and balanced weekdays most days, and a chill weekend. Worked on the video weeknote for 2025-W01, largely around footage management, as well as getting a bunch of admin work done, and playing Assassin’s Creed Mirage and working on a (jigsaw) puzzle.
Photos
(Based more on time of processing than time of taking…)
Enjoying
- Reading:
- Assassin’s Fate (Fitz and the Fool #3) by Robin Hobb
- Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
- Watching:
- 📺🏃 Superman and Lois season 4 (completed)
- 📺🏃 Castle season 8
- Playing:
- Assassin’s Creed Mirage on PS5
Newly discovered
RSS Blogroll Network
As I mentioned last week, I think there’s still some missing pieces (or perhaps missing knowledge) in the discovery area of the RSS ecosystem, and this OPML-based auto-discovery system seems like it on the path to what’s needed - a way to discover what other people find interesting, in this case on a feed-by-feed basis. Being able to discover people who have similar tastes to you (have similar feeds in their blogroll) can then help you explore other things you may like.
Highlights
A brief sojourn
Recently I’ve come to realize I need personal risk in my work to feel satisfied. I also want to build something where I am the primary customer.
I want to try building a product without worrying about growth for once. I’m going to focus my energy on craft and quality. I’m making a conscious choice to build slow… This is a personal project, and while I’m hopeful it can turn into a nice, small business, I kind of just want to build something cool again.
Speaking of learning, I’ve never learned this much, this fast. For a 45 year old that sometimes questioned whether I should just lay low in the executive ranks, this is the level of danger I needed to feel invigorated.
As a similarly-aged person who has recently decided to go it alone and rediscover the joy of building by building stuff I want to build without worrying about convincing others, I can only nod along to this. I hadn’t thought about “personal risk” in my case, and I think it makes sense from a “stepping outside of the comfort” of the inherited “success” of the team/company I’m attached to.
Recommended
This presentation starts relatively simple with the idea of how “measuring productivity” is a fool’s approach to engineering, posits that instead you should describe how your engineering org looks like when it’s succeeding, and then goes wide and deep in a bunch of places.
I may not be much of a capital-A “Agile” enthusiast so I bring a lot of skepticism about it and XP, but I appreciate the attempt to approach the problem from first principles.
More from the “things you’re unlikely to have seen before” department - a very close look, in slow motion, of a watch doing its thing.
The title says it all - Solving Minesweeper with Set Theory.