Weeknotes: 2025-W11

Published: 17 March, 2025, updated: 17 March, 2025

Summary

Went off on a side-quest binge-watching all three released seasons of From. Picked up Wanderspot which is a rather amusing game on a number of levels, especially given my history with burn-out. Started on my quest to get certified in the Seattle Makers woodshop.

Photos

(Based more on time of processing than time of taking…)

Enjoying

• Reading:
  • The Traitor (Covenant of Steel #3) by Anthony Ryan (★★★★☆)
    • A step down from the previous books in the series, but a satisfying-enough ending to the series.
  • Mort (Discworld #4) by Terry Pratchett
• Watching:
  • From
    • Season 1 (★★★★☆)
    • Season 2 (★★★★☆)
    • Season 3 (tbd)
  • School Spirits
• Playing:
  • Wanderstop
  • finity. (★★★★★)
  • Cracking the Cryptic

Newly discovered

PDF/A

PDF/A is a new-to-me (possibly because I’ve forgotten) subset of PDF for archiving documents that I discovered while, well, archiving some documents and seeing a checkbox for it.

Rustconf in Seattle

This year’s Rustconf is in Seattle, so I really have no excuse not to go since I’ll likely still be on my work break in September.

Highlights

The options available to people with established careers, the way we move through and experience the industry, and even the culture around day-to-day working conditions, are dramatically different from what newcomers experience.

[…]

Further, even advice people with long careers on what worked for them when they were getting started is unlikely to be advice that works today. The tech industry of 15 or 20 years ago was, again, dramatically different from tech today.

– Beware tech career advice from old heads by Jacob Kaplan-Moss

That something needs to be specifically useful to the audience to be classified as “advice” is a realization that took me way too long to get to. Your story - what worked and didn’t for you - is different from advice. Not useless, but not nearly as useful.

When people talk about world-class engineering organizations, they often have in mind teams that are top-heavy with staff and principal engineers, or that recruit heavily from the ranks of former Big Tech employees and top universities. But I would argue that a truly great engineering org is one where you don’t have to be one of the “best” or most pedigreed engineers to have a lot of impact on the business. I think it’s actually the other way around. A truly great engineering organization is one where perfectly normal, workaday software engineers, with decent skills and an ordinary amount of expertise, can consistently move fast, ship code, respond to users, understand the systems they’ve built, and move the business forward a little bit more, day by day, week by week.

– In Praise of “Normal” Engineers by Charity Majors

A larger proportion of my former Big Tech colleagues were probably in the “world-class engineer” bucket vs. what you’d find in the wild, and similarly in the “strong”, “solid”, and “high potential” buckets. The majority (including myself) weren’t in that “world-class engineer” bucket, and many were slowed down by the engineering organization not recognizing the importance of making systems and processes approachable by mere mortals.

Recommended

Soft body procedural animation

As I mentioned back in 2025-W43, I’m a bit of a sucker for generative art and procedural generation, so argonaut’s follow-up also makes the cut.

How Much Rolling Shutter Is Too Much?

Gerald Undone’s review videos are my primary camera review videos, and this video doubles-down on why - he’s careful to separate the objective and subjective and to acknowledge that there’s no single “best”, but that you need to find “good for your intended use cases”, and in this case, shows the practical implications of the numbers.

The Best Dragon (According to Science)

If you haven’t thought through the different depictions of dragons, or perhaps if you have thought too much about them, this is an amusing take.