Weeknotes: 2025-W15

Published: 14 April, 2025, updated: 14 April, 2025

Summary

Fairly productive week on a few fronts - getting some much-delayed paperwork filled out, and starting on a new woodworking project by getting lumber for it, rough design, and doing rough cuts.

Inhaled The Pitt whole - yum!.

Photos

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

Enjoying

• Reading:
  • Impractical Magic (Myrtlewood Mysteries #9) by Iris Beaglehole by Iris Beaglehole (★★★☆☆)
    • Got to the end of the series, but perhaps a bit too long of a palate cleanser.
  • The Crone of Midnight Embers (Myrtlewood Crones #1) by Iris Beaglehole
• Watching:
  • 📺🏃 Pulse season 1 (★★★★☆)
  • 📺🏃 The Pitt season 1 (★★★★★)
    • Definitely in the running for best season of television I’ve watched in years.
  • 📺🏃 This Old House season 45
  • The Life List (★★★☆☆)
    • Another escapist watch - a bit better than expected. (Part of my attempt to watch more movies)
• Playing:
  • Cracking the Cryptic

Newly discovered

Pottery

The nearby maker space, Seattle Makers, is getting their pottery operation going, and I had a serendipitous Florian Gadsby video come past, and I binge-watched a bunch of his pottery videos.

Obviously it’s a lot of experience to get to the ease shown in his videos, but I suspect I’ll be trying out the pottery wheel in the maker space in Q3 sometime.

Highlights

Teams often confuse psychological safety with everyone getting along perfectly. I see leaders bragging about teams where nobody ever raises their voice, where meetings wrap up with everyone nodding along, and where disagreements are rare. Some even think their team is “psychologically safe” because nobody ever argues.

But here’s the truth: real psychological safety isn’t about avoiding conflict. It’s about creating an environment where challenging ideas makes the team stronger, not weaker.

…

My best engineering teams were never the quiet ones—they were the ones where technical debates got spirited, where different perspectives were welcomed, and where we could disagree while still respecting each other.

– “Why Your ‘Harmonious’ Team Is Actually Failing” by Matheus Lima

Recommended

Simulating 256 Bytes of RAM - Sebastian Lague

I’m really enjoying Sebastian’s exploration of how computers work, and this is one of them, so…

Pilot Mental Health Campaign Dinner - Xyla Foxlin

I’d definitely feel more comfortable flying with a pilot that has received some mental health assistance than one who has the feeling that they can’t get help in addition to whatever else has been going on for years without any help.

Foggy Regional Constraints - Cracking The Cryptic

Regional constraints look to be a fun new addition to the variant Sudoko landscape, adding a new constraint that works particularly well with dynamic fog.