Life Log: Q3(ish) 2024
🌵 Happenings
The past quarter (+/- one month) has been a another period of great transition. Reflecting, grieving, pondering, preparing, connecting, searching, and creating. Giving support and receiving it with gratitude. I wrote a whole post but I've decided to let it remain a private cathartic exercise 🙃.
Joshua Tree.
New York City.
Arthur Ashe Stadium.
In the last months I've:
- 🎓 Celebrated a college graduation in the family.
- 💍 Celebrated an engagement in the family.
- 🥂 Celebrated a wedding in the family (clearly a big year for the fam!).
- 🚘 Driven from California to Texas (featuring stops at Joshua Tree and White Sands).
- 🗽 Visited New York (for the first time in five years!) to attend LeadDev NYC.
- 🎾 Gone to my first-ever grand slam (the US Open!).
- 🐶 Done lots of puppy-sitting for a new little nugget in the fam.
- 🏸 Felt like a kid again enjoying the Olympics.
- 👟 Played a lot of tennis.
- 🧶 Experienced a creative re-awakening after healing burnout.
- 👩🏻💻 Tinkered and started kicking the dust off (like re-writing this site).
- 🔎 Taken a pseudo-sabbatical before starting a focused search.
- 💫 Accepted an awesome opportunity that I'm really excited for!
🧶 Projects
Quilt.
Totes.
Works in progress
- Personal site revamp (a perma-WIP, really. Be kind, it's young, dark mode to come).
- Home-cooked app for scheduling with friends
Finished objects
📚 Reads
- The Goldfinch (by Donna Tartt).
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (by Patrick Lencioni).
- Resilient Management (by Lara Hogan).
- Engineering Management For the Rest of Us (by Sarah Drasner).
- The Manager's Path (by Camille Fournier).
- An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (by Will Larson).
🎧 Listens
- How To Become Batman (Invisibilia). Not what it sounds like. Better. (Episode recommended in Sarah Drasner's "Engineering Management for the Rest of Us").
- Kelsey Hightower: Retired, not tired (Changelog). I just enjoy his perspective. (And am grateful for him prompting the most recent wave of tech migration and activity on the sky app.)
- Maggie Appleton: Barefoot Developers, AI, end-user programming (localfirst.fm). I don't want to hear most people talk about AI. Maggie is not one of them.
📺 Watches
- Great British Baking Show (Netflix). New season. Palate cleanser for my soul. Obsessed with Nelly.
- The Diplomat (Netflix). Joins the small list of shows that don't totally scratch the West Wing itch but are as close as I can get (cough cough Madam Secretary).
- UnREAL (Netflix). Oddly great?
- Haunting of Hill House (Netflix). The annual rewatch for October.
🔗 Links
- Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you (Article by Charity Majors).
- How treating life like a video game means you can't fail, with Rachel Lee Nabors (Video by Jason Lengstorf).
- The work is never just "the work" (Article by Dave Stewart).
- Job Title: It's Complicated (Article by Brad Frost).
- A Guide to Our Company’s Completely Reasonable Interview Process (Article by Marti Trgovich).
- The manager's unbearable lack of endorphins (Article by Jamie Lawrence).
Cover image: By Amberley Romo