On the Monday before Thanksgiving, I had surgery on my nose for my skin cancer. I’m glad to report that surgery went fine and I’m cancer free (for now). The procedure involved cutting away 1mm layers of flesh at the tumor site and looking at each layer under a microscope, repeating the process until there’s no cancer detected. Thankfully we got it in one go. But because this is my nose, you can’t graft a piece of butt cheek on there to patch it up, we had to borrow skin from other parts of my nose and sew it all up. It looks like I got into a fight, but it seems to have gone well. Still don’t know what the final product will look like, but I’m glad it’s over for now becuase that was a lot of ambient anxiety hanging over me.

Earlier in the month, the app I’m working on had a big 10-day outage. The target server wiped a setting which produced a silent failure and the Github Action thought the backend API deployment succeeded… but, dear reader, it did not deploy… since like August. I also found an undefined function crashing a monthly chron job. Lord, Lord, this took a long time to untangle. After a lot of staring at the console, I diagnosed the issues, landed fixes, and added some much needed monitoring and documentation that will hopefully make it easier next time around.

Speaking of the app I’m working on, it’s now a little less of a secret. It’s called Luro and we think you’ll love it. Before we open the doors, we need to let it bake a bit more with our first cohort of beta testing customers. Then we’ll have more to talk about and show.

Other vibes

I spent a lot of mental energy learning and establishing my thoughts about Web3, blockchain, and NFTs this month. Some of that thinking leaked out on Shop Talk Show #490. I think I’m out for now. There’s a lot to say. Solving ledger-like problems seems okay. DAOs are (probably unenforcable, but) interesting. But truly, nothing compelling other than FOMO right now. Money charts going up is cool and produces a great amount of envy, but I read a lot, listened to a lot of podcasts, challenged myself to be open-minded and not old man yells at cloud, yet … I can’t. And that’s where I’m at on that, for now at least.

All the Web3 hype (as well as Politics Twitter) actually made me uninstall Twitter from my iPad and iPhone… and I kind of love it. I’m unplugged from the outrage machine and it’s much quieter. Stomping the urge to reinstall the app or log in from Mobile Safari for some dumb tweet is the hardest part, but I’m so far successful.

With time to kill, I spent a lot of time watching TikToks and roleplaying videos, both popular DnD5E series (like Critical Role (Campaign 3), Battle for Beyond, The Adventure Zone: Imbalance) and for one-shots systems like Lasers and Feelings. I’m enchanted by the idea of running a one-shot and may try to put one together in one of my Discords. But for now I’ll live vicariously through watching videos and pretend I’m pretending… wait.

I’m even starting to think about making a video game again…

Stats

  • 📖 Reading: Opted for podcasts over audiobooks this month, but still managed to squeeze in three books.
    • The Bomber Mafia - Continuing my quest to read all the Malcom Gladwell novels. This book was a bit dull, but the theme around “Is there an ethical way to bomb during war?” and the exploration of that theme was interesting enough to sustain me.
    • The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - A business classic! An interesting look at how different personalities and attitudes can impact a team.
    • Effortless - Another good, thought-provoking book by Greg McKeown. “How do you not feel overwhelmed even when you become an essentialist?” McKeown shares some strategies for creating “effortless” work. Not 100% practical, but challenging at least.
  • 📝 Blogging: Did not ride the blogging train into November as I hoped, but it’s fine, I watched TikToks instead.
  • 💪 Fitness: Mild setback as I may have injured a butt cheek swinging a pickaxe while clearing the nandina out of the side yard with my neighbor.
  • 🎙 Podcasts and YouTubes: Released a normal amount of podcasts. Shop Talk is careening towards Episode 500 (which we’ll hit next year).
  • ⌨️ Open Source: Reviewed a PRs for <spicy-sections>
  • ⚖️ Budgeting: Actually started looking at this today. But I wouldn’t say it’s going great.
  • 🎮 Gaming: Nyet.