It’s been an eventful three months since my last update. I nearly burnt myself out powering through a big internal release at work in February, a season of back-to-back family activities March and April, I turned 45 at the end of April and school lets out next week. Summer has begun.
And let’s be honest, we could blame the tardiness of this post on a lot of issues: the rise of fascist authoritarianism in America, busy home life, busy career, nights at the ball field… But we all know the real reason this post is months overdue: Balatro.
Internal-source work project launched
I devoted a lot of my Q1 life force to getting an internal work project out the door. It’s an internal design system that’s a sibling of the open source design system I work on but has more components, smaller API surface, a different look, more expressive and robust token system, and it’s less kilobytes.
Our team has a lot to be proud of and built something great but I’m learning that it’s not always a straightforward process in large companies. We’re addressing feedback and iterating to make it better while more requirements trickle in. It’ll jeremy-beremy around a bit until we get the five moons to align.
Cheer competitions
Spring is competitive cheer seasons. My daughter finished her second year of competitive cheer competitions. Not without drama. In late February her team competed at the NCA Cheerleading Competition and won the national championship for her D2 Mini Level 2 division. A minute after hearing the news there was an active shooter situation which was traumatizing even though it turned out to be two groups of parents fighting at a hotel. Wholly unnecessary. Everyone’s safe, but it’s having ripple effects through our family unit and friends’ families as well.
Since that event we’ve decided to go to competitions as a family. We went to one in Houston (technically, Rosenberg) which we parlayed into a trip to see my mom. The cheer season culminated in the Regional Finals competition in New Orleans, Louisiana (see below).
Installed grass and irrigation
Back-to-back heat death summers, our front lawn has been a barren disaster. In the summer the city limits days you can water, I’m inconsistent at watering, grass got too hot, curled up and died. And I don’t love spending my Wednesday and Saturday mornings and evenings moving sprinklers around, getting bit by mosquitos, and realizing I left hoses on in the middle of the night (see: ADHD). I even own a special flat shovel that I use to scrape mud back into our yard after it rains.
One of our lawn guys approached us with a plan to add irrigation and re-sod the front yard for an affordable price so we jumped on it. But did it work? It sure did. I’m happy to report we’re no longer the dirt bags in the neighborhood… for now. At least five neighbors have mentioned our yard (and former dirt patch) to me.
Spring break in Arizona
While most families head to the beach, we went to the desert. Arizona offers us one amenity not available in coastal regions: cousins! For five packed days our kids went wild playing with their cousins. To be honest, being off-duty as a parent with kids fully entertained and redundant parent figures (grandparents, aunts, and uncles) is the most relaxing and restorative break for me.
While we spent most of our time with family, we managed to sneak out and see a pre-season baseball game which was nice. The slow pace of life at the ballpark is a worthy aspiration to strive for.
The Sherwood Forest Renaissance Faire
Our friends the Kentopps invited us to join them at the Renaissance Faire. They have two boys and have gone for the past couple years and our weekends aligned where we could say “Aye,” to ye olde adventure.
There’s something magical about the Renaissance Faire, and I’m not talking strictly about all the cleavage and robed wizard cosplayers. It’s a fully immersive environment on acres of land. People in costume speaking with faux-Arthurian high fantasy accents as far as the eye can see. Shops of all different sizes and caliber selling different handmade and laser-cut wares. The illusion achieves a critical mass, and offers you a gift to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the group improvisation.
I did find it ironic that I’m the biggest nerd in my family, I play DnD, but I don’t have a RenFaire costume. After much discussion I think I realized that I’m not that kind of dork. I’m a different kind of dork.
New Orleans
At the beginning of April my daughter had her Regional Finals cheer competition in New Orleans. We stayed off-French Quarter near the convention center but we dipped in and out as needed. There were a three major highlights of this trip for me:
- My daughter’s team finishing their season undefeated
- The Honey Island Swamp Tour
- Spending lots of time in City Park
We had a great guide on our swamp tour which made it that much more enjoyable. We saw lots of small swamp critters, tons of birds, and the big finale was two 12-foot female gators up close to our boat. Good memories for sure.
We ended up at City Park two or three times over our three day trip. The sculpture garden was phenomenal. There’s an amusement park there too. And can’t forget the Café Du Monde (of course) where you can coat your entire body in powdered sugar for your beignets. I’m sure there’s more to the story of City Park, but I love when cities invest in enormous public spaces. It’s a great contrast and relief to the more intense (and drunk) economic zones.
For Texans (and all Americans?), New Orleans is the closest city you can go that feels like another country. It has a different bustle, a different energy, different food, and that was fun to show the kids.
Bought another car
One Wednesday night my wife said “I think we need to buy a new car.” Part pressure due to family visiting us with no way to haul everyone around, part tariff-induced panic; buying a car became a top family priority. A quick search showed a nearby dealership had the right color (the most important feature of a car) and trim (the one with the black grill and wheels) that my wife wanted.
While this seems impulsive (and believe me, yes, correct) this is how our family operates. We talk about something for years, bucket money, never act, and then full send it on a whim.
At 5pm, she left me with the kids to go scope it out and about an hour later she called and told me to come to the dealership because we were ready to sign papers. Car financing is something that makes me want to pay cash for every car. 6pm turned into 7pm and so on… but by 10pm we were leaving with a brand new car.
Turning 45
I aged again this year. Did you know aging isn’t linear? This is something I learned this year. You age a lot around 44 and then again at 60. Interesting huh? I think I’ve been feeling that this past year. Aches are achier, all that.
I generally feel young, youth-spirited, but on the morning of my 45th I started to see 50 on the horizon and for the first time in my life I think I started to feel old. As I was thinking that my neighbor Cleo texted me to say happy birthday and congratulated me that I was now half her age. That was great timing. A reminder that there’s still a lot of life yet to live. That said, Cleo is super-fit and can still probably outrun me in a foot race, so who knows. You’re not guaranteed much on this earth.
One year at Microsoft
I also celebrated one full year at Microsoft. As I said above I’ve gotten to work on some cool projects; not one but two design systems, a robust design token system, a couple prototypes, and a lot of documentation. I’ve learned a lot and made some good work comrades.
A sour note to this celebration is that last week Microsoft had a 3% reduction in force (which is about 6,000) people. I know enough about enterprise to know this happens periodically but it never seems fair, only callous. I’m a post-processor so I’m sure I’ll be sitting with this for awhile.
Quick Stats
🧠 Learning
I love when I get to take a weekend for myself (read: I’m on parenting duty and the kids are on iPads) to learn something new.
- Godot - I took a weekend and Hello World’d Godot game engine. I have video game ideas kicking around but with Unity being the game engine I know, I felt like I was experiencing skill collapse because that company has made some horrific decisions. There’s a lot to like about Godot. GDScript feels like a cross between Python and JavaScript so it’s easy to pick up. It’s simplified in a way that you’re not forced to think about Quaternions right way, that’s there but more or less abstracted out. Feels like a good fit for a casual like myself.
📖 Reading
Not my best season of book consumption but that’s countered by the fact that 1) I chopped my RSS down from 3000 to 1200 unreads and 2) I read some great, high quality books.
- The Siren’s Call - Probably the best book I’ve consumed in awhile. Digs into the heart of the Attention Economy and how our attention is valuable, monetized, and exploited.
- The Twilight of the Elites - Another banger. A look at the 1% and how perverse and outsized the oligarchy’s role is in our politics. Meritocracy is not based on merit, but rather wealth.
- System Collapse - The last book in the Murderbot franchise.
- Careless People - Holy shit Facebook is a terrible and willfully ignorant company.
- Poverty, by America - A great look at the wealthiest country in the world’s biggest problem.
- Abundance - Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson are mad about… [checks notes] … California housing and want to celebrate … [checks notes] … Operation Warp Speed … ? Ezra Klein wants to (and can be as far as I care) a pillar in the Democratic party and influence the platform… I found the book and ideas to be pretty impotent.
- Meditations for Mortals - Listening to this as an audiobook at 2x is not how the author intended but I still enjoyed it. I’ll probably buy a paper copy and do the daily reflections.
- Who is Government? - Anecdotes about ordinary people (and numbers) who avoid the limelight and toil behind the scenes to make government work.
📺 Media
Feeling blessed to have some good shows right now and making time for them.
Shows
- Win or Lose (Disney+) - Pixar’s “Pulp Fiction” style story characters in and around a youth softball team. Close to perfect as you can be for an animated series.
- Mobile Suit Gundam Gquuuuuux (Amazon Prime) - A new take on the Gundam franchise by the people who made Evangelion.
- Welcome to Wrexham S4 (Hulu) - Up the town. Excited for the new season.
- Murderbot - 50% how I pictured it, 50% not how I pictured it, and 50% even better than I pictured it
- White Lotus S1 - My wife and I had some kid-free nights where we could watch grownup shows, so we’re three episodes in.
- Love on the Spectrum - Autistic folks finding love. It’s a sweet show with so much emotional honesty. There’s a lot of making out, but it’s been great to watch the non-make-out parts with the kids and try to field their questions best I can on what makes autistic people unique. One young woman, Pari, on the show summed it up nicely, “It’s like having a different operating system.” I love that.
YouTubes
- Ari@Home (YouTube) - a guy in NYC who walks around with an entire mobile music production rig on his back.
- Ska Tune Network (YouTube) - a one man ska band that does incredible cover songs.
🤖 Gunpla
Picked Gunpla back up after a hiatus. No where near peak Gunpla, but it’s enjoyable when I get hop back in.
- Nobell Gundam - The “Sailor Moon Gundam” featuring class RX-78-2 design but with a tighter waist, longer legs, high heels, long blonde hair, and a school girl uniform.
- RX-78-2 Gundam Revival - A remake of the original 1979 Gundam plastic model kit. It has the same boxy proportions and limited mobility as the original, but modernized on the inside.
- Duel Blitz Gundam - A mobile suit that has another set armor it can wear
👾 Gaming
I rebuilt my gaming PC so I could hop on games with my friends more. Been fun.
- Balatro - Way too much. Still having fun tho. Best way to kill 10 minutes.
- Warzone - Back in Verdansk with the boys.
- Overwatch - New stadium mode is okay. Anything different is welcome.
- Lots of mini web games: 368 chickens, Dragonsweeper, etc.
Thus ends the retelling of the vibes.