Last year I dramatically fell into the world of watchmaking. I’ve often been mildly interested in watches and how they work but just assumed it was something too hard to do. I don’t remember where it started exactly this time, somewhere between Nat and I just deciding to try a DIY watchmaking kit or getting lost in the Wristwatch Revival YouTube videos, but when I say dramatically fell into the world, it’s not an exaggeration.
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It’s been a bit over 10 years since I first became an engineering manager—minus a couple non-manager roles in the startup world as a lead engineer. That realization and my normal end of year productivity reboot has had me thinking a lot about how I operate outside of the core mechanics of how I do things—namely how I have changed and how things operate in my head. The thing is, I’ve always been really good at dropping work out of my head at the end of the day.
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My wife and I have worked on our YouTube channel from time to time and one thing that comes up regularly is how we capture video differently. We normally use our iPhones as that’s the sort of best middle ground of good video and convenience. However, I often get fancy and use apps like the new-ish Blackmagic Camera App to record ProRes 422 HQ / Apple Log footage on my iPhone 15 Pro. That’s great and all but a lot of the time, Nat will edit the videos as I’m at work or something. So then she has to color correct the videos and the pipeline just gets really annoying. Of course, I could just stop being so fancy and just record in the camera app with the same settings as her footage. Hmmmmm… should I?
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I’ve recently been making some updates to the theme that drives this site, internet-weblog. I’m slowly updating it to follow more modern standards and add new features. First was a bugfix to support newer versions of Hugo, followed by two new features: Open Graph metadata with featured images and automatic dark appearance support. If you have things you’d like to see please let me know on Mastodon or open a PR in Github!
As little as I blog here it might be a surprise that I’m starting a different blog but here we are. Over the last year, I’ve spent a lot of time learning Italian, learning how to cook Italian, and learning about my family history and genealogy. So much that I just want to talk about it all the time. Most people don’t want to hear me talk about Italy all the time so it’s an outlet. If you want to follow along, check it out!
I almost forgot to blog this year! It’s now the last minute—9pm on December 31—and the only thing I could think of was to write was a sort of ‘Year in Review’ of the movies, TV, and music I’ve enjoyed this year. It is something I’ve wanted to do before anyway, so why not start the tradition? So if you’ll indulge me here are a few interesting movies, shows, and songs I was entertained by in 2023.
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I really like the idea of “asking a lot of dumb questions to learn fast” and while I don’t think this is a dumb question it’s kind of dumb in that it’s a controversial question on the internet. Maybe I can learn something at least? So here it goes.
Why are so many developers so smitten with monorepos?
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Yesterday, I made a very minor update to my Hugo internet-weblog theme that drives this site. The micropost formats looked different to regular posts but I cleaned it up a bit more making it a little lighter feeling. Additionally I improved the menu to not have a background, which always bugged me a little. I published it and thought I broke something, but then learned that newer versions of Hugo use a new Markdown tool which requires running in unsafe mode for any raw HTML in the Markdown.
A lot of times when I would start a side project, I’d try to pre-plan all the work I’d think I’d need to do on it—building a large todo list. This makes sense because my work is often trying to plan and execute on engineering projects. The only problem is, time is limited to some nights and some weekends for side projects, so… I’d never actually work on the list. I started a new little project over the last couple weeks, but instead of pre-planning it I tried to just explore, be curious, and build out my idea. This has of course led to many tasks being added to my todo list, but they are specific and actionable because I am finding them as I work on the project. So just start working on the side project, you will find the tasks.
I’m constantly overwhelmed with all the things I want to do. From learning new languages to buying an FPV drone to blogging on this site—it’s almost a task just to keep up with the new things I want to try or learn. Unfortunately it often leads to me doing nothing or just watching YouTube. It was YouTube though that brought me across the idea of an “Energy Portfolio”. The big idea is to write down all the things you want in a “backlog” or “bucket list” then have 3–4 items in an “Active” list at any time. I’ve been trying it for the last few weeks. It’s hard but the biggest thing is to give myself permission not to explore all the ideas and just focus on the few I’ve currently chosen.