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Hello! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

I wanted to share with you — in the waning hours of 2020 — my year in review post. It’s a good one, I think — it’s the first one I wrote comfortably in quite a few years, rather than trying to bang it out in the three days between Christmas and New Years Eve.

You can read it here. It’s on my new site, “arcana dot computer”, that I have tweeted a fair bit about.

This week was defined by small victories over small-but-annoying tasks that had metastasized themselves to my subconscious. A friend calls them “gum tasks”. I returned a coat I bought in January; I finally tracked down the source of an enigmatic $35/month charge; I finally backported all of my blog archives.

I am embarrassed of most of what I wrote in the past five years, which I think is a good thing. It is so fun to scroll through my archives and see writing from 2014 when I thought that blogging about Python was some sort of key to success — and, to a certain extent, it was! Writing, albeit poorly, about technical topics got me some new friends and some meager level of communicatory expertise, and these things have a habit of snowballing. I always love finding someone’s blog and seeing the evolution of their interests over time; in general, my philosophy on blogging has shifted from “every essay must be a perfect, shimmering artifact” to “blog posts should be short, authentic, and flawed transportation devices”.

It’s funny to see how much I cared about television (which I still care about a lot in an abstract sense, though the only show I’m regularly watching is , and that’s more out of supplication to the zeitgeist than thinking that it is an amazing exemplar of the medium) and podcasts (the time I spend listening to podcasts has been wholly supplanted by the time I spend listening to audiobooks, with the sole exceptions of and , for when my brain is spent). I can’t help feeling like a little bit of an impostor to my former self: I can still get into a shouting match with someone about how is obviously better than and how is the platonic ideal of the post-NBC sitcom, but most of my material is a few years out of date.

I still haven’t quite figured out what I want my spring-and-summer mornings to be like.

I’m now used to — and fond of! — waking up at five, chugging some pre-workout, and knocking out emails as the requisite amount of wherewithal seeps into my system before heading over to the gym. This is a thing that gives me stability and peace; no matter how the day turns out, by seven I’ve worked up a sweat and, like, done my Duolingo, and sometimes those two things get me through otherwise interminably unproductive days.

Now that I’m lifting less, I find myself with these mornings that feel like guilty pleasures. I’m waking up at five, still, and by six I’ve.... done the things I need to do, and I have two more hours before I become a real human.

So I check work emails; I do the crossword; I read and I write. And it’s nice, and feels like river-time. But by the time I’ve done all that it’s still only seven, and so I shower and get to work early. (I was on-call this week, so quiet office mornings were actually lovely and prudent, but I’m not sure showing up downtown at 7.30am every morning is sustainable.)

It seems silly to think of a “first week back” after only having been back for a week, but jet lag has a way of making even comfortable beds in comfortable neighborhoods seem foreign. (I did the thing you’re supposed to do and stayed up til my bedtime the first day back, which seemed to have worked — and then I fell asleep at 7pm the following day. Whoops.)

A friend recommended that I read The Friend — which I did, and loved, and you should read it too. The Friend name-drops Rilke’s — which I dutifully borrowed from the library, and devoured in two sittings. in turn recommends the book , by the Dane Jens Peter Jacobsen, which I’m starting tomorrow. There should be a term for this sort of chain reaction of literary progeny: you read a book that forces you to read a book that forces you to read a book, the textual equivalent of a wild night out.

Paris was, to me, a city where it was impossible to stay jaded.

I loved the way you order espresso with cafe un cafe noisette (noisette meaning , a nod to the color of the lightened milk). I loved the scooters and the bike paths and the unreasonably pleasant public transit. I loved the way sunlight soaked the Ile-de-France in the early afternoon.

Writing this en route to Paris, via Salt Lake City. (I volunteered to give up my seat for $500 and my only penance is getting in three hours later, which feels somehow like a scam.)

I need Paris, both the city and just the week free from It All: from the perpetual waterfall of bugs and features and emails and tweets, from the hedonic treadmill of annual sales. This will be my second trip there, which is great because I’ve already done so many of the requisite bits — the Louvre (though obviously I’ll be going again), the Musee d’Orsay, etc. — leaving me more time for the true tourism of wandering and getting lost, to leave my mark in cobblestone grooves and emptied bottles of wine.

I had jokingly told a friend that , and that’s more or less true. The stress of unanswered emails is a nettle I’m still trying to weather; the joy, abstract as it may be, of cosplaying as a “person who sits in Paris and does business things on the corner of Rue de Seine” certainly doesn’t help.

I am very bad at lulls in conversation.

There are friends with whom I am comfortable in silence; these are the close friends, the chess-at-breweries friends, the ones with whom I can sit and stare out into the earth.

But even then, even with them, I struggle. You can be an absolute stranger or someone who I’ve known for nine and a half years, after a long enough pause I will ask you one of two questions: what’s new with you? or

There are so many things I want to tell you about, to make up for lost time.

1. I was in Vegas. This was my first time in Vegas, and it was … not quite what I expected? I mean yes — there was the neon, there were the corridors that led everywhere, the acres of tired faces. There were the overpriced drinks and the slot machine cacophonies. But there was also the first thing I mention when I tell people about my trip to Vegas — on the second weekend of 2019, the thing that felt oddly momentous — the six hours spent in the Park MGM spa, $20 for a robe (since pilfered) and a hot tub and chairs that reclined all the way back. By virtue of it being such a bonkers and weird place, Vegas was honestly the most relaxing trip I’ve had in .

If cities are machines designed to produce interactions between people, New York is the largest and most efficient one to which I’ve visited. It was, in retrospect, foolish to try and cram a universe into three days: but the three days have been very good, filled with the silly (I saw a rat! I saw a pigeon! I got a New York slice!) and the divine (Morgan’s library, Strand, walking through East Village at dawn) and so many very incredibly good people.

I’m flying back tomorrow at seven in the morning; I get back into Seattle at ten and will head straight to the office. I will try and work on the flight (six hours is not to be squandered!) but even now I know I will be spending so much time thinking about what I saw: the rats, the pigeons, the dogs wearing Canada Goose jackets, the subway cars crossing like lattices, the acres of brownstones, the machine humming blissfully along.

It turns out that it everyone was right, is what I’m saying: that New York is in fact very good, and I am looking forward to coming back.

On the last day of the year, I wrote about it. It was a weird and mostly fun year, and 2019 seems poised to be the same.

I.

I realized this week that I have become the coworker who talks obnoxiously about waking up early. It is great. (You should wake up earlier.).

Aristotle has written more persuasively and interestingly about the virtues of habitude and rigor than I ever will. All I know is that I started 2018 waking up early because it was the only thing I could do to impose some sense of control and gestalt over a world that seemed devoid of both, but I am ending 2018 waking up early because it feels right and natural and the way to tap into some better universe, one populated by those who have figured out more things than I have.

My darkest secret is that my morning routine sounds like a satire of productivity blog posts. I wake up at 5.30, immediately chug pre-workout (think caffeinated Kool-Aid and you’re in the right ball park) and a kale smoothie, and then do the following things:

The advantage of having written this newsletter for over a year and a half now is that I can mark the deja vu of things: this time last year I was writing about the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack and, lo and behold, I have to fight the urge to do the same thing today, but instead will settle for again cribbing this perfect excerpt from Charles Mudede:

• Oh god, this again.

How do you start something?

When I was in Richmond, I stopped by my mom’s CS class to answer some questions about being a ‘real’ programmer (a title and designation I wear with no small amount of disbelief.) The answer I gave was one that I think is correct:

Ada Limón:

Every time I'm in an airport,
I think I should drastically
change my life: Kill the kid stuff,
start to act my numbers, set fire
to the clutter and creep below
the radar like an escaped canine
sneaking along the fence line.
I'd be cable-knitted to the hilt,
beautiful beyond buying, believe in
the maker and fix my problems
with prayer and property.
Then, I think of you, home
with the dog, the field full
of purple pop-ups-- we're small and
flawed, but I want to be
who I am, going where
I'm going, all over again.

Some things I’ve done the past few weeks that I recommend:

1. I recommend dogsitting. Specifically, dogsitting these two dogs in Magnolia: Maggie and Max. They’re both very good dogs, and extremely well trained. Max is a good dog, sure — he will sit in your lap and wag his tail and be extremely pleased when you find the right spot to scratch his back. Maggie, though, is the saint, the angel dog, the paw-print hagiography: she is nine years old and half-retriever, she has eyes that make you faint from earnestness. Dogsitting is perfect because it lets you cosplay as a dog owner for a couple days without assuming any actual maturity or responsbility; the only downside, so far as I can see, is that you will find yourself at home a week from the act of dogsitting wishing that you had something to pet.

I haven’t written about Buttondown in a while because I haven’t worked on anything on Buttondown worth writing about. This is for a couple reasons:

1. It was summer for a while, and summers are not best spent with idle hours funneled into a computer screen.
2. Buttondown is growing, and of the hour or so I allot to it a day, more and more time is spent doing operational things — responding to emails, improving documentation, fiddling with Heroku — rather than doing the thing that I enjoy, which is sitting in an IDE building things and pretending that there are zero users or external concerns.

I mean, it’s a phone. And what do you use a phone for nowadays? You are never too far away from a laptop; you still hate sending texts by tapping on glass. You are trying to use Twitter less; hell, you are trying to stay off all “apps” because you want to chip away at the tower of books that threatens to overtake your bedside table in height.

And yet, you have many serious complaints about your old phone. Your old phone had terrible battery: it would turn off in the middle of light jogs, it would require a cable in the middle of the day. Your old phone tried very hard to be attentive and responsive, but it always seemed to come up short. Your old phone had a couple chips and scratches that could no longer be chalked up to patina or wabi-sabi. (Your old phone’s camera lacked the ability to capture bokeh, too, which admittedly was less important.)

And so you buy a new phone. It is extremely expensive: this is the thing that proponents of the new phone tacitly agree not to discuss, or to softly paper over by divvying the cost into months or days or hours spent using the phone. (“If you use it three hours a day for two years, it costs two quarters per hour!”, they say, and you wince at being the kind of person to whom such arguments are persuasive.)

Thankfully, then, it expensive. The new phone is a treasure: it is a perfectly polished stone. It is equal parts sleekness and density. The new phone knows your face but gets confused when you are wearing sunglasses, which I find extremely endearing.

For whatever reason, this floors me. It felt like one thing for Judith Bronte’s work to find me in this way; fed into a recombinatorial machine, cut into pieces and reassembled into accidental poetry, arriving in my spam folder in the consort of advertisement. Somehow it felt entirely different that this work managed to function in the same way with her; a cavalcade of wayward characters she may not have ever written, returning home to the inbox of their original creator.

Everest Pipkin

I am struck by how, except when you’re young, you really need to prioritize in life, figuring out in what order you should divide up your time and energy. If you don’t get that sort of system set by a certain age, you’ll lack focus and your life will be out of balance.

…

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.

If you have spent the past week or two in Seattle, you know that it is has been a bizarre hellscape. The smoke (some coming from northern Washington, some from Vancouver, some from Canada, some appearing as if stretching up from the Sound and streets themselves) has kept the city in a hostile sepia. It is eminently bizarre to pass so many people with smoke masks in the middle of the day, and it was hard not to feel the psychic weight of so much dust — as if the ash that wreathed itself on every car and sidewalk was a weight on your scalp.

Today, though, it is somehow autumn.

It won’t be autumn forever — we’ve got, let’s say, fifteen more days of summer to sludge through — but today was autumn. The high was sixty-four degrees, there has been a constant and pleasant drizzle, and I can hear the faint of cars tattooing their tracks on the meager puddles outside my door. It is all in my head, but I can feel the rain and gale ushering the smoke to the coast; I can feel myself breathe a little easier.

1. A task should correspond with exactly one deliverable.
2. The task should be written not as if it’s going to be read for the next two weeks by your current team but three years from now by a completely different team who inherited your codebase (and your backlog.)
3. Be unreasonably rigorous about inundating the task with context. Links to the PR, links to the merged commit, paper trails of slack logs, transcripts of random conversations you had about it at lunch.

Hello!

I’m writing this from Lihue Airport, waiting to board my flight from Kaua’i to Seattle.

(I am not sure if it is Lihue Airport or Lihue International Airport; it is one of those things that I’ll have to check once I’m back in the ‘mainland’, as the airport calls it, back in my not-quite-air-conditioned apartment with my not-quite-mopped floors.)

I was talking with my manager during our weekly one-on-one and I brought up that I was having an off day.

It was one of those days where I just couldn’t get into a productive state; you don’t get a great night’s sleep, you wake up with twenty texts and emails to respond to, and your workout is bad, and then by the time you get into the office you’ve got another dozen emails but also a 9am meeting and a 10am meeting and by the time you’re done with those it’s practically lunch, so of course you eat lunch, and now it’s suddenly 1pm and you have nothing to show for the first half of the day.

His correct rejoinder was that of course you have something to show; that thing isn’t code, and it might not be any artifact at all, but it’s still good, you know? Meetings and conversations (or at least the right ones) add value; as you grow more and more senior in an organization, the time you spend coding is less valuable than the time you spend writing, and the abstractions you provide are at the social level rather than the technical one.

This has been the first quiet weekend in a while.

It has been very nice, but the thing with quiet weekends is that sometimes I do not know what to write about. I think about getting coffee with an old friend and what I would want to talk to them about, and I think it would be some combination of the following:

• I saw in concert last Sunday for the tenth anniversary of their first album, . It was a terrific show and they did all the things I love them for doing — the acoustic set, the heart-pounding closer, the sheer earnestness. I joke with a lot of friends about the ideal concert experience being to commit as little as possible, showing up right when the main act starts such as to limit the time commitment to a mere two hours — and this was a reminder that maybe I just don’t love enough music anymore.

I recently completed my ninety-day survey at Stripe, which was a surprise because wait, I’ve been there for ninety days?

So, here’s the thing. Being new in an organization is a superpower.

You are saddled with such little context and inertia and institutional memory that all mysteries are interesting and all questions are worth asking. The five lines of shell-script incantations look like forbidden magic rather than something rote and muscular; the brilliant data pipeline looks august, looks like a Roman aqueduct, rather than something saddled with years and years of minor tweaks and duct tape and prayers.

What are the obvious ways to make your life better?

1. I bought an electric bike, and this was my first week commuting with it. It was extremely rad; my commute got cut from 25 minutes to roughly nine. It cost, uh, a lot of money; I can do the whole rational value-of-my-time justification and say , and that’s totally fair. But I’m also comfortable with just, you know, buying the feeling of being consecrated by the wind every morning as I sail down Pike.

How do you explain on-call to a friend?

I mean, they are your friend — they are smart and kind and patient. When you fumble through the first inexact metaphor (well, it’s kind of like being a doctor, but all your patients are computers, and sometimes the computers get sick) they smile and nod. They ask completely reasonable questions (so, if your stuff goes down then the company is losing money?) to which sometimes the answers are simple and sometimes less so ().

We had someone new join the team.

This is always exciting.

He asked if there were any books he should read to get more information: about our stack, about our competititive landscape, about our history.

Naturally, because I am an earnest but unhelpful coworker, I suggested , because like everyone else in the world I downloaded the audiobook after Anthony Bourdain’s passing and fell in love with it.

August 2005: I am given the most precious device I have ever owned: a half-busted MP3 player. I think it had sixteen megabytes, which is a number that seems so preposterously low as I type it that I think I must be mistaken.

It carried as contents, amongst some other detritus which has been since scrubbed from my memory: some metal covers of video game songs, a couple jazz songs, some Modest Mouse, and — the lead single from The Decemberists’ debut album, .

They’re building a massive office building across the street from our office, and its construction has proved a source of endless distraction and fascination to me and my team. I have never really thought about the process of what it takes to create a building where there once was an abyss of space, and seeing the evolution of rivet and metallurgy and concrete into a rectangular gestalt is terrific. You catch a crane lifting a handful of beams out of the corner of your eye while you’re climbing down a stack trace, and suddenly you start thinking about the sheer logistics that makes it all possible — the right number of materials, the right timing, the universe of decisions and optimizations.

(And, of course, seeing the sheer dexterity of folks bouncing around on what will one day be the eleventh floor puts the danger of ssh-ing into a production box into perspective.)

My legs are tired as I write this! On a moment’s (well closer to ten moments’) notice I ran the somewhat unfortunately named Furry 5K with a friend. There were lots of dogs. It was excellent.

Beyond that, I had been looking forward to this morning for a while. I look forward to every Sunday morning, but this one in particular was going to be well-earned.

After a busy week in a long list of busy weeks, Sunday mornings are a slow dip in a cool stream. I sleep in a little, make some coffee, blast , putter around in a very octogenarian milieu while I clean the apartment, finish up some reading, and plan out the week ahead. It is a quiet and lovely ritual that I talk and think about a lot.

You’ve probably heard this anecdote before, right?:

A very large government bid, approaching a million dollars, was on the table. The IBM Corporation—no, Thomas J. Watson Sr.—needed every deal. Unfortunately, the salesman failed. IBM lost the bid. That day, the sales rep showed up at Mr. Watson’s office. He sat down and rested an envelope with his resignation on the CEO’s desk. Without looking, Mr. Watson knew what it was. He was expecting it.

If we have spent an extended amount of time together, we have probably talked about Murakami. (Sorry.) And if we have talked about Murakami, and you haven’t read Murakami, I have probably recommended that you start off with Kino, one of his short stories.

Kino is one of my favorite pieces of Murakami’s work, but that’s almost beside the point. More important than its quality is its metonymy — it is rare, I think, for a single short story to encapsulate an author’s entire oeuvre, but Kino does so admirably, single-handedly winning Murakami bingo.

What does your best morning look like?

I ask because I have been thinking a lot lately about morning routines!

This is the first week that I’ve spent affectionately referring to as the duffel bag lifestyle — which is to say that at five every morning I chug a thing of pre-workout, fill up a duffel bag with what I need for the day, and head out to the gym, not to return for another fourteen hours or so.

Here is an essay I liked a lot:

I’m going to be honest: I’ve had a hell of a time getting my head around React. More than any other technology I’ve touched over the last 10 years of my career, I just haven’t had it click for me. It’s very frustrating as I really want to learn it, and it’s clear the library has legs.

I am so happy to be back in Seattle, where it is filled with warmth and sunlight and dogs who are experiencing the world as if for the first time. I know that by no reasonable definition can we consider it the first day of summer, and yet — it feels unshakeable that today is it, today is the longest and brightest day of many long and bright days to come.

Cars, apartments, coffeeshops: everyone has their windows open.

Here are some idle things I learned in San Francisco:

I’m in Seattle for another twelve hours — back in town briefly for a friend’s bachelor/bachelorette party — before heading back to San Francisco.

It is comfortable and warm here. Spending a brief day in Capitol Hill reminds me of all the things I miss when I’m away: the coffee-shop whose mid-day rhythm I can feel in my bones, the perfect spots in Cal Anderson where you can sit in the sun and the wind, the snugness of a city whose familiarity has worn grooves into your feet.

(My brain is still scattered, and so this newsletter will be a little scattered too!)

If you’ll excuse an allusion I should have outgrown by now: I feel a little like Matilda at the end of the book, no longer telekinetic but happier for it.

Here’s what you do:

First, go for a bike ride.

It does not much matter where you go on the bike ride; you can take the Embarcadero if you want, going from AT&T Park up past the Fisherman’s Wharf, especially if it’s a sunny day and you can squint away the legions of tourists. (You shouldn’t begrudge them — you’re one of them, after all.)

But you don’t need to take any route in particular. The goal is to end up somewhere vaguely alien and distant — to disassociate yourself from the entire process of geospatial reasoning, to lazily drift from neighborhood to neighborhood until, with a certain alacrity you realize you are kinda lost.

I’m writing today’s note on a flight to San Francisco, where I’ll spend the next three weeks onboarding at Stripe as an engineer on the Sigma team.

I am tremendously excited.

This is my first time writing about the new job (granted, that’s omitting the myriad “omg omg omg” texts to friends and family) and it feels kind of weird to do so!

I think my hesitation is both that the brand of Medium post has grown helplessly cliché and that there’s a severe lack of novelty in my situation in particular:

Due to a great amount of luck and literally no amount of foresight or knowledge, I won a bunch of March Madness brackets this year, netting almost a thousand bucks.

This surprised nobody more than it surprised me, for two reasons:

I’ve been bingeing old episodes of Conversations with Tyler and he had a quote that’s stuck with me all week (emphasis mine):

COLLISON: Right, right. I think many of us are here so we can ask the question, “How do you read so much?”

If life in your mid-twenties is an accumulation and nurturing of a bouquet of simple pleasures, I have added a new flower — dockless bikeshare.

Hm, that’s an awful metaphor.

Let me try that again: there is a panoply of moments when I am reminded of how fortunate I am, to be young and free and unplagued by worries (worries of money, worries of health, worries of chaos). Most of those moments are routine: a quiet Sunday morning spent listening to , happy hour with friends, whenever I’m .

I wrote a few months back about the Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair, and this week was its sister event: the aptly titled Huge Book Sale thrown by the Friends of the Seattle Public Library.

There’s something so pleasantly aspirational about buying books, isn’t there? Buying anything is at least a little performative: you’re not just buying a blazer, you’re buying the future in which you’re the kind of person who wears a blazer more than once a year. You’re not just buying , you’re buying the self-deception that you have enough time and energy to pour into a forty-hour video game like you did when you were young. You’re not just buying a collection of Umberto Eco essays: you’re buying the idea that you can be the kind of person who reads them, and is thus enriched.

I got back into Seattle both mid-day and mid-week, which almost seems unfair. My ideal time to arrive back from the airport is around 8pm: enough time to unpack, sort through mail, and begin the quiet process of converting back into one’s un-vacationed self while not really feeling obliged to do anything at all.

But arriving at noon? You are at war with Maslow: you’re hungry, you’re a little bit sleepy, your circadian rhythm is out of whack, and you probably have a long to-do list for which you are not nearly equipped with adequate energy.

So you dive into cold brew, like I do; so you leave a stack (or, more aptly, a pile) of East Coast clothes in the corner of your bedroom, having not the requisite energy to move it the extra three feet into the hamper. You’re still out of rhythm, but in an annoying way rather than a fun way.

(I’m in DC for the first part of the week to catch Heat/Wizards with the entire family on Tuesday. Now that I’m at the point in my life where cross-country flights seem akin to something like self-flagellation, I decided to extend the trip a little longer than a day.)

Is there anything more simultaneously mundane and surreal than deplaning at midnight? Everything and everyone is awash in a dim flourescent hue; stalls, restaurants, and gates are cordoned off in gray chains; if music is playing, which it rarely is, it is too quiet and faintly otherworldly. But most of all, the sensation of being in the airport after midnight is identical to the sensation of being in the stage of sleep where you can’t quite tell if its a dream or a nightmare — you know you’d rather be somewhere else.

I wrote a small post about the imagined need for “enthusiam” in the tech industry. After publishing it, someone alerted me to the phrase “missionary vs. mercenary” (as in, an employee who would proselytize the organization’s cause vs. someone who’s just in it for the paycheck). That’s certainly a poetic dichotomy — and props to the recruiter who came up with it! — but, uh, yikes. (I guess you’re working for alms, in this metaphor?)

Here’s a genre of tweet I think about a lot:

1. It snowed today.
2. It was for a couple minutes, max: I looked at the window and it was a regular Seattle window, overcast, a couple folks in Patagonias walking by unamused, and then turned back a moment later and suddenly there was everything coming down, blurry enough that I couldn’t tell if maybe it was sleet or snow or rain or something a little less magical.
3. It snowed on a Sunday night , too. It was during the Super Bowl (a harsher Super Bowl) then, and we left early because it was obvious the Falcons were going to win and we wanted to beat the traffic, and then of course you get surprised in the worst way.

I’m writing this from the first coffeeshop I ever worked at in Seattle, the Uptown Espresso on 4th and Wall.

It has, mercifully, not changed at all. The carpets are still putt-putt green; the tables are all scratched and ancient; I even still recognize a couple of the regulars from a few years ago (bearded man with a weather-worn fantasy novel; another bearded man playing CounterStrike in the corner.)

The coffee isn’t perfect, and the music isn’t perfect, but everything is pretty good. They got rid of some of the lamps and redid the chalkboard mural. Small changes, in the scheme of things.

This has been a week without through lines:

One of my favorite things about the time I spent at Amazon was its COE process.

COE stands for : its a document your team fills out whenever you cause a .