Jason Becker
March 17, 2024

All I can think about watching John’s windowing is how powerful spaces are and how it drives me nuts that people don’t use them more.

Also, please bring back spatial spaces. I’m glad to not be stuck with 2x2 grids, but I loved 3x3.

Quick breakfast while waiting for my haircut.

A white plate with a yellow edge. On it is a bed of greens and bacon, above which is a slice of toast with avocado and additional greens, topped with an egg sprinkled with paprika and hot sauce. The table is marble, and there’s a glass on the top right with a nitro coffee with foam on top.

This post on how Phoenix is not your app really resonates with me. In fact, something that drives me nuts is when I see logic leak into a LiveView. That said, moving code and accessing our own code is so easy, it’s not tough to refactor.

I’ve been increasingly turning to Firefox over Safari. I like it a lot more than Chrome so far.

March 16, 2024

Gracie is still with us, though her decline continues. Multiple times I’ve thought, “If this is not one day, but two days like this in a row, it’s time.” Holding the power to decide when life ends and death begins for someone you love who cannot express themselves is challenging. We are playing a mix between dog nurse, dog psychologist, and dog priest. This kind of extended end time takes its toll– I don’t sleep well because every movement she makes at night means she could be getting ready to vomit or need to go for a walk to avoid an accident. That’s not literally true six of seven nights a week, but it only takes one night to set my nervous system on high alert.

She has had quality visits from my sister and my parents. We brought Elsa’s mom home a bit early– she’s arriving today– so that she can have quality time with her as well. When we made that decision, I was certain Monday or Tuesday would be the day, but now I’m less sure.

The big news is that Allovue was acquired by PowerSchool in January. This marks a transition after almost exactly ten years working on the same project with the same people. In a lot of ways, the work isn’t different– we’re aligned on mission and vision, especially in the near-ish term, and I’m working with the same team. But in other ways, everything is different. I’m going from being a clear leader at small company where every bit of history and every decision was one I witnessed or partook in to being a middle manager in a very large company. I remain optimistic and I am continuing to adjust. Being in management in general is kind of tough here, because I’m trying to help people navigate the change while going through it myself.

I have continued to deepen my Elixir knowledge, bit by bit, and it remains a language that makes me feel happy. The speed with which I can move from idea to prototype is great. It’s easy to look at complex code and consider how to pull it a part and make it better (almost too easy to spend all of my time tweaking and refactoring). It’s a pleasure to read. You can write garbage just like any other language, but the underlying elegance and expressiveness is impressive. You can go very far only understanding basic data structures and using Ecto. That’s the way I think it should be – for me, programming has always been about shuffling data around and Elixir jives with that, so it jives with me.

I’ve been sitting on a partial redesign of this site for quite some time. I became so annoyed with myself for having not completed it that I went ahead and applied the new (darker) color scheme a couple of months ago just to feel like I made some progress. Maybe it’ll actually roll out in 2024.

One thing that’s changed definitively is I now use Nova for almost all of my non-R code. I was much more heavily using neovim before, and I still do whenever I’m already in terminal land. I’ve just found it really hard to get things working how I like in neovim for a few key features. Nova’s vim binding support is terrible, and I still find that very frustrating, but the rest of the app sits much better with me than VS Code has, even if I’m missing out on the extension library.

We’ve got some upcoming trips to Chicago, Providence, and Nashville I’m looking forward to. The plan is still to go to London in July, although it appears we’ve chosen the absolute peak of the peak of travel season so I’m starting to second guess myself on that one.

Lately, I’ve had a hard time with consistency. My diet has been inconsistent. Getting to the gym and volleyball has been inconsistent. Reading has been inconsistent. Writing on my blog has been inconsistent. I’m hoping I can start to find some kind of groove again in the next few months.

March 12, 2024

Natalie Wynn pointing out how incels say they want a return to traditional roles, but actually wish to be the “beloved” rather than the “lover”— to feel desired, in a way that is often ascribed and allowable to the feminine— is a banger real late in her newest video.

Not a new observation, but damn, The Stranger is a hell of an album.

March 10, 2024

Holy shit, I’m watching the latest video from Natalie Wynn finally and she literally has footage walking to my local Royal Farms. So weird to be like, “Wait, is that… is that the Keswick Royal Farms?”

“I was surprised that they pretty much all agreed on a definition that romance was for good girls, and erotica is for sluts. Pornography, of course, is for men.”

– Natalie Wynn on the definition of romance v. erotica

I’ve mentioned the rotating home screen images as a killer iOS feature, but I think I’ve undersold Focus Modes.

Aggressively automating the quieting of my phone has eliminated pretty much any negative feeling I have toward phones.

March 9, 2024
March 8, 2024

Something is really fucked with my blog. Missing pages, a major post flipped to draft then republished… I’ll have to poke more when I properly wake up.

March 7, 2024

A couple of days ago marked ten years since I met Jess at SXSWEdu.

She wrote this reflection on LinkedIn. My own reflect is below that.

10 years ago today I tapped Jason Becker on the shoulder at a conference between taco breaks and the rest, as they say, is history.

Casual observers think Jason and I agree on everything. This has become a running inside joke because the truth is that we have frequent, vehement disagreements in the same direction. We argue intensely with-and-not-against each other about problems and solutions. If we’re accused of sharing a brain, we must each have complementary halves because we often approach problems from polar opposite perspectives– but we know two heads (and at least one whole brain, on a good day) are better than one. And because we trust that the other has thought deeply about their perspective, we work hard to understand each other’s position. Together, we end up with a more complete understanding of a problem and get aligned on a path forward.

For two people who love numbers, we never keep score; we’re playing an infinite game.

If you love your work, I hope you’re lucky enough to find someone (not Jason, sorry, find your own co-conspirator) who puts up a good fight; this kind of creative tension is how good ideas become great and bad ideas end up in their rightful place in the discard pile.

Jason, thank you for being my best sparring partner and the one who showed me the value of a great editor and co-creator. You’re the five to my three. I’m glad I tricked you into working for Allovue all those years ago.

🥂 Cheers to making things together, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

(These are the only two occasions Jason has worn a tie in the past 10 years– April 2014 and December 2023. Yes, Jason’s first official day of work ended up in a cannabis grow facility. We might make a guest appearance in a documentary about it. It’s been a JOURNEY, ok?)

My thoughts:

Spending ten years pursuing the same vision at the same company takes passion, determination, and belief. I have only been able to have all three because something more precious came along with it– partnership and friendship that always challenges me and that refuses to accept the bar I set for myself.

The first time Jess Gartner and I met, we spoke for about five minutes. I remember telling Elsa I just met someone with a great idea. And this may be apocryphal, but I remember also telling Elsa it was a great example of why I was never an entrepreneur myself. For all my love of strategy and problem solving, I never seemed to think of an idea that was worth doing. I know for sure I thought, “She found something worth doing.”

The second time Jess and I met, she flew to Providence to have coffee with me. In a classic Jess Gartner move, she claimed she had to “be there anyway” (bullshit). She told me that day that she saw “C-level potential in me” before I knew what that meant.

So much of my own success of the last ten years comes from Jess seeing things in me I didn’t know were options. And then she makes them happen before I even catch on to her plans. I like to think I do a bit of the same when it comes to ensuring our company and product deliver on her, and now our, vision.

Thank you.

March 6, 2024
March 4, 2024

Film was seen. Short thoughts: with all the Dune we now have, I could watch 10 more hours of Dune easily.

First half was better as a stand alone, but the two parts make a brilliant whole.

The best thing ever happened today. A very good volleyball player on my team recommended they all just “walk off the court” because I found my serve for a bit and briefly became unstoppable.

As I transition to stricter separation between business and personal, is there a good modern KVM? I would like to easily swap between my Mac Mini and MacBook Pro. I’m using a Studio Display and pretty much all USB-C. I realize the answer may be, “USB-C dock, and plug and unplug”.

A compassionate vet who genuinely cares and is on your loved one’s side is worth the world.

March 3, 2024

Life has gotten too busy to have much “fun” computer time. Even when I want to have fun on a computer, I find that the “fun” I want to do is deep, concentrated work on my day job that I don’t get to do during the normal working day. Sometimes, that’s how it goes.

The answer to “how different is Micro.blog versus Hugo?” is almost nothing. The major exceptions are custom front matter and post types. Otherwise, Micro.blog themes are “just” Hugo, plus adding some important data to your head so that you can use indieauth and micropub etc.

It’s probably just my Long Island showing, but Billy Joel has got to have one of the all time great rock voices and we don’t talk about that enough.

March 2, 2024

Describing something as “slow, sad sci-fi” absolutely guarantees I will watch it. I stopped reading after the title.

  • I write the things I feel like writing
  • in a place that feels easy to write
  • with posts available in places that make it as easy for others to read my posts as I want it to be to write them
  • and create a website experience that reflects who I am, which I’d like if it was someone else’s.

That’s what I think personal blogging should be like.