Meta note: I really didn’t think through this post naming schema to support these split weeks. Big thank you to Jeremy for being my second participant in this project.

Dear Jason,

Yes, it’s definitely hard to do anything outside during winter. To be fair, though, winter here in the southern half of the state isn’t all that bad. Two or three big snows per winter, most days around forty degrees. (I recall winter being more severe in my childhood but those kinds of memories aren’t always reliable.) The thing that really keeps me inside is the lack of light. My job has the traditional 8-5 working hours so by the time I’m done with work, I’m tired and it’s dark and I have a hard time doing anything except sitting on the couch.

As for the garden, this will actually be the first year we will attempt to grow any significant amount of food. The past few years have been focused on native plants and plants that attract pollinators. Orange butterfly weed is, of course, the star of the show; it’s a favorite among people here who grow native pollinator plants. My favorite, though, is hairy woodmint (blephilia hirsuta). It’s not the prettiest plant—when it blooms the flowers are tiny. The flowers, though, grow in a pagoda-shaped cluster, the leaves are beautifully minty, and the bees just love them.

It’s not often that I talk to someone who knows what GASB is! It’s like finding someone who understands your secret language. There is a lot of crossover between IT and accounting now, isn’t there? Especially when you get either to a certain scale (and can’t use QuickBooks) or in a specialized field. I work at a university foundation so our organization hasn’t been able to use much off-the-shelf software. For example, we’re (yet again) building our own endowment management software because none of the readily available software does what we need—and we don’t want to manage a large endowment on spreadsheets!

In fact, this new accounting standard implementation (which is a separate issue from building a new endowment management system) is going to require us to acquire some lease management software for the future. So many systems to maintain. It feels like it never ends.

I’m glad you’re enjoying volleyball so much! I imagine it would be good for a person in a variety of ways. Like most people, the only time I ever see volleyball is during the Olympics. I can see how its systems could be described as elegant like dancing. Even to someone who knows very little about the game, the coordination is clearly visible.

And it’s impressive how much variety your city’s rec league has. I live in a small town and we have nothing remotely like that. Your leagues are clearly an advantage of urban density.

Sincerely,
Jeremy

Jeremy,

I think we may have different definitions of “all that bad”– I don’t want to spend much time outside in forty degrees. We do agree on lack of light. My time in Mexico City this winter was not marked mostly by far milder temperatures, but instead was notable because of the far later sunset moving southward.

I love natural gardens. I really hope we can move away from rows and rows of Kentucky bluegrass. I think it’s kind of incredible how some mix of capitalism, conformity, and culture has taught us that the natural and native is ugly meant to be tamed at best and eradicated at worst. The project you’re undertaking reminds me of this excellent recent win in Maryland for native lawns.

I’m surprised there’s no market for purpose-built endowment software. The market, by definition, has resources, and it’s the kind of problem software can be great at. You’re giving me business ideas. Working with financial accounting is quite complicated for software engineering though. The standards and practices and (somewhat) common data structures from a distance can lull the engineering mind to believing that you can simply follow basic standards and principles and arrive at a universal solution. In reality, accounting data has fractal complexity, with each organization being able to adopt and adapt from one common shape into something completely unique. Every person I work with has found a different way to reflect their unique organizational structure, needs, and practices. It’s almost shocking how much customization and flexibility is required, and anyone who digs in can easily see why ERPs are huge, slowly changing, and incredibly costly to change involving heavy customization and training.

I am a true ambivert– I treasure and require solitude. I am very comfortable alone; I also love being alone in public. I like to sit at a bar reading a book. I like sitting in a coffeeshop to get my work done. And I do get a lot of energy from interacting with the right kind of crowd and love taking a stage to talk about something I’m passionate about. I say all this to emphasize what is so great about having a recreational league structure in Baltimore and why cities are so important to me. The best part about returning to playing a sport is that while I’m playing, I can truly shut my brain off to everything else. It’s impossible to stress about work or family or anything– there’s just what’s happening in the now. I am fully engaged in the moment, and in some ways, largely in my own head. And yet, what’s great about recreational sports and teams is I’m also with people building relationships. I get social interactions and familiarity and camaraderie from working together toward a goal free from obligation and true stress. I think it’s incredibly healthy for anybody, but especially for my particular blend of social wants and needs. It’s a form of community, which I feel is harder and harder to locate these days.

I’m looking forward to seeing spring garden pictures this year.

Jason

Call me a neoliberal all you want, but the federal dollars we’re trying to pump into clean energy and industrial policy in general should be pay for performance and not highly regulated via procedures and reports.

I don’t want 10 year guarantees of not expanding in China; I want factories actually open and producing in the US.

We need to build transmission lines, solar and wind farms, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and public transit now. Plans are worthless without execution. We need to build, and we need to build so often that we get good at it and it gets cheaper and easier and more predictable how we do this work.

My grandmother sometimes wrote daily travelogues when on vacation. This morning, my mother scanned and sent one from a trip to Israel in December of 2000 when my Uncle Erwin passed away and his estate needed to be taken care of.

I teared up when she wrote,

For me, it was very difficult to say “shalom’ to my cousins Ahuda and Arelka - Inwardly, I feared never seeing them again, especially Ahuda - who has not been well for a very long time.

In June 2008 my sister, my grandmother, and I went to Balfouria together, and she was able to see her cousins again. It was the last major trip my grandmother took anywhere. I’m glad it was to see her family in her once home.

My nephew is 5. Im 33F. A few months ago he asked me, “Auntie Franny, are you a grown-up?” I got really quiet, cautiously looked around, put my finger to my mouth and told him, “I’m still a kid, but you can’t tell anyone because no one knows."

His eyes got huge and he loudly whispered, “I KNEWIT!!!"

Now every time I see him, he comes up to me at some point and whispers, “Don’t worry, I haven’t told them.” Then proceeds to ask more question about my life as a secret kid.

And every time I’m video chatting with him and my sister, he sneaks an obvious wink, and I wink back, and only we know what that wink means. And to this day, he is the only person that knows I’m still a kid and that I’ve been faking it all this time.

Source

Bare with me. This should probably be in DayOne instead of on my blog because:

1. No one cares.
2. It’s probably too vague for all but a narrow slice of people dealing with these problems and getting more specific will reveal what I consider to be trade secrets.

Anyway…

Excel and custom solutions are always hard to unseat because the world is inherently difficult to model like we want to in formal software. I have spent weeks thinking about the difference between what is spent at a school and what collection of plans we consider that school’s budget. What about resources that a department budgets on behalf of a school that needs to be seen by that school’s leader and comes out of their allocate resources?

There are many non-overlapping circles of abstractions and scopes and responsibilities. We have a really solid compromise in our current model, but as we construct and even more powerful school budgeting system, I’m trying to do an even better job.

There are so many things that are casually referred to as a “budget” with no other phrasing– not even overly technical jargon– associated with it. The entire field of planning and accounting really falls down with distributed decision making. The only options out there are hierarchical organization/business unit structures with full control of whatever is in that scope or requests for marginal changes.

The result is carefully crafted Excel files that separate out the planning process in ways that are very difficult to express in rules, with lots of overriding, and lots of pain stitching it back together and pulling it apart again for different audiences.

What’s most frustrating is Allovue has solved this problem, well, multiple times. But each time we expand what we do, I come back to it and try and think of yet another set of edge cases we can pull in and handle more elegantly while hiding even more of the complexity from our users. The work that goes into making something that feels completely natural and like the only possible way to do things while covering so many possible conditions is frighteningly complex. Sometimes I spend weeks or even months writing and rewriting the same set of conditions and examples and toying with them until I can see how things must work. And then I spend weeks, sometimes months, and sometimes years helping my team make that happen and helping them see just precisely why each part is necessary and the whole is beautiful.

Is this work product management? Is it software architecture? Is it design? I don’t know, but it’s at once the hardest and most rewarding thing I get to do. I’m just fully in the “hardest” part of that curve right now.

Dear Jason,

It’s interesting how we can both have the same goal, i.e., the preservation of the natural world, and such different paths to get there. (A point, as you say, that we’d do well to remember with human relationships also!) It would seem that in our visions of the future, you would have a healthy planet with pockets of humanity minimizing their impact of the world around them while I would have humanity more diffused but integrated with their ecosystems. My preference is obvious but I can also see the sense in your vision. My real worry with your vision is that we would still not be living with the nonhuman world in a healthy relationship.

Turning to your new topic, the things I’m most looking forward to are getting back to our garden/backyard habitat and continuing woodworking. We have already started doing some work to expand the garden—by the time we’re done we’ll only have a few square feet of grass left. We’ll be growing a lot more vegetables this year and we’ll plant some Concord grapes. We’re also very excited about getting several bullfrog tadpoles to put into our tiny wildlife pond.

I’m glad things seem to be going well for you professionally. I’m also in the middle of a large project at work—in my case, the implementation of a big new accounting standard. Killing a party by discussing it is my new favorite hobby.

I’ve seen you talking about volleyball a few times on micro.blog. So is there a league in your town, or just some friends getting together? Did you play in school? It’s not the most prominent sport in America so I’m interested in how you got started. I’m not much of a sports person, though I do love watching professional cycling and the new season starts this weekend.

Sincerely,
Jeremy

Happy Saturday, Jeremy.

Do you find it difficult to put time into your garden and outdoor life in the winter? I have, at times, aspired to spending more time outdoors doing that kind of casual, physical, tactile work. I think one thing that’s always made that hard is winter. Indiana is not exactly known for a mild winter. I can imagine that it’s tough to “lose” that important time and hobby for a period this year. There truly is nothing like homegrown food, though. What have you had the most success with? When we’ve done growing projects in the past, peppers and herbs have always gone well. Cucumbers have gone too well– I’m not sure I’d even want to grow them again with the amount they produce at the crazy size you can get with too many to eat at once. I guess that’s why the world gave us pickles. Grapes seem intimidating, though I love the idea of vines growing over trellis surrounding an outdoor table, just to overly romanticize things.

Given that I work in school finance, we get hit in various ways when new GASB rules come out all the time. Luckily I"m just far enough away from the pure accounting side that our software doesn’t have to be modified each time, but there’s a world in the future where that may happen. Nothing is worse than sitting at a conference for two hours learning about new rules for depreciation. I might be the only person who doesn’t run at the party while you get into the minutia.

Volleyball– yes, this is actually quite important to me these days. Growing up I played baseball and basketball a ton until high school. Deteriorating eyesight made baseball quite difficult (my left eye has very poor vision, a story for another day). And basketball, well… I’m 5'8". I was 5'6" by fifth grade. I haven’t grown since middle school. I learned to play at center and power forward heights and never could keep up as I became quite short. I’m still fairly short for volleyball, but it’s the other sport with high energy and jumping and all that. A few girls I was friends with played volleyball in high school during the fall season, and since I didn’t have a spring sport without baseball, I decided to try out for men’s volleyball, which was a spring sport. I was never any good, and I had a difficult relationship with a lot of the kids on my team. Sometimes we were very close, and sometimes I felt very much rejected by them. But I loved the game. I loved playing. I even love watching. Played well, volleyball is beautiful. Everyone should be moving in a coordinated fashion at the same time based on what’s happening. There’s a system, but rather than feeling rigid, it is elegant like dancing. Given that it’s not a very popular sport, it just went away for me after high school.

A year or so ago, as part of an effort both to introduce more fun into my life and continue my investment in my own health, I sought out volleyball again. We have an adult recreational league in my city for a variety of sports. Basically adults pay to play in casual sports leagues around the city (there’s soccer, football, basketball, softball, volleyball, dodgeball, pickleball– you name it) and they use those fees to pay for athletic summer camps and after school programming for kids. I don’t really know the details other than volleyball being quite popular– at least four nights a week, there’s at least 8 teams of 6-9 players playing in leagues of various levels, and typically another 12 or so folks playing “pick up” disconnected to the leagues. And that’s just with this one sports league– there are others, especially in the summer when there’s outdoor park and beach volleyball, that are just as full. Volleyball feels downright popular.

So now I get to play 2-3 nights a week. I started off joining bunch of teams as a free agent since I didn’t know anybody. Now I only sign up on teams with folks I know from playing volleyball or I play pickup. Pickup tends to be twice as long, no rotations, and has a fairly regular crew of decent folks so it’s a bit more reliable. I’ve been having a blast, even if my body has made clear that I can’t keep playing volleyball for too many more years. I’m glad I picked it up again while I can still do it.

I would try out watching a game of indoor volleyball. Maybe watch a video on how “coverage” works (that elegant dance I was mentioning) so that you can get a little insight into how it is that everyone seems to be right where the ball ends up going. It’s a ton of fun.

Jason

Dear Jason,

Your description of Tulum was very interesting. It’s the first I’ve heard of it. And, yes, I can see what you mean by it being a contradiction. I like the idea of lifting people out of poverty; at the same time, it sounds like the usual corporate greenwashing.

I can imagine this sort of thing being the future of what you might call “conscious travel.” Where Walt Disney built a theme park in a swamp and then later brought in people from around the world to set up a pale imitation of their cultures at Epcot, developers will appeal to modern sensibilities by trying to pay lip service to local cultures and environmental sustainability in order to draw in the “conscious travelers.” Yet, as you say, it’s the same unsustainable model.

I completely agree with you that the lifestyle we have come to expect will destroy the relationship we have with a place. And I also suspect that climate change is something like the planet’s immune response to our lifestyle. At the same time, I would say that the problem is the modern lifestyle, not humans themselves. After all, humans evolved alongside the rest of life on earth; this is our home every bit as much as it is for any other creature. The problem is the cluster of ideas and practices that have been developing in Europe and America for the last few hundred years. That is where you’ll find the true contradiction that is echoed in Tulum: economic prosperity that destroys the material basis of life.

And here I sit typing these words on an iPad. I also embody the contradiction! To quote the Apostle Paul, “O wretched man that I am; who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”

But I do not think we should resign ourselves to continuing in the same way while attempting to mitigate the destruction our lifestyles have caused. I do not think human flourishing requires the destruction. Depending, of course, on what you mean by flourishing. Most pre-modern human societies lived in far less destructive ways than we do. Of course, their lives were much harder—which is why I don’t advocate for living in exactly the same way as our predecessors did. There has to be some way of third way of renouncing the poisonous cluster of ideas and practices that have landed us here while also not rolling back the clock according to some simplistic primitivism. Something new. Some way of living in relationship with the non-human world.

One of the core ideas we must renounce is control over the world. That idea has led to our present situation of world-altering power lying in the hands of a relatively few people. There is simply too much power up for grabs (and when I say “up for grabs” I mean among the elite—we will never gain that power) and those incredibly high stakes has led to the total obsession over politics. Every election season we are told by politicians that it is the most important of our lifetimes—and there is a sense in which that is true! That much power should not be available because it appears that we are not suited to it. It’s not a matter of finally getting the right person in control. Like Gandalf when offered the ring, we must recognize that, however much we hope we would use such power for good, that level of power must be renounced.

This is why I have increasingly moved toward a more anarchist politics. I have lost faith in the ability of humans (particularly a handful of wealthy humans!) to solve global problems on a global scale. And I will certainly grant you that in the present circumstances I do not really trust local people to make good decisions either. There are too many warped incentives. These warped incentives, however, are the result of our poisonous system. Free people from that, give them local knowledge, and maybe love and care can flourish, thus breaking the tyranny of small decisions.

I will admit that my politics are utopian. I also believe that utopian politics can be actually useful when the system we were told represented the end of history is crumbling around us and all “realistic” options seem to be more of the same.

As for strengthening relationships with the nonhuman world, I think hiking is an excellent way to start! It’s where I started. My one piece of hiking advice is to refuse to see it as exercise. Shut off trackers and timers. And whether you are hiking or simply taking a daily walk, find places that appeal to you, where you can stop and rest and listen and observe. Learn to identify trees and flowers. Getting the identification right is actually secondary; the real goal is careful attention to the plants.

Attention is key. In order to integrate nonhuman beings into our world, we must stop seeing them as set decorations in the human drama. Simone Weil called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” The beginning of any reciprocal relationship with the nonhuman world begins with generous attention.

Sincerely,

Jeremy

Hi Jeremy,

Well, I’m back at ~40,000 feet so it seemed like a great time to write this letter. Busy week again, this time hopping over to LA for a conference for a day and a half before heading back home to Baltimore.

There has to be some way of third way of renouncing the poisonous cluster of ideas and practices that have landed us here while also not rolling back the clock according to some simplistic primitivism. Something new. Some way of living in relationship with the non-human world.

I think where I am at in my own evolution is believing precisely in this third way. But in my mind, this third way is already here. It’s not primitive, but it is a return, certainly compared to how American cities were developed. I’d like to see us abandon the false pastoral sheen of the suburbs and sprawling human habitation and move into human-scaled urban cities. I think to return to nature we have to separate from it. Less land use that’s far more efficient. We need to create places for human flourishing and interaction. I think we’ve spent so much time separating from each other physically so that we can collide with nature all over. Instead, I think we need to collide with each other a lot more and nature a lot less.

Maybe this where my politics are utopian as well, but from a different direction.

I think what’s interesting about your descriptions of how to interact with nature and how it informs your “treehugger” identity is that each time I read it, I think about how it can and should apply to our human relationships as well. Take generous attention, a phase I love and will now forever cherish. How often do we practice generous attention with each other? These letters are, in some ways, about generous attention.

Let’s turn to a different topic. It’s still kind of the start of the year. And while I haven’t thought of a theme or anything yet, I have been thinking about what I’m looking forward to and what I’m hoping for.

At work, my team has been growing and we’re pursuing some work that I’ve been looking forward to for years that I think has the potential to make a step change in our business. It’s difficult and sometimes slow going, but it almost feels like a senior thesis in that it combines everything we’ve learned and worked towards for a decade.

At home, I’m looking forward to continuing to regularly play volleyball, which I started to do again about a year ago now after a 17 year hiatus. I’m also hoping to finish off some last home projects, including a deep clean out of my office and our pantry. And of course, I’m looking forward to this project, Letters, which has now filled up for the year.

Until next week (which is already almost upon us), Jason

It’s funny how priorities impact costs. I care about good sound. So even at 20, I scoured Craigslist for good speakers and found a pair of Paradigm floor speakers for $100. I’ve always had a solid surround sound setup, built and upgraded one open box or Craigslist piece at a time. My setup has barely changed in years, and while I eye various upgrades from time to time, nothing was purchased full price, I never bought things all at once, and I have had awesome sound for over a decade in three different homes.

Elsa and I have a full assortment of All Clad and Le Creuset pots. We used to buy one piece at a time at an outlet, or when there was a major sale with coupon stacking. Or sometimes buy seconds and we still can’t tell what was wrong with them. We did this from the time we were 23. Within a few years, we had an aspiration-level kitchen setup. We’ve owned most of these pots and pans for a decade or more now and will have them for life.

Not everyone can afford these things, but we decided early on to wait, watch, and buy once. I’ve watched so many people buy junk thinking it’s all they can afford, and I know over the same time I’ve spent less and have had better products.

Dear Jason,

It was interesting to read about your history online and a little more about the motivations for this project. I sincerely hope this project leads you to the interactions you are looking for. With that, let’s move in the direction you’re wanting to go. You’ve asked some excellent questions!

So, treehugger. First we must digress into the terminological. “Tree hugger” is, of course, a word used for environmentalists, but I wouldn’t call myself an environmentalist per se. I think of myself as something like an animist. An animist is, in the well-received words of Graham Harvey, someone who recognizes “that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others.”

Environmentalism, to me, feels more purely political. Another variety of activist. And I love activists! I have been one at points in my life. But when I think about what forms my actions from day to day, the belief crystallized in Harvey’s definition is far deeper and central than any particular political identity. To live in an ongoing relationship with the Cosmos around and within me is my goal, however imperfectly realized.

Notice that this situates me in a web of relationships. This brings up another uneasiness I have with the term “environmentalist” (and I picked this up from an animist writer named Gordon White). The “environment” is something which surrounds you and from which—crucially—you are separated. It is out there. And the thing out there must be preserved. But for the animist, there is no out there as opposed to in here. Everything is connected in a living relationship and any damage done to one is done to all and to one’s self. To be clear, I’m not saying that environmentalists would disagree with this; I’m only pointing out a weakness in the term.

At this point I think it would be useful to answer your question about how I arrived here, because the answer will lead me to your other questions. The short answer is Wendell Berry twenty years ago and Richard Power’s The Overstory three years ago.

If you’re not familiar with him, Wendell Berry is a farmer and writer from Kentucky. He has been immensely influential over the last half-century—his writing is a thread woven throughout the ecological movement, farm to table cuisine, technological criticism, regenerative agriculture and more. When I encountered his writing, I was a young libertarian who believed that capitalism was a liberating force that may cause pain in the short term but would, in the end, be an engine of human flourishing. Berry dissolved that illusion and replaced it with something much more humane. One of his key ideas is “local knowledge”, but more on that in a moment.

Berry has been a figure that has been central to my life at times and at other times he has moved to the periphery. By the time I picked up The Overstory, Berry was on the periphery for me. By the time I finished reading The Overstory, he started moving back to the center. I’ve said before—and I don’t know how much I mean this literally and how much metaphorically—that the trees called to me through Richard Powers’ novel. I got back out into the woods and started paying attention to that web of relationships again. The web of relationships, moreover, in the woods near my house and, eventually, my own backyard.

And here we arrive back at local knowledge. In Berry’s way of thinking (and also according to indigenous people, though I’m far less familiar with them), we must act in accordance with local conditions. One of the main reasons we are in the mess we are in is that we have imposed our wills on the land upon which we live, rather than learning from it how we ought to live. And, crucially, the land asks different things from its humans in different places.

So my response to your point about urban versus suburban and the various fractures in the environmental movement is, therefore, that the land of Manhattan Island asks different things of its people than that of Lawrence County, Indiana. I cannot say what ought to be done in other places. The responsibility for those places falls on those places’ biotic communities. This is, importantly, not a dodge but a fact of life.

So how do we all become treehuggers? Again, Wendell Berry tells us: we do not set out to save the world—that is a task beyond the scale of our competence. We learn from our land and work within our web of relationships. When we do that, we become part of a community based on mutual love.

Sincerely,

Jeremy

Hello there Jeremy,

At first, I was delayed in responding because I wanted to try and spend a little time with the thinkers you’ve introduced me to in this letter. Then I was delayed because the week just got away from me, so I didn’t have time for that. This was our last week in Mexico after a two and a half month sojourn there, and in fact, I’m writing this response from somewhere over Georgia on my way home.

For the last week, I’ve been in Tulum. It’s a contradiction. It’s very white, and very wealthy when you’re an American tourists. But it’s also very much not white, and has incredible poverty and inequality if you go slightly off the beaten path. Those who are looking to sell foreigners on their new playground will insist on certain ideas– this is a place that is still very much a part of the jungle. We have large ecological zones and restricted areas for building. Our architecture and many decisions, down to the winding roads and the decor, are about listening to this lands that we’ve been stewards of for so long. You can almost see, if you squint real hard, a kind of idea of respect for the indigenous people and culture of the Yucatan.

At the same time, you’ll see the concrete that creates so much carbon. You’ll notice the stacks of diesel generators along the eco-friendly beach hotels and restaurants. You’ll notice the incredibly car-oriented infrastructure that makes no sense.

Don’t get me wrong, I like spending a short time in Tulum. I appreciate how much it caters toward the upper and upper middle class foreigner and brings me comforts with just the right tinge of exoticism. In many ways, the architecture and landscape avoid the Shoppy Shop and Blands of the single global culture. There’s honestly still something distinct about Tulum, which is more than I can say for most places I’ve visited. In reality, Tulum, like much of the “Riviera Maya” is an economic project catering to foreigners to lift people out of poverty. It’s a playground in a jungle that has been occupied for a long time. It is a place that is very much alive, quite unique, filled with traditional foods and languages that is developing in ways that very much are not listening to the land.

I admit though, while I find this kind of animism appealing, my consequentialist insides bristle a little. What do I think all the land is telling us? Go away. Our world, the population and life styles we expect, are not consistent with any place. There’s an element of the push for density, urbanism, and my environmentalist politics which is all about a simple fact: human lives of health, flourishing, and dignity are inherently destructive, and the best harmony we can achieve requires collective action to minimize that destruction. I’m not quite ready to leave Lawrence County to Lawrence County. Not because I don’t believe in local knowledge (hell it’s the one Hayekian idea that as a former bureaucrat I cannot escape thinking about), but because I believe in global challenges. We’re often at risk of the tyranny of small decisions – a series of seemingly correct small decisions made locally add up to a horrible end result. Each person may be rationale for making the decision to drive a large crossover or SUV, but the total impact on emissions and pedestrian safety is massively negative.

I think there’s a lot of wisdom and personal peace to be found in considering your local surrounds and truly listening. And I think that offering genuine respect to the life and geography around us is critical. My partner, Elsa, finds it hilarious how even when visiting major cities like Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Mexico City, the pictures I take the most are of trees that I like.

But I’m worried. I worry a lot about the small decisions. I worry a lot about failing to understand how independence of individuals and decentralization fails to consider the cumulative effects. I worry about big problems created across generations and borders creeping up on us without having good responses.

I never feel more at peace than when I recognize the environment is not “out there”, but it’s also so disturbing when I assess the health of “in here”.

What do you do to strengthen your web of relationships to the persons of the world, human and otherwise? This project is a way I’m trying to strengthen my relationship to the human persons out there today, and maybe long into the future. While I do take daily walks, often through local parks, and sometimes go on hikes on weekends, I’m not sure I’ve been doing much to cultivate my relationships to the non-human persons around me. I think I can and should add more of that to my plans for 2023.

From 38,000 feet,

Jason

CDMX

We spent a little over two months in Mexico City this winter. Here’s what I learned:

Unsurprisingly, environment matters. Being far further south, sundown is much later in the winter than it is in Baltimore. Pretty much skipping that part of the year where I’m working until full dark even when I’m not working late was great. Sunlight really does impact my mood and happiness.

The weather is real hard to complain about– the coldest it got at night was in the mid 40s, and most days we were in the mid 70s by afternoon. It’s great to live somewhere where the difference between outside and inside blurs. This is helped by the total lack of nasty insects.

My lack of Spanish made my world smaller and a little more isolated. Over time my comfort improved, but being totally unable to engage in small talk or effectively overhear conversations was a real challenge for an extended stay.

Living somewhere that is completely walkable with a high density of restaurants and cafes and parks is an absolute joy. Mexico City is far more car oriented than most of my favorite cities, but density and great weather combine for magic if you’re in the right neighborhoods. I adored never once thinking I need a car, though inexpensive Ubers were a help for some kinds of travel that didn’t quite align with public transit.

Letters

We’re into month 2 of Letters, and I’m already pleased with this project. I want to work on a dedicated page to this project– that’s something I’ll try and get done in February or March I hope. I’m booked through September, so there are still three slots left if you want to participate.

A Break from Movement

I focused on my rebuilding my relationship with my body for a solid year, focusing on eating well and moving often. My appendectomy put stop to that in October. We got to Mexico essentially as I was fully cleared for physical activity again. Despite that, I decided not to work out or watch my food in Mexico. I needed more time for healing. I had knee, wrist, and finger pain (really) from playing so much volleyball with little break. After my surgery, a lot of my body was recovering, and I decided that it was time to give my whole body a little bit of time. Ideally, I would have been back at it in January, but it’s hard to restart routine, especially when you’re rebuilding it in a new place.

So I cut myself some slack, and I’ll get back to it when we return to Baltimore in mid-February. I’m looking forward to building back the muscles I’ve allowed to atrophy with some fresh energy. Any other time I’ve “fallen off the wagon”, it’s been hard to get back going again. For the first time, I have no concerns about my ability to rebuild my habits. I finally have achieved a lifestyle change that feels permanent and a part of my identity. I have no question of my success, and no concerns about the progress that was lost. I’ll start again, enjoy it again, and pay attention to when it’s too much.

Reading

January has historically been the month I read the most. This month I finished no books. In another sign of growth and changes, I don’t seem to find this concerning at all. I will read again soon, when it feels like the thing I want to do, for as much as I want to do it.

Sharing More

I never did rewrite my resume like I planned last year. I want to do more to write about things I know this year instead of things I feel. Part of working on my own self-image includes getting over the part of my that places my professional knowledge under the category as uninteresting because it’s unimpressive and not novel. Of course, that’s true of literally everything I write in public, yet it doesn’t stop me when it’s not about work.

No Theme

I haven’t gotten there this year. Maybe something will come to me soon, but I’m not forcing it. I think being away from home and far off routine has kept me in a kind of stasis that makes it hard for me to decide what I want this year to be all about. It’d be worse to push it than to not have something in mind. Maybe it will take facing my first clear choice to reveal what I’m focusing on.

This month I’ll be exchanging letters with Jeremy.

Dear Jason,

I was immediately interested when I saw your post about a letters project for 2023 and grateful that you accepted me when I volunteered. I also have some thoughts on your motivation for this project, which I will share after I briefly tell you a bit about myself.

Rachel and I are two months shy of being married for 25 years and we have a daughter who just turned 17. I’m a CPA working at a large nonprofit. I’m an unapologetic tree hugger who has started (with Rachel) a regenerative gardening project in my tiny backyard. I’ve blogged off and on since 2005 and I’ve recently started woodworking.

I resonated with your idea that public, online letters are an excellent way to discuss complex topics with more nuance. You said your favorite online world was that of personal blogs in conversation with each other. As I mentioned, I’ve been blogging since 2005 and that was definitely how it worked for me in those early days. In the circle of blogs I was part of, we were always either quoting-and-commenting on whatever we were reading or quoting-and-commenting on what others in our circle were saying. (So many blockquotes.) It truly was a form of public correspondence.

Correspondence should a series of responses (it’s right there in the word), not just two people sending each other a series of monologues. There is give and take to true correspondence—and a measure of risk. You opened up this project to volunteers with no assurance that you wouldn’t get a bunch of bores! I signed up for this project not really knowing you, hoping I wouldn’t come off as some weirdo.

Algorithmically driven reactions to “content” determined to be either popular or profitable are also not true correspondence. Algorithms, being engineered, do not open themselves to response in that more organic, human way. Slower correspondence invites more time to think and seems less prone to the argumentative style seen on social media.

And with that I’ll close this first letter and await your unpredictable human response!

Hi Jeremy,

Welcome to the project!

Let’s talk about the real world motivation behind this project. It’s not really just about capturing the old internet, it’s about capturing the kind of social life I want to have. I work remotely from home. I’ve done so for more than a decade, though there’s been a formal office for me to report to as desired on and off throughout that period. Before that, I was “online” more or less since the mid 90s. I still spent a lot of time on the phone, mostly talking to girls, in the early 2000s, but I was more or less permanently logged into AOL Instant Messenger since the availability of always-on cable internet around 2000/2001. Throughout college, I spent time on various online forums, on instant messenger, or communicating via email. Then, just as I graduated, the iPhone suddenly made being online something that wasn’t persistent just at home, but everywhere I went. Messaging became something I did on the computer to something I was doing constantly.

I am 35 now, and I would say that 80% of my social life has been through a screen, but in some kind of reverse Pareto principle, only 20% of the value has come from these virtual interactions.

The thing is, I think that socializing through screens has become worse over time, not better. When it was both less central, slower, and lower fidelity, I feel like I got so much more out of my online interactions.

When I thought about why it came down to a few factors.

1. Most online socializing was additive, not subtractive. I spoke to people I would have never met or interacted with on topics I may not have otherwise engaged in. What was online started as new, but now has become a substitute for other ways I might interact with folks.
2. Most online socializing was deeper than my in-person interactions. As a male teenager, it felt safer being vulnerable or exposed when conversations were mediated through a screen, often behind pseudonymity with other pseudonymous strangers. My identity could be more fluid, but also I could take risks about myself without feeling the same consequences. And in some ways, it was also critical that I could interact as a peer with adults.
3. Most online conversations were centered around interests, with long ongoing conversations that fueled a culture and debates. Subcultures not only generate belonging, they generate a certain set of knowledge that felt valuable and powerful and helped to shape how I think about important things.

With Letters, I am mostly hoping for an opportunity for ongoing interactions, with a person and possibly around a topic, that develops a mini-culture over time. I want to capture the value of my real world friendships and interactions– vulnerability that comes not just from pseudonyms or the comfort of hiding behind a screen but from deeper understanding, a conversation that spans hours and not seconds, and a true dialog that has no lead, but instead partners pulling and pushing and forming where we go.

So in the interest of driving the conversation away from the meta and into some meat, let’s talk about your identity as a treehugger.

My mother long styled herself an environmentalist. This comes from a real belief in how a toxic environment can impact individual and public health, as well as a love of nature. I grew up in a family that valued planting trees and hated the idea of corporations polluting without consequences or remediation.

And yet, as I grew older, I began to recognize the many ways that my mother’s environmentalism felt inconsistent with what might actually help the environment. She is an avowed suburbanite, living somewhere that requires the use of a car for everyday living. She fought against additional, denser housing in favor of open space as a part of her environmentalism. She disdained apartment buildings in favor of single-family housing and perceives city living as polluted and disgusting, not at all updating her perceptions of New York City in the early 70s compared to today.

I’ve come to feel deeply disconnected from the traditional environmental movement that fights for local control on zoning and building, extensive environmental review processes, and preservation of open space in already developed areas. My environmentalism is strongly pro-urban, pro-public transit, pro-density, and pro-building (especially renewable energy projects with almost no limits). Whether we call that collection of policy preferences YIMBY or neoliberal or what, it’s generally not associated with the treehugger label.

Which comes to my questions and curiosities. What drew you to environmentalism? How have your beliefs changed (or not!) over time? And how do you feel about the current schism that seems to have developed between, say, the Sierra Club v. the Sunrise Movement v. YIMBYism? These days the importance of environmentalism feels incredibly salient (though I’m sure the horrific air and water pollution of the mid-20th century didn’t make things feel any less urgent then!), but the movement of people who are concerned with the environment and the natural world feels more fractured than ever.

How do we all become treehuggers?

Hi Jason,

Another later-in-the-week reply for our last week of this project. To what you said about taking stock, I think a break or a big life change is an excellent time to think about these things. We found ourselves doing that when we moved into this house and once again when we knew we were having a child.

Onto which, the final preparations are now taking place: washing the clothes, organising the nursery, and prepping the hospital bag (a long with many pregnancy and post-pregnancy products I’d never realised even existed). I’ve gone past the worrying stage now for the most part and I’m focusing on things I can control.

Mexico sounds wonderful and I hope you’ve been able to relax and enjoy it - spending an extended time away from home in somewhere so different sounds lovely.

Now to get a little bit meta about this project of yours. Having done this for four weeks now I’m struck by how difficult I’ve found being committed to writing something every week - it’s certainly a good job I suggested early in the year pre-baby else I’m not sure it would have gone quite as well. Despite having ideas here and there for little projects or blog posts something about the somewhat stricter schedule I’ve struggled to do it “on time” (despite the loose rules).

I have, however, really enjoyed being part of this project and I’m looking forward to reading in the coming months.

Speak soon,
Robb

Hi Robb,

It’s funny, because here at the beginning of this project, while taking stock, I’ve had two contrary reactions. First, it does take a surprising amount of discipline to sit down and write to someone. It’s certainly harder than just shooting off whatever is at the top of my mind. Second, it feels so feeble to just write a letter once a week while I see all the progression you’ve been making on several side projects, while preparing for the baby, during this same month.

You’ve been automating your now page, released a widely celebrated set of icons, built a CLI for omg.lol, and a host of other small projects. Based on chaosweb.space, I think you’d like mavica’s work.

It’s generating that itch in me again to figure out how to leave some energy at the end of the day to do the things I love on the computer after doing those things at work all day on the computer. Part of my taking stock is realizing that I have to find a way to push over that activation energy hump so that I can just work on small tools for myself all the time.

I’m glad this first month felt like just writing letters to a friend about what’s happening— it feels like an easy introduction. Maybe they’ll all go this way, but maybe some folks will want to really dig into a specific topic. I’m glad that I am not responsible for writing the first letter, because I think that makes it more likely that each month will be a bit different based on who is participating.

Thanks for helping me kick off this project.

Jason

Bray writing about the idea of being a “class reductionist”.

I think I similarly embrace an idea sometimes associated with class reductionists— money now to address poverty.

It’s not the only problem, but it’s the common symptom and result of so many others. And it’s very easy to address. We can fix poverty.

Eliminating one, complex element of oppression will simplify addressing others.

It’s a little bit like Thomas Abt on crime— for all the challenges with policing and crime, we have a strong moral imperative to focus on reducing murders above all else. We have to stop the bleeding.

Poverty is the bleeding. We just have to give people money.

The only “innovations” in school vouchers over the last two decades are legal/technical, entirely focused on maintaining private schools’ ability to discriminate and teach anything to kids.

There has been no fundamental change to gap between vouchers and quality school tuition. No improvement for students with special education needs. No protections against radical religious indoctrination. No movement on the underfunding of traditional schools where vouchers are paid for. No improvement on lack of actual options within a reasonable distance of most students’ homes. No meaningful improvement delivering instruction in a non-traditional setting or online such that it becomes a major provider of choice for families.

ESAs and vouchers are not supported on some idea of choice. They are explicitly about supporting religious schools that can teach religious beliefs without limit. They’re about richer, wealthier people who can already afford private schools getting a huge check back from the government to support their opting out of the public system. It’s the richer and wealthier folks who hate taxes and the idea of supporting a public good making sure they get theirs back rather than having sufficient taxes to support the system everyone accesses.

This is entirely distinct from other possible mechanisms of choice, including well-regulated charters and inter district choice. But these mechanisms, which could have (and have had) bipartisan consensus offer the potential to improve school operations and choices for families. That’s solving the wrong problem. They solve the problems choice advocates say they care about, but not the actual interests they serve. Choice is about tax breaks for the rich, excuses to not increase funding for schools, and having state supported religious indoctrination.

Here’s a real live example of why I am stuck with R and stuck with data.table. In my work, I often receive various delimited files from customers. Mostly, these delimited files are created from Oracle or MS SQL and have all kinds of gnarly things going on. Without sharing too much, here’s a partial example of the last few fields of one line in one of those files:

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|25-AUG-22|"SAN81803 EXPO® White Board CARE Dry Erase Surface Cleaner 8 oz Spray Bottle|54

Do you see the problem? I have a " character in a field, but the field itself is not quoted and the quote is not escaped.

Let’s compare how different systems handle this file. Before we do so, it’s important to know how many rows are in this data set:

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wc -l my_file.txt
  239167 my_file.txt

DuckDB

The new hot thing, DuckDB is an in-memory database like sqlite, but optimized for analytics and reporting. It has support to automatically create a table from a CSV file. What happens when I try and do this?

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D create table df as select * from read_csv_auto('my_file.txt');
Error: Invalid Input Error: Error in file "my_file.txt" on line 50614: quote should be followed by end of value, end of row or another quote. (DELIMITER='|' (auto detected), QUOTE='"' (auto detected), ESCAPE='' (auto detected), HEADER=1 (auto detected), SAMPLE_SIZE=20480, IGNORE_ERRORS=0, ALL_VARCHAR=0)

Yup, you’re right DuckDB. That’s absolutely the line with the problem. Guess I’m stuck.

Python/Pandas

How about Python and pandas, somehow the king of modern data science and data frames.

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>>> import pandas as pd
>>> df = pd.read_csv('my_file.txt', sep = '|', low_memory=False)

Hey, so far so good! This file get read without any messages, warnings, or errors.

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>>> df
...
[238701 rows x 22 columns]

Uh oh. The data has only 238,701 rows, which is quite a bit less than 239,167 (well, 239,166 since this file does have a header row). This may not be a problem, because it’s possible that new lines exist in a text delimited file that is not a new record (if properly quoted). At least now that I have the data loaded, I can check for the sum of a column called “Amount”, because this is financial data. We can compare this to other methods later in addition to the row count so we can be sure the full data set was ready by pandas.

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>>> sum(df.Amount)
196848446.45999622

R - readr

I am a full on tidyverse apologist. So of course I’m going to reach for readr::read_delim to get this file loaded.

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> library(readr)
> df <- read_delim('my_file.txt', delim = '|', show_col_types = FALSE))

Awesome. Like pandas, readr had no messages, warnings, or errors. Let’s see how many rows there are and the sum of that amount column.

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> df |> nrow()
[1] 238609
> sum(df$Amount)
[1] 196828725

Uh oh again. It seems that readr::read_delim also doesn’t reach 239,166 lines, but instead has only 238,609 lines. That’s almost 100 less than pandas, and the sum is off by almost $20,000. I don’t know at this stage if pandas is right, but it seems pretty likely that readr just silently gave up on some lines that it shouldn’t have.

R - data.table

Let’s try the package data.table which has a function fread to read delimited files.

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> df <- fread("my_file.txt")
Warning message:
In fread("my_file.txt") :
  Found and resolved improper quoting out-of-sample. First healed line 50614: <<25-AUG-22|"SAN81803 EXPO® White Board CARE Dry Erase Surface Cleaner 8 oz Spray Bottle|54>>. If the fields are not quoted (e.g. field separator does not appear within any field), try quote="" to avoid this warning.

That’s interesting! When using fread, I get a warning that points out the very line I mentioned above. It even prints the line (I removed most of it) and says that it resolved the issue. It also recommends that I might want to try and specify quote = "" if, like on my file, fields are not quoted. We’ll come back to that.

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> nrow(df)
[1] 239166

Well, would you look at that? Exactly the amount of lines I’d expect if there is one header row and no new lines. Let’s check that amount column.

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> sum(df$Amount)
[1] 196926161

That’s almost $80,000 more than pandas. That’s a lot of money to have missing.

Just for fun, instead of expecting fread to figure everything out about my file on its own, what if I follow its suggestion and tell fread that there is no quote character and no fields are quoted?

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> df <- fread('my_file.txt',  quote = "")
> nrow(df)
[1] 239166
> sum(df$Amount)
[1] 196926161

By giving fread just a little information about the file, I get no warning about resolved lines, it just reads the file correctly with the same results.

So now, because of fread, I have some idea of what the problem was. Almost everything that reads a delimited file expects fields to be quoted, at least optionally, at least some of the time. They hate a quote at the start of a field that is actually in the raw data (understandably). Maybe if I tell these other tools that the quote character is nothing they’ll work better.

PostgreSQL

Let’s try PostgreSQL using COPY. Note, I’m not including the create table statement to avoid revealing more about the data.

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jason=# \copy df from 'my_file.txt' CSV HEADER DELIMITER '|';
COPY 130426
jason=# select sum(amount) from df;
     sum
-------------
 97411927.64

Well, that’s not right. I should have nearly twice the number of lines. And sure enough, I’ve got only half the dollars. No warnings, no errors, no messages. Nothing. Silent failure.

Can I fix it?

Now that I know the issue is the quote character, let’s see if I can fix all the methods that failed to load this file.

readr

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> df <- read_delim('my_file.txt', delim = '|', show_col_types = FALSE, quote = '')
> nrow(df)
[1] 239166
> sum(df$Amount)
[1] 196926161

pandas

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>>> df = pd.read_csv('my_file.txt', sep = '|', low_memory=False, quoting=3)
>>> df
[239166 rows x 22 columns]
>>> sum(df.Amount)
196926160.57999647

duckdb

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D create table df as select * from read_csv_auto('my_file.txt', quote='');
D select count(*) from df;
┌──────────────┐
│ count_star() │
│    int64     │
├──────────────┤
│       239166 │
└──────────────┘
D select sum(amount) from df;
┌───────────────────┐
│    sum(amount)    │
│      double       │
├───────────────────┤
│ 196926160.5800201 │
└───────────────────┘

postgresql

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jason=# \copy df from 'my_file.txt' CSV HEADER DELIMITER '|' QUOTE '';
ERROR:  COPY quote must be a single one-byte character
jason=# \copy df from 'my_file.txt' DELIMITER '|';
ERROR:  invalid input syntax for type integer: "col1"
CONTEXT:  COPY df, line 1, column col1: "col1"
jason=# \copy df from program 'tail -n +2 my_file.txt' DELIMITER '|';
COPY 239166
jason=# select sum(amount) from df;
     sum
--------------
 196926160.58
(1 row)

Would you look at that? Everyone does just fine when you tell them there is no quote character or quoted fields. ¹

All of these methods are essentially instant on my computer. Performance is not the issue. What’s incredible is that data.table::fread can identify file issues and resolve them. In this case, it turns out that data.table::fread was also able to describe the problem well enough that I could fix every other method of reading the file successfully. I will say, going back and reading the error for duckdb may have given me some hints, but `pandas, readr, and PostgreSQL completely failed to even notify me something was wrong. In an automated pipeline, I would have no indication that hundreds of rows, or in PostgreSQL’s case hundreds of thousands of rows, were just gone.

I was able to fix pandas, readr, duckdb, and PostgreSQL, but I have run into many scenarios where this is not the case. For example, what if I had this same row in a file that sometimes did quote certain fields. The fread function can handle this no problem, resolving the issue, warning me, and moving on. Every other method just wouldn’t work.

I don’t control this data. I don’t control producing it. It comes in on a scheduled basis, often hourly, and I need to accurately process it.

Silent failures are terrible.

The only way out is to embrace open, documented, binary data formats. But until all major RDBMS (and probably Excel) have native export and import, flat files will continue to be the de facto standard. In the meantime, it would be nice if PostgreSQL’s COPY, bcp, and spool could at least try and do things like quote fields and escape characters by default when targeting delimited files.

Some additional testing

I was asked to check vroom and arrow in R as well as polars via Explorer in Elixir. The results were, not good.

vroom

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library(vroom)
> df <- vroom('my_file.txt', delim = '|')
Rows: 238609 Columns: 22
> sum(df$Amount)
[1] 196828725

arrow

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> df <- arrow::read_delim_arrow('df.txt', delim = '|')
> sum(df$Amount)
[1] 196848446
> nrow(df)
[1] 238701

explorer / polars

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iex(1)> Mix.install([
...(1)>   {:explorer, "~> 0.5.0"}
...(1)> ])
iex(2)> df = Explorer.DataFrame.from_csv(filename = "my_file.txt",
...(2)> delimiter: "|", infer_schema_length: nil)
{:error,
 {:polars,
  "Could not parse `OTHER` as dtype Int64 at column 3.\nThe current offset in the file is 4447442 bytes.\n\nConsider specifying the correct dtype, increasing\nthe number of records used to infer the schema,\nrunning the parser with `ignore_parser_errors=true`\nor  adding `OTHER` to the `null_values` list."}}

Hi Jason,
A late reply this week - I completely forgot about this until very late last night.

Your TV setup looks very similar to ours but we’re lucky enough to have two wall lights behind it so the wall looks much less bare but you’re right it’s hard to put anything to garish there otherwise it’s distracting.

With 10 weeks to go, I’ve been thinking a lot about technology and how that will affect my duaghter. This post in particular made me think about how much I’m going to share about her online once she’s here. I don’t think there’s any right answer but it has occupied my mind the past few days. Come to think of it, the impending birth is basically the only thing I can think about at the moment. I’m sure that we’ll be fine but I can’t help but worry that we won’t have enough clothes or nappies, or something I haven’t even thought of will go wrong.
As for non-baby things, I’ve been having fun messing around with the omg.lol API building a CLI to interact with the service and I’m working on add a /now page to my website (as well as the new omg.lol now pages). How has your week been this week?

Speak soon,
Robb

Hi Robb,

Easily excusing the “late” reply¹, with a later reply of my own. This week has been incredibly busy at work as the post-holiday break, post-three day weekend, we’re really back at it and in it, started to kick in. It’s been long but rewarding– one of those weeks where you’re exhausted, but I’m doing the kind of work I do well bringing the energy and attention I need to.

In particular, I’ve recently reorganized our team so that I have slightly smaller set of direct reports that are more “coherent” structurally– I am managing directly one person who leads each function below me. It’s too early to say if this is working better for the whole team, but this week made me feel confident that it works better for me, which is really important for avoiding burn out.

On the TV side, wall lights were another thing we considered– a sconce on each side just to give it something. It just feels strange to have so much blank space above the TV as well. I need someone to, I don’t know, share a Pinterest board or something with me so I can figure out what people actually do. The entire dilemma of what to do behind the TV reinforces a personal frustration of mine. It feels wrong that our “living room” is oriented toward a television. I would like for things to be different, but I don’t think my partner or her mother would be sufficiently on board to make that change. It’s more aspirational, really, to make sure that all television time is appointment time and not casual watching.

I cannot imagine the stack of worry that comes with being just weeks away from being a dad. It’s good to work with fun new tools right now while you can– a good distraction before side projects get put aside for a while. My gut is that it’s not worth worrying too much about online presence. I’m not a parent, and I’m not facing that decision, but my gut is that it’s easy to overthink the consequences (or lack thereof). Short of straight up exploitation, which is rare, these things seem to work out ok for parents and kids regardless of the choices they make. That’s not to say the choices don’t matter, but it seems like there aren’t wrong choices.

I’m a big fan of /now pages (I really need to update mine). I really value the narrative of a Now page. For me, it’s a time I get to think about what matters that gets lost in the series of smaller posts or dripped out updates. I have resisted adding any “automated” elements– it’d be easy to add the book I’m currently reading, for example, or maybe something like starred articles from my RSS reader. Something to think about.

We’re coming to the end of our time in Mexico. I’m thinking a lot about what makes home, well, home, and what I’ve learned about where I want to live and what I want my life to be like from 2+ months away. It’s a different kind of taking stock than becoming a parent, but I find myself taking stock nonetheless.

Looking forward to next week,

Jason

Here’s a thought.

Right now, I have an M1 Mac Mini on my desk. It is great, and handles almost eveyrthing I throw at it. But there are some times my work Macbook Pro is noticeably better. And it should be– I have an M1 Pro with 32 GB of RAM.

I’ve been hoping for an M1 Pro (or by now, M2 Pro) Mac mini for a while. The Mac Studio is not too expensive– but I don’t need a fan on my desk ¹. It sounds like it’s possible that device is being released tomorrow.

My Synology is old. I bought it and most of it’s drives on April 25, 2015. I’m getting worried about an important piece of equipment hitting 8 years of running mostly continuously. Amazon used to have some incredibly generous backup solutions which meant my NAS was backed up, but now it’s not. I’m currently using about 10TB of capacity.

What if I bought an OWC drive enclosure and a couple of 12TB hard drives for about $650 total? I could then connect the enclosure over USB-C to my current MacMini and put it in the same closet as the Synology, running headless. I could then use Backblaze to back up my drives, and still have two open enclosure spots to use in the future. I would be giving up RAID (for now, I suppose I could always use software-based RAID in the future), but I’d gain offsite backups.

It seems Synology has abandoned making products with good transcoding CPUs, so maybe this is a better choice? I’m also pretty confiden that the Mac mini will draw way less power and generate less heat, while being far more capable.

Last week’s letter

Good Morning Jason,

what room or project are you most proud of?

The office was my top priority (my partner had different ideas) as I spend 3-4 days a week working in there and I’m very proud of how that turned out. I built the desktop and matching shelves myself from scaffold boards because finding something in the exact size I wanted turned out to be fairly difficult. This was a project that took a few weekends of lots of sanding, glueing, and staining but the final results is something I’m very proud of. Here’s an in-progress shot and the final result in situ. I also did the faux wood-panelling in our bedroom which we’re both very pleased with.

The work I do is primarily focused on property reports for tenants (inventories, fire risk assessments, etc) so there isn’t much crossover with renovating the house but I what I did learn is that planning is key. We wish we had spent a few weeks planning what we wanted to achieve before jumping into the renovation. There were definitely things that made our life a bit more difficult because we did some work when we should have waited for another job to be finished first.

That sounds like an interesting job but it must be difficult to work with organisations like schools that can be slow and unwieldy to get new tech implemented. How long have you been doing that?

I saw you posted yesterday about being ill, hope you’re feeling a bit better today?

Speak soon,
Robb

Hi Robb,

Luckily, I am feeling better. Note to self, when you order a steak medium and it comes out just barely rare just send the damn thing back. The day of suffering that followed was not worth it.

I’ve done some more work in my office since this last photo, but this is a not-terribly-inaccurate representation of where things are. I also use the IKEA pegboard. I did not quite get as fancy on the desk itself– which is an IKEA Karlby 98" top that I had a friend cut to 80" and then added some really cool metal legs from an Etsy shop. When the pandemic hit we went 100% remote, which meant tha this room got transformed into an office. I probably have 6-10 scattered blog posts about the process that landed on the setup linked above– most of the changes by now are additional plants and things hung on the wall (plus some equipment changes).

I think it’s pretty natural for the office to be the place you’re most proud of– it’s one you get to call your own and the spot you’re probably stuck spending the most time in.

We’ve been thinking about doing a similar paneling look either behind our bed or possibly behind our TV. Maybe that’ll be a project for when we return home. It’s hard to have a big wall behind a TV– it looks bare without anything, but most things we could put there would be distracting.

I’ve been working at my current company nearly 9 years. Before that, I worked at a university research center working with school districts on early warning systems, and before that, I worked for the state department of education. I think what’s most challenging is that everyone is well-established. There aren’t new school districts popping up building their systems and processes from scratch. The people, organizations, culture, and work processes are all fairly fixed. So we have to do things much more completely and better than most companies to even get in the door. Then we have to get a large set of folks on board so that we can deliver on our promise. We’re a small team and we’re supporting billions of dollars of budgeting and monitoring. There’s a lot of technical/systems and cultural debt that we have to work with to succeed.

That said, the opportunity for improvement is huge, and it’s very satisfying when someone gets it and we can make their work so much easier and more effective.

Looking forward to next week,

Jason

Last year’s theme was fun. I didn’t write a ton about it. My “annoucement” post simply said,

I’ve decided to focus on Fun in 2022. I just haven’t had enough of that these last few years.

I didn’t quite know what I would seek out for fun, but it turns out, it took me just 8 days.

I signed up for a volleyball league, and by May I escalated from one night a week to 3-4 nigths a week. By September, I was joining more intermediate play. Returning to volleyball after 17 years was a tremendous amount of fun. And although due to surgery and travel I haven’t played since early October, it’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to when we return to Baltimore in February.

In the summer of 2021, we went to Mexico and the most fun I had was our day of biking, hiking, and swimming through the jungle and in caves. In fact, all of the highlights of the last few years for me were days with strenuous physical activity. It’s not the only thing that brings me joy, but these days are sharper and clearer in my memory than any other. They’re sharper than the other good times, and they’re sharper than the other bad times. I have to keep reminding myself of this, because my base motivation is still to remain stationary. It’s hard for me to motivate myself to get up early on the weekend and go for hike. I never regret when I do.

Volleyball was great because I had to schedule it and put it on my calendar. I built a small community of friends and people I wanted to see. I hoped they were happy on the days I could make it. And because signing up was a promise of a full court, or at least enough people to play, there was just enough guilt to mean that signing up meant going. Scheduling my physical activity with limited slots and friends who are relying on me seems ot lower the activation energy just enough to make it happen. I knew this about myself– I still go to a gym that is entirely based on small group training, and my consistency there is entirely due to the same factors that lead me to showing up for volleyball. It’s scheduled, choosing a session means locking someone else out, and there’s a community there I look forward to spending time with.

Volleyball wasn’t the only source of fun. I took a desperately needed trip to Puebla and Mexico City in early March. Personally and professionally, 2021 was a rough year. And although 2022 was a year of full of healing, growth, and fun, 2021 was not quite done with me those first two months. I’m glad we had that trip planned, but I’m also proud that I used that trip to restore myself. I set solid boundaries with work before, during, and upon my return. And I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that I came home a healthier person, more capable of moving forward than I had been in a long time.

That trip rolled into a fun weekend in Chicago in May. It was the perfect bite-sized vacation that just wasn’t possible during the peaks of COVID. It felt a lot like our trip to New Orleans in December 2019– fast, fun, restorative, and mostly, normal. It was around this time that we started to take more seriously an idea that we had while in Mexico– maybe we should spend a good chunk of winter in Mexico City.

Baltimore is dark and cold in the winter. Mexico City stays mild (50s at night, 70s during the day) pretty much year round. Because it’s further south, there’s significantly more sunlight during winter. Because both Elsa and I get time off from work for the holidays and work remotely, good wifi is pretty much all we need. Looking back, I never had work trips in December and January.

Although I had tons of anxieties about booking a long time away from home, I said yes in the interest of fun. Today, I’m writing from Mexico City, about halfway through our stay. I’m glad I said yes, and I’m glad to have had fun guide me.

All of my concerns and anxieties stemmed from an idea of what the best use of our time and money was. I am a person who has often let worry, planning, optimizing, and a host of other anxieties paralyze me into inaction. I want to do these things, but because I perceive these opportunities as rare and limited, I allow myself to be frozen, or I allow the expectations swamp any possible reality, zapping the fun from existence.

In order to have fun, I have to find ways of letting go of these anxieties and just do.

This extended to food. I have been generally eating healthier– my body is keeping score and it’s clear this year was a strong year for my healthy. At the same time, I had some of the best food of my life this year. I’m doing a better job of allowing myself to make food something I can celebrate. I make better choices for the every day mundane meals and find ways to make that still filled with joy. I know how to cook healthy food I love. I know how to get food quickly that’s still healthy when convenience is more important. But I’ve also sought out great food, sometimes expensive, often not, and let myself enjoy great meals. I’ve eaten healthier and better in every way.

But having fun wasn’t just about saying yes, it was also about boundaries and saying no. It was about doing a better job of turning off when I needed emergency surgery and not working and trusting my team. It was about going to Cuba without connectivity and being ok. It was about taking those trips and being present where I was. It was about separating the personal and professional relationships I had, even with the same person, so that each can be more healthy. It was about letting some things take longer at work so that other parts of me had time to thrive. It was about being more aggressive about putting books down I was not enjoying. Stopping things I thought would be fun but weren’t. Making easy commitments when they felt right and avoiding commitments that didn’t.

Was 2022 the most fun I’ve ever had? No. But it was a successful return to fun, or at least a year where I built better tools to find fun and to nurture the things that are fun.

It’s disappointing that MRAN and checkpoint are being shut down. They were incredibly simple ways to move toward more consistent environments.

We’ve moved on to the Posit package manager because of binary availability.

But! The right move for the R community would be to rally behind renv and lock files in general. This is much more in line with how the broader development community ensures reproducible software builds.

Things are still a little clunky in renv land, but I’m confident with increased adoption we’d see rapidly improved ergonomics.

It feels like in the past few years there’s been a growing wave of people talking about the power of adult friendships (and frankly, the crisis of adult friendships, at least in the United States).

Friendship Forever is another article in that vein. It’s filled with powerful quotes. This one is my favorite:

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone. —David Whyte

I was reminded of Noah Smith’s great The internet wants to be fragmented post from a couple of weeks ago when Matt Bircher linked to it.

Matt pulled out the same quote that resonated most strongly with me:

It started with the Facebook feed. On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew.

I didn’t always believe this. I changed all of my user names to be something that was both consistent and identifiable around 2006. One reason¹ I did this was that I came to believe that being identifiable meant I could be held accountable. Pseudonymity and anonymity in most contexts felt like avoiding standing behind your statements. ² This was wrong.

At this stage, I kind of think that Reddit is closest to an ideal centralized system. It’s a place that aggregates many individual communities around one log in. Each community can be moderated based on its norms, with voting distributing norm enforcement in a fairly easy way. I think the one thing that’s missing is you still have to be the same person across Reddit. Imagine if Reddit allowed a unique psuedonym for each communtiy you post in. One log in, but your identity does not persist across communities. Finding that I wrote something in r/Urbanism about my politics doesn’t invite you to come after me in r/ProductManagement when I’m discussing something professional. Reddit the service can know I’m the same person, and this way truly egregious behavior can lead to more global banning, but otherwise, each identity can be separated to be policed separately within each separate community. No more clicking on my user name and finding me anywhere across the site. Of course, Reddit doesn’t even let you change your username, so there’s little hope in this feature appaering.

Centralization on the web is valuable to the extent that it permits me to have one login that aggregates multiple communities/people I’ve curated. That’s what my Twitter feed was/Mastodon feed is. That’s what my list of RSS subscriptions are. That’s what the Reddit communities I’ve joined are.

This actually isn’t surprising at all, but it still needs to said over & over — the biggest barrier to more urban biking in cities is the fear of cars. “A study confirms that if we are serious about getting people on bikes, they need a safe place to ride.”

– Brent Toderian, linking to Biggest Barrier to Biking Is a Fear of Cars

We don’t need a $7,500 tax credit for electric cars. We need to spend money on safe, separated bike infrastructure and e-bikes.

DayOne has turned out to be the perfect travel journal. There’s not a lot I want to write about while in Mexico, but Elsa and I did want to keep track of where we ate.

I thought about using various geotagging services, but very few are private. Those that are, well, kind of stink. But I’ve been making entries with pictures and taking advantage of DayOne’s great support for geotagging to record most of our meals here in Mexico City. When making DayOne entries, your location is recorded. This way you know where you are, the weather, and other facts while writing an entry. One killer feature is that when I add photos to my entries, DayOne will prompt to ask if I want to change the entry date and location to match the date and location of the photo. This means I can take pictures inside a restaurant, museum, park, or store I like and not worry about making a journal entry in the moment. I can come back days later and still get the correct date, time, and location for my entry.

I have a private map of all the places I’ve been. Since CDMX is likely going to continue to be a fairly regular destination, it’s easy to keep track of favorites and make sure we try new things.

When I started using DayOne I wasn’t sure what it would be for. Over the years I just keep finding new ways to use it. It’s not just one thing for me. None of my favorite tools are.

In all the blogs I have ever written, I have had analytics that tells me how many visitors came to various pages. What posts were popular? Tap tap tap 🎤 is this thing on? When I moved my blog to Micro.blog after years of self-hosting, I removed my Google Analytics snippet. What little proof I have that anyone is “here” comes infrequent and primarily from strangers.

I don’t know who has subscribed via RSS.

I don’t know who is following @jsonbecker@json.blog via ActivityPub.

I don’t know who subscribed to the newsletter I briefly turned on and paid for and then turned off, though it still appears to get sent.

I don’t use Conversation.js to view WebMentions or replies of any kind.

All other forms of social media tell me not just how many people follow me, but who has followed me. Most provide me with stats on individual posts, including both views and various forms of interactions. I don’t know how many people read this site. I don’t know who reads this site. Even if I wanted to know, I’d have to somehow collect RSS subscriptions, site page hits, Micro.blog views and interactions, Twitter views and interactions, and Mastodon views and interactions– at a minimum– to get any kind of picture of “reach”.

I used to like knowing that a particular page about how I solved a problem in R continued to get a lot of search traffic. As a result, I was motivated to keep that post reasonably up to date. On social media, I liked knowing that certain friends were reading— it made it possible to make a knowing joke or let me assume that they knew about something that was going on with me because I knew they read it. I guess I don’t agree that likes, follows, replies, or audience metrics are distorting popular contests. Not all feedback is toxic.¹

Maybe it’s easier for me to absorb the various metrics about posts because I’ve never had meaningful internet popularity, nor was that ever my goal. I don’t like blog comments— this site is for my words, not everyone else’s— but I do enjoy replies, which remain significantly easier on social platforms than anywhere else. I only rarely receive replies, and I get them entirely through social-like systems where I crosspost like Micro.blog, Twitter, and Mastodon. I like getting a like, because it says, “I was here, and what I found resonated with me.” I’ve had my email address on this site for years and received one email in all of that time. I can’t help to feel like there are better solutions than stripping it all away.

Some people use their blogs as a personal repository of knowledge. They talk about how their site is like a public version of their outsourced brain, letting them search for answers they already have. That’s not why I write. These are my thoughts, sometimes personal and revealing, often not. They always start as something private, but they become something I choose to make public. I want someone to read what I write. I want it to make them laugh, or smile, or think, or get angry, or just get to know who I am a little better.

Why do I write anything in public? Mostly because I would drive my friends crazy with emails and text messages if I shared each thing I thought they might like with them. I kind of already do. I would drive them crazy if I shared all the thoughts I have that I’d love a reaction to. Writing in public is an easy way for me to broadcast to a self-selected group of folks and have them grapple with and engage with me. It helps to maintain many social and para-social relationships without the pressures of direct, synchronous communication.

If a friend leaves me “on read” when I sent them an article directly with my thoughts, I’m going to feel bad. Did I interrupt them? Am I annoying? Are they interested in this conversation? Are they interested in me?

If I write 10 blog posts and I find out they read just one of them, however they let me know, on their own time, I feel great.

I have been thinking about all of this since reading Monique Judge call for a return to personal blogging. I agree with so much of that article, which is why I’ve been semi-consistently blogging for years. But there’s one thing that struck me as, if not wrong, challenging:

People built entire communities around their favorite blogs, and it was a good thing. You could find your people, build your tribe, and discuss the things your collective found important.

Creating communities around blogs remains hard. Very popular sites with authors that focus on very specific topics who also spend significant time moderating their comments sometimes ended up with an entire community. Most blogs just got loads of spam and a drive by comment from someone who landed on your page via Google and decided to be a jerk.

One of the triumphs of social media over blogs was how quickly and easily you could join or bootstrap a community. Are these communities as great as the niche internet of 2001? No. But so many more people were able to find community on social media. Web 2.0 was meant to make the niche web that felt like a community accessible to everyone. It succeeded.

Social media’s success at bringing community to everyone on the internet is mirrored in its failure to ensure those communities were healthy and safe. The real Web 3.0 shouldn’t retreat from some of the goals of Web 2.0 – replies, likes, reposts, follows, and views are all native parts of how communities are built on the web today. I don’t think they are the problem. I just don’t think they are the end point.