Reading the same books as someone else is a way of being together. This is the premise of seminars, bookclubs, of so many friendships and conversations. What it is to discover that you’re currently reading the same book as someone else - especially someone you don’t know all that well. The startling, sometimes discomforting, effect of accelerated intimacy, as if that person had gone from standing across the room to all of a sudden holding your hand.

– Kate Briggs in This Little Art

I couldn’t agree more. This year, I want to read more books together. Let me know if you’d like to join me.

Vicki Boykis is exactly right.

I’m going to steal her post idea and give you my reasons to learn each: git, SQL, and the CLI.

SQL

I’m starting with SQL, because if we’re talking data-centric code, we’re talking SQL. Databases talk SQL. Data stores that don’t talk SQL have SQL interfaces. You will interact with databases everywhere you go. And importantly, even if you’re not writing SQL directly, SQL’s impact means that most APIs for interacting with tabular data borrow from SQL.

You will see select, where, group by, and * join everywhere. Sometimes there’s a word substitution (like dplyr using filter for where), but understanding the basics of a SELECT query in SQL will teach you how to access data anywhere.

SQL also teaches you about data organization and design by its very nature. By understanding how joins, filters, and aggregations work, you start to understand principles behind good data ways to structure and store data for analytic tasks.

A day spent writing SQL is almost always a good day.

Git

Do you want to understand your code? Do you want others to understand it? The one computer science class I took taught that the way you accomplished this was writing comments. This was wrong. When you change your code, the comments don’t change. When you write your comments, they may not actually describe what’s happening. Comments have a place, but they are far from your first line of defense.

First, you should strive to write really obvious, clear code. Use descriptive nouns for all of your variables. Name your functions with descriptive verbs. Don’t be clever. It should be obvious what your code is doing simply by reading the code itself.

But your second line¹ of defense is git, where true documentation lives. Why do we use git? The main reason folks turn to distributed version control is because it makes it easy to work on the same code in the same files as someone else at the same time and make sure you can recombine that work. But the process of writing commit messages means that git can also serve as the best way to document your code. Think of a commit message as a comment that is specific to a collection of code that can exist throughout multiple files, time stamped, and with author attribution. You can (and should) use a commit message to explain a logical collection of code changes meant to accomplish one goal. The result, combined with cleanly written code, is documentation about who did something, when, and why. Code comments too often simply try and describe an isolated how and end up being some kind of imperative pseudocode that adds very little the code itself doesn’t reveal. The limitation of comments living in-line in a single file strongly encourages the wrong behavior. A commit let’s the code author define a unit of change and what is accomplished by that unit.

Git let’s you travel through time and see past code and changes as they happen, revert back to known good working state, try out new ways of doing things and easily discard that work, and make huge sweeping changes without ever having fear of finding your “last good known state”. Have you every edited a long piece of prose, moving around paragraphs and sentences to get things right? Do you paste sentences after a whole bunch of white space at the end of a document or hit undo frantically to try and get back to before you made things work? Git make all that easy for code.

If you’ve ever found a reproducible regression and written a failing test, then gone ahead and used git-bisect to find out exactly which commit broke the behavior, then found a solid commit message explaining what was done and why, you’ve known true joy.

CLI

The CLI, or command-line interface, is a big area. When I say CLI (and I believe Vicki means the same), I’m talking about being proficient with Linux/Unix/POSIX etc style systems. There are two separate reasons I believe in the CLI. The first is Vicki’s reason:

As a data developer, you will spend most of your time SSHing into servers, looking at stuff, and running code. This is especially true for companies that have moved to the cloud, but the pattern of, “your code lives on some remote production server and you need to get to it” is universally true. Command line is your best friend here

As soon as you plan to let computers work with your code while you’re not around rather than requiring you to hit a button to run code on your local machine, you’re going to want to have the basics of the CLI. This is how we interact with machines not in front of us.

But my second reason is even more important and harder to capture: the CLI is magic. When you first learn to write programs, it feels magical to command your computer to solve hard problems. The CLI is filled with battle tested programs that solve a huge class of problems interacting with a computer. They are blazing fast and are easy to combine together. Learning the CLI is learning the programming language of computer operating systems ².

Do you want to feel powerful? Learn how to setup an SSH tunnel on a local port on your machine, then use psql to connect to a remote database, edit your SQL in vim, and seamlessly read from and write to your local machine while running SQL on a server a thousand miles away without missing a beat. Schedule a cron job that runs a small bash script that coordinates fetching, moving, and renaming files, processing gigabytes of text with awk or sed seemingly instantly and then loading that data into a database of a live application.

Almost all the programs I’ve written that save me so much time it feels like magic are actually just a series of command line tools to process text³, work with the file system, and/or operating system.

If you’re working with data, you’ll need to get it (SQL), you’ll want to process it, move it around, or use computer power somewhere you’re not and while you’re not pushing a button (CLI), and one day, you’ll want to know why you wrote the SQL or CLI script you did, how it works, get that code on another computer, and let someone else help out (git). This will be true literally everywhere you work.

In a deliberate attempt to cure my brain from The Feed, I have resubscribed to some high quality news magazines this year. My hope is to spend more time reading material that I learn from and less time reading the Discourse around some set of reported facts.

I had my first magazine delivery this week. Once I flipped past the fancy (positively archaic) brand advertisements, I landed in the first section of most news magazines: Letters to the Editor. ¹ The “Why” of blogs was laid out before me. The first batch of letters were in response to a piece that flew around my part of the internet when it was originally published online months ago. The Letters section was banal; blogged responses were insightful.

I think I’ll be exposed to more news journalism with my new habit, but there is a reason the internet quickly came to dominate.

In the interest of having fun, I opened up my holiday gift today and built my first Lego set in over 20 years.

During the drive home yesterday we listened to the Slate Plus segment of the Political Gabfest. The hosts were answering questions about the best and worst year of their education. Everyone agreed middle school was the worst, with Plotz claiming you should “never trust anyone who loved middle school”.

By grade 6, I was really struggling in elementary school. Maybe it was early puberty, maybe it was my general precociousness, and maybe it was the small size of our school and classes (each of our three classes had 19 or 20 students, with 59 students in total for the sixth grade). But by the end of elementary school, I was bored. The work was easy, my friends and I were outgrowing each other and starting to have different interests. I had so much free time, most of which was spent playing basketball with friends or playing video games or Magic: The Gathering. We were cranky.

I remember that winter that I was put in a reading group of my own for our holiday assignment. I read Lord of the Flies from my teacher’s personal bookshelf, which I’m pretty sure was meant to be some kind of preparation for middle school. It was the first time I was taught about symbolism and the ideas behind literature and was instructed to see beyond the plot. Brilliantly, my teacher did this by having me read the short book, asking me to write up what it was about in our standard way, and then handed me the Cliffnotes. It had its intended effect, suddenly forcing me to confront the book within the book that I hadn’t realized I had read.

Middle school was a relief. From 59 students to 250 students, there were all these new people with different experiences. Some of these kids were friends I had for years through Little League, basketball, Hebrew school, summer camp, or even preschool. We took different classes with different teachers with different personalities. There was a whole array of afterschool sports and activities to take part in. There was more work, advanced classes combined 7th and 8th grade math and science into one year, but it was still easy to keep up with— the pace was at least no longer glacial.

For the first time, I felt like I developed meaningful relationships with adults. Teaches, coaches, and guidance counselors all related to me more as an adult than a child, at least more as an adult than I ever felt like I was treated before, and that was a breath of fresh air. I never settled fully into one group or clique, at least that I recognized, and instead spent a few years trying all of the interests and personalities and people that were available to me.

Maybe I was just ready? For me, middle school was like being brought to a city filled with restaurants of varying cuisines after a life time of only grilled chicken breast and steamed vegetables.

The way a lot of people describe going away to college is how I experienced seventh grade. Maybe that would help the folks who hated middle school understand what it was like for those of us who really fucking needed it.

Plotting the number of bagels my body wants over time, as I approach bagel eating, the curve rises to a local maxima of 1. Just after finishing the bagel, the plateau shoots up almost instantaneously to 3.5 bagels. This is known as the “peak of deception”, because if I’m smart enough to wait t=10 minutes post bagel, the curve dips to -1.

Is it the case that creative acts cannot be sustained? With hindsight, and exposure to the complete oeuvre of artists long past, it’s quite clear that the earliest works are not universally the best. Yet, how many of us are as excited for album seven from our favorite band to drop as we were for their sophomore efforts? How often is the fifth series by an author the one we’ve been waiting for? Is webcomic number 2124 as exciting as number 32?

I am now in my mid thirties. Most of the creative forces that have shaped my taste continue to produce art, and most of it feels hollow.

Maybe there’s something about the relentless need to generate more to make a living off of art that zaps it of its power. Maybe today’s artists have to continue to create out of commercial, rather than artistic necessity. Maybe being a cornerstone in my aesthetic foundations requires giving way to the future edifice it anchors. Maybe we are monsters, and artists are doomed to fail their fans who demand an impossible balance between expectations of familiarity and the demand for novelty.

In a world with so much, easily accessible art, I am glad I can still find new works that excite me. I am also grateful that I can continue to enjoy the work I already know and love. But I worry about how this impacts the economics of art in our world, and it feels like a raw deal for anyone creative.

As a fan, it seems I will always drift away from the artist, even if their best work is ahead.

I use the LG Ultrafine 5K every day. I bought it about four and a half years ago for $750 (and I bought a second one that Elsa now uses for $650 off of Woot). At the time, I couldn’t believe it sold for $999 new and yet, there seem to be no reasonable competition.

Years later, and I have two problems: horrible image retention and the monitor market has only gotten worse.

Every computer screen I look at has been high DPI for 5 years. Every mobile screen for even longer. It’s just shocking to me that the whole market has decided that high DPI doesn’t matter. I can’t imagine going backwards.

But here I am, with my LG monitor, with image retention bugging me daily, and what are the options?

Drop twice was much money as I spent the first time for a monitor no one seems to care about and never got better? I get that gamers are driving the market today, but I’ve never been more convinced Apple was wrong to get out of this market.

Looking at some real data¹ in Allocate, Allovue’s tool for resource allocation modeling. Two different funding formulas, with a total cost with in 0.5% of each other. Look at the swings on a per-school basis.

Without reviewing results, both models seem like reasonable choices. The variance is astonishing.

Forgot to take a picture of the mac and cheese.

The last few weeks I have been experimenting with a new focus mode setting. I call it Down Time, and I now have it turned on most of the time when I am not working or in Sleep.

The only notifications I receive are messages from Elsa. I have no apps on the Home Screens for Down Time. All widgets, except for my home row.

I originally let a few other people and apps “through” my notifications. Turns out, there’s really no app that deserves to break through. Maybe something like Flighty when traveling. And the people? I pretty quickly realized that no one I talk to had any expectation of immediate responses always. They sure don’t respond right away most of the time. So it turns out letting them notify me was more like feeling good someone “liked” my post on social media. It was about a little endorphin hit because someone was thinking of me. Those hits are hollow though, and the addiction is shockingly easy to break.

Overall, the feeling is one of just a little more quiet. I like that in focus modes I can still see there are non-Elsa notifications when/if I want to look. I check my phone often enough that I don’t really miss anything— sometimes there’s a message that’s been sitting around for 10-30 minutes. I never miss anything critical, and I check my phone often enough that nothing sits for hours unless I let it intentionally. Maybe this is more extreme than how you want to spend your weekends, but I would strongly recommend zero-basing your phone and only adding back what you miss. It will probably be less than you think.

We’re going on vacation this weekend. I’m heading out to the woods to hang out in a beautiful cabin near the mountains just prior to ski season. There won’t be much to do and that’s the point.

This is a break. Not travel, but rest, before the start of holidays ¹ and the end of year rush.

I have no plans. I’m bringing some books and maybe a few magazines. We’ll probably make hot chocolate or something.

Maybe I should buy a Lego set or pack a board game (got any two player games you like?). But mostly, I’m hoping for the kind of intentional quiet that recharges the body and leads to some genuine creativity.

There will be no work communication, no frenzied distracted days. If I choose to do something, it will be with my complete attention, something I am sorely missing these days.

And hopefully there will be some great pictures.

I finally read The Why of Newsletters by Robin Rendle. A great, quick, and beautiful read. You should click on the link and spend a few minutes and then come back, but if I were to summarize the piece:

1. Newsletters are easy to write.
2. They have an automatic notification system.
3. They have a built in payment mechanism.

Websites are missing all three, but that is a choice. There are solutions to (1) that could be popularized. We all know RSS is great for (2), but maybe it needs to be built into a place we already go, like the browser, to have the same advantages of email. But I think (3) is trickier and the solutions further off–for some reason, we’re perfectly ok with an email model where folks can and do forward paid newsletters all the time (and often have a weblink that only offers security through obscurity to read a copy of a newsletter), but afraid to have website payment structures that are as easy to circumvent.

The unspoken part of all this is the impact of Google Reader. I still know very smart people who loved Google Reader and have refused or bounced off of other RSS-based reading systems. That includes folks who are not using social media as an RSS replacement. I don’t know that solving (2) and (3) in Google Reader would have worked, but it sure feels like mainstream weight behind RSS in the form of Google Reader had power. I have often wondered if Firefox had kept marketshare and used Pocket less as a “save this part of the web” and more as a “read the web better in a stream” if that may have helped.

I’m frustrated by the rise of newsletters. I’m thrilled to be able to read great content and follow an author ¹. But I really don’t want your writing in my email inbox. The design of all newsletters is very same-y and lacking in personality, although at least they all tend to have an ok reading experience. The length of newsletters feels all wrong–I feel as though many paid newsletters feel the need to write significantly longer pieces to justify their cost. I’d prefer shorter pieces, even if it meant more of them. My own blog is chronological within a day, because I think of my writing here as an ongoing journey within a day of what I’m dong and thinking (a… web log, if you’ll indulge me), and I’d rather read a few ordered 250-500 word thoughts than once a week be hit with your 3000 word news magazine think-piece that would never be bought by a news magazine. And lastly, I can’t say that I think any of the common middleware providers here, mostly Substack, are places I want to spend a lot of money. I’m disappointed more people aren’t using solutions like Ghost. I hope that Automattic would do some cool stuff with Tumblr in this direction.

I guess it doesn’t really matter to me in the end–I use a funky email address provided by Feedbin, which gets all those newsletters into my RSS reader of choice (Reeder), and I get to enjoy more writing from people I’m interested in following. But it is bizarre to see the writing revolution happening from within closed, centralized platforms using a weird open platform (email) for distribution while the web is sitting right there.

After presenting at the annual conference of the Colorado Association of School Business Officials (on equity-based budgeting), I got to stick around for a weekend in Vail about a week post peak foliage. No complaints about being back on the road for work.

I thought there was no way I’d notice the higher refresh rate on the iPhone 13 Pro. I don’t notice it at all on my iPad Pro, so I really didn’t think it’s a big deal. But it’s quite noticeable on the smaller screen. I think I like it, but I absolutely can understand why some people will turn this off. There’s a bit of an uncanny valley effect, not unlike high frame rate video.

Do I think this is worth buying a phone for? No. Do I think I’d notice it after a couple of days? Probably not. I bet I could switch back to a phone without the higher refresh rate and not notice it. But the difference is real, noticeable, and nice.

In the early days of the internet, my hope was to be noticed. I wanted people to respond to a forum post. I wanted people to recognize my handle and know who I was and where I came from. I wanted to construct an identity among strangers that was meaningful and respected. I was a teenager, and what more does a teenager want than acceptance by peers and adults alike as a member? But there was another difference–I was speaking within a community of strangers.

During this time when I’m turning down the dial on social media feeds, I wonder: do I still want to be noticed? Frankly, being noticed seems to be a nightmare.

But it’s hard to build communities on top of a globally shared commons. On the classic college quadrangle you might put down a blanket and stake out a spot under a tree with friends. You might setup a table for a club or group with signs and materials and goodies to attract others. You might be projecting loudly making a statement looking to net in passerbys. Social media believes that it is creating this type of public commons ¹.

The problem is that social media is overcrowded, so the separation into smaller communities is hard to maintain. Worse than that, social media wants to be crowded. Social media makes its money when we’re jammed packed in just a few huge crowds. So the tools they provide on their platform are designed specifically to draw in bystanders and to amplify each individual voice so that it bleeds into every surrounding community. Everyone is close together, everyone is shouting, and everyone participates in simultaneously overlapping communities.

We don’t have “rooms” or “boards” or “channels”–we have the feed. I think this is a huge part of why Slack, Discord, and Twitch have found popularity for social use. They are designed to be smaller communities and they provide some organizational power within those communities to find a space on the quad where you can engage in exactly the activity you want. You can actually tell what community you’re trying to be a part of and gain acceptance through participating in what that community values.

What does my feed value? Why does anyone talk to me as an individual communicating across many non-overlapping communities that I want to be noticed by? How do I find my way into any of those spaces? And, importantly, in a world that feels increasingly isolated and lonely to me,² how do I find a supportive community?

I used to defend the relationships I built online as “real”, scoffing at the idea that there was anything lesser about my “virtual” friends and community. I was right then. I couldn’t take that same stance about the internet we have now.

If my goal is to build community, I need to make that my project. The tools we have make participation wholly insufficient. I think I need to find ways to translate weak ties into meaningful bonds by taking the budding friendships and community out of the social commons. That may mean taking the step to find a way to meet in person, or getting an email address, or getting on a video call or something. Maybe it means finding a way to work together. But social media has taught me to collect as many weak ties as possible with no mechanism to bring them together into community.

This tweet was originally embedded but has been replaced with a screenshot due to changes in the Twitter service

Some things happening now:

• Weight loss has gone well since returning to the gym in April 2021. I am about as fit as I’ve ever been in my adult life. I’m not feeling a lot of strain with keeping up with my physical health, so I’m hoping to keep this rolling, permanently. For whatever reason, this time everything is working.
• That vacation to Tulum was both great and terrible – we got away, we rode bikes, we hung out on the beach, and we ate some great food. It was nice to be active somewhere else. But for days during that trip I had a sinking feeling. Anxiety? Stress? I’m not sure. But I found the idle time challenging, and I think overall my feeling was, “Uh oh, that’s a lot of emotional weight from the past year and a half and I think it’s all catching up right now.”
• So this summer has been mentally hard. I’ve had good days and bad days. I’ve been meditating lately, and I think maybe that’s helping. But the whole pandemic has been hard and the delta variant snatching away what normalcy I was starting to feel has been devastating.
• We’re going on more vacations, and I’m quite excited, because I’ve learned the alternative is a greater risk to my health right now.
• I picked up the pace of reading this summer and it feels great.
• I’ve logged out and deleted the Twitter apps (and all tweets, which happens after 60 days anyway). I’ve reduced some of my RSS subscriptions. I turned off easily finding my archives on the blog. This is not meant to be permanent, just seeking some additional quiet. I need a reset. I am allowing too many things out of my control to impact my emotions.

Feel free to email me if you’d like to correspond and you don’t have my phone number.

Here are a couple of recent dog pictures.

Previous Now Page

The failure of federal rent relief is a great demonstration of what happens when the law and policy is written without consideration for bureaucratic capacity. If we want government to be effective, we need to ask government, “What are you most capable of doing today to solve this problem?” If we don’t like that answer, we need to simultaneously fund government do what they can and fund government to build future capacity more in line with what is needed.

Reform often comes after failure, but disconnected from the funding and immediate policy objective. Imagine if while we funded expanded unemployment, we also funded states to have better systems for direct deposit access, Postal Service banking to have universal access to consumer banking needs, and dramatically changed the complexity of qualifying for unemployment.

I’m not sure what the equivalent is for rent, but there are clearly systems, capacities, and relationships government simply does not have that makes rent assistance virtually impossible. If we don’t like that, we need to fix it for the next crisis.

The failure of so much leftist, activist politics is a complete disinterest in making government better at its job and caring about the details of governing. We’re so busy worrying about ideological purity that fights over actual policy become purely symbolic– even when you win, it turns out our government cannot do what you want well.

And so the cycle begins as the right points out ineptitude as though that’s an inevitable, permanent feature of any government action.

We need to make government work well while we can ask government to do more. It can’t be either/or.

Some sequels are strong because they’re a continuation of an unfinished story. Some pull forward C-plot characters to tell a new story.

Few sequels take place after a “complete” story and picks up with the same characters to deliver another great, complete story.

The Hidden Palace achieves this.

I have never been the member of a social bookclub. It’s kind of strange, because reading is one of the few activities I have always made time for. ¹

The thing is reading is fundamentally asocial for me. I enjoy reading or listening to criticism on books I’ve read, but mostly, I enjoy reading and thinking about things myself. I don’t want to be an active participant in literary criticism. I read to learn and I read to feel. So much of my fiction reading, and really my consumption of all creative works, is about having a meaningful emotional experience without vocalization or analysis. So much of my non-fiction reading is about trying out ideas and hearing the steel man argument from someone I have no personal or emotional relationship with.

I don’t really want to be in a bookclub. I don’t want to have to find words to express why Piranesi was beautiful, or the meaning I found in The Hidden Palace , or how The Midnight Bargain’s simple surface feminism still had me pumping my fist in the air. I don’t want to have a pot luck about these things once a month, turning my joyful reading into homework.

But, I do want friends who know The Starless Sea was breathtaking, who can find themselves fantasizing of the bonds of found families in Becky Chamber’s books , and consider the power of stories from Alexandra Rowland’s books , and delight in being lost in Naomi Novak’s fairy tale worlds . We don’t need to have a bookclub, but I know we’d be fast friends if you connect with the same art that I do.

While I rebel against Rob’s recognizable and childish, “… what really matters is what you like, not what you are like,” I understand how powerful that line is. What you like so often reveals what you are like, in inexpressible ways.

Most of my friends don’t read the books I read. I wouldn’t even recommend that they do. But there are a few people who share my tastes and I can’t help but to feel this keeps us connected in a different, powerful, and intimate way through the years. ²

While I’m mad at how the US has performed during COVID, and especially our government health authorities, I still have bristled at completely undermining their authority. This is at least equal parts fear of the lack of better alternatives and a recognition that, “the painfully visible gap between the institutions’ claims of competence and their actual performance,” while real, also strike me as “a function of the limits of human knowledge,” as Martin Gurri wrote.

This crisis of authority is real, but their failures to be perfect are not. And in some ways, my frustrations are feeding a narrative that requires, at times, magical or impossible standards. That’s why specific criticism is so important— the early communication on masks was wrong, but possibly not bad ¹ decisions. Whereas the slow process to full approval for the mRNA vaccines and hesitance to introduce vaccine mandates of any kind feel more like both bad and wrong decisions.

Our government’s handling of COVID-19 is littered with wrong decisions and bad decisions. We would do well to focus criticism on the latter, lest we succumb to a hopeless nihilism that will only leave us less prepared to face the next crisis.

I was being driven crazy by the sound of my guitar. What’s wrong? The tuner says I’m fine. Am I going out of tune because I’m pressing too hard on the strings? Why do octaves all sound good? Is that a rattle/hum/buzz?

After 15 minutes, I realized what it was the interaction between the note I was playing and the sound of my ceiling fan being just slightly different such that I could hear the subtle beats of notes in unison out of tune. Turn off the fan, wait for it to stop. Play. Everything sounds fine.

Fuck.