Yeah that was a pretty good breakfast.

Ecto is the best ORM-like I’ve ever used, but I still find with complex queries that it’s way easier to express myself in SQL. There are definitely some benefits to doing it the “right” way, but there’s a lot of pain writing in one language to get a specific result in another.

Follow up thought on self-censorship– my own decision to post or not is based at least partly on whether I even want to have a conversation. It’s ok to have thoughts and feelings, write them out, and then decide that the writing was the point, not sharing, and not conversation.

There is a universe between a complete idea and a complete execution.

My take reading some posts going around about self-censorship in the circle of blogs I read.

For most of human history, an individuals’ thoughts and opinions rarely left a small circle of people who were essentially kin. Not sharing all of your opinions in public isn’t self-censorship— it’s wise.

In my opinion, there are three types of opinions people share that result in having a pretty bad time.

1. Someone holds an opinion that has been pretty poorly thought out that falls along familiar, fallacious ground. Folks who have thought deeply about that issue/area have confronted the naive view so many times that they are unkind. This is the classic Internet forum issue of the n00b. It’s terrible, but folks who are experts are often exhausted by novice opinion. Because the internet freely mixes novices and experts and screens are easy to depersonalize, we get unpleasantness.

2. Someone holds a deplorable opinion they’re sharing under the mistaken belief they’re among other people who share their horrific belief. Think most racists or misogynists on the internet.

3. Someone is a member of a marginalized group exposed to the people in (2). Of course, the people in group (2) immediately claim they’re in group (3) when called out on their shit— it’s their only play.

I sympathize a lot with folks in group (1). Most of us have been there before, and most of us could do better to practice empathy in that situation. And sometimes, it makes sense to read and listen more than write and talk. No one wants to be told to read the fucking manual, but it’s also hard to answer a question for the 100th time with the same patience as the first time. If I felt the need to debunk idiotic climate denialism every time I read it, I’d go nuts. Maybe that’s group 1.5– those of us not answering because we’re exhausted.

The people in group (2) should have a bad time of it. I don’t feel bad calling them out, and I actually do believe enough people saying something helps to change views over time. I don’t think people who say they are “self-censoring” because they’re being called out are actually engaging in any kind of censorship. Facing the consequences of holding deplorable positions (being shamed) is not censorship.

The folks in group (3) are the real people who are censored. Marginalized folks are actually being bullied into silence because of who they are. It sucks. But also, these folks have (in my opinion) been heard more and are more empowered to speak than ever before. The fact that some folks are facing consequences in group (2) is both a marvel and relatively new.

Sometimes people claim they’re being censored when lots of people disagree with them. I think this almost always come from someone who is unwilling to reconsider their views. Rather than feel shame, I wonder what would happen if they took a deep breath and asked, “if lots of people I normally like, trust, and agree with feel very differently than I do in this case, maybe I’ve missed something?”

A thing I’m learning about myself single-dog parenting this week– while I like spending some time on my own in a different city, I do not like being alone and working at home.

Do you think we should try to bring the forums back? When I say we I don’t mean me and you but we people who care about a certain type of web. Do you think there’s still a place for those? Or do you think we’re so used to social media that people will prefer to move to Mastodon or some other decentralized social network?

I hear you about “online only” relationships thought. I have quite a few of those and they’re honestly great. And the best part is when you finally do end up meeting someone in person and it doesn’t feel strange at all. I believe that digital relationships can be as powerful as IRL ones. Both types have pros and cons but they’re both powerful in their own way.

Your urban hiking thing is neat. Picking two points for lunch and dinner is such a cool idea. I might have to try it at some point. Quite hard for me at the moment because I live in the middle of nowhere but maybe in the future. I’m a big fan of moving slowly through spaces. We’re all so busy these days that we often forget to enjoy our surroundings.

Since this is going to be the last letter I’m going to ask you a couple of questions.

The first one is related to your work news: how does it feel? I’ve always been self-employed as I mentioned in a previous email so I’m curious how it feels to know your entire workplace will change as a result of an acquisition. Is it disorienting? Is it exciting? Is it scary? Does it make you want to change job entirely? I’m curious to know what’s going through your head at this moment.

The second question is probably silly but it popped into my head when you wrote “the start up I’ve worked at for almost a decade”: at what point a start-up stops being a startup and it’s just a company?

Lastly, do you think the letters experiment was something worth doing? Did you learn anything new about yourself over these months?

Thank you for having me as a guest on your blog, I really enjoyed these exchanges.

Ciao, Manu

Hi Manu,

I think that forums continue to have their place, but they’re dead as social places on the web. What made them great communities was the magic of being a place that drew in people of similar interests who then just… stuck around for lack of somewhere else to go on the web. The number of easy “social” options where “everyone is” makes the magic of off-topic posts and relationships built on forums somewhat irrelevant. I think it’s hard to invest in the kind of community glue that used to exist on forums among regulars and translate that into a broader social interaction than it used to be and that’s probably here to stay.

That said, I think there are lessons to be learned from the world of forums. It’s right in that paragraph– there’s a magic to bringing people into a space with common interests and letting that be the basis of a community. That’s how “academic Twitter” or “black Twitter” (two bad examples because they represent, in a way, identity groups more than common interests, but they come to mind as known, named things) or activist hashtags functioned– they were like interest-driven spaces that became communities. Common interests serve as the foundation, but the load-bearing beams and walls of a community are the personal relationships that build between regular participants.

On to work and how I feel… I feel, well, everything. I ended a post on LinkedIn about the transition that I felt both hope and determination for what’s to come, and that still feels like the best summary of how I feel. I think there’s a huge opportunity here to take the work I’ve done for the last decade to a much larger scale and to have the support to go from “a start up that feels like it could end at any moment” to “a permanent fixture in US K-12 education and maybe more”. I think all the problems we set out to solve are still present and we’re in the best position we’ve ever been (and of anyone else out there) to really address it. That may sound like the hope,but instead that’s the determination. I am determined to do everything I can to take advantage of this opportunity.

The hope is not knowing if it’ll work. I’ve never known if any of this would work in anyway, and I continue to hope that I’m the right person to be a part of it. I hope that we’ll make good choices, that my coworkers that have been a part of building this thing will keep at it with me, and that we’ll add new people to contribute over time that level us up. But I know there’s every chance that I will fail, separate and in addition to whether “we” collectively will fail. Right now, I feel like we hit an important milestone, but I still feel far from done.

I was smiling reading your question about “the startup I worked at for over a decade”. This is actually something we used to discuss internally to help people understand the language we use about the business. For us, start up does not indicate “a new business”. Instead, when we say start up, what we mean is a business model. We considered ourselves a start up not because of size or age, but because we took outside investment in exchange for ownership in the company and designed the company to prioritize revenue growth over profitability. Our measure of success was top line revenue growth while ensuring our model could achieve profitability, but we would invest every dollar that came in (and then some) toward growth– both investing in sales and R&D. This is in contrast to a “new” business or a “small business” that is largely owned by proprietors and is geared toward achieving profitability every year. The only way Allovue would have ever ceased being a startup is if we changed our business model. Companies can be startups for a long time, provided its investors support that model. Startup, in that sense, does not really refer to the age of the business. Instead, it’s more “this is a business that needed ‘startup’ capital”– we had a business that took a lot of upfront investment before what we built could be sold.

Letters has been a fun project. As you can tell from my late response here, life often made it hard to be truly “weekly”. Many months on my site did not get a post per week. Sometimes that was my fault, sometimes it was the person who signed up for that month. I decided early on that I was not going to get crazy about it or generate any pressure for myself or others– an obligation that felt bad seemed counter to what I was trying to achieve. Despite that irregularity in a project that was meant to be regular, I’m confident that this year I wrote more long posts and more personal posts than ever before. Letters has made my blog feel less like social media reaction takes and more like a place I share a bit of myself. I have gotten to know some people I didn’t before, or know some people I knew but in a new way.

Maybe my favorite thing about Letters is that others were inspired to do a similar form of writing on their own blogs. I love reading letters/pen pals/whatever folks choose to call it on other blogs. It makes me feel like this last year I contributed a small bit to building the kind of community I’d want to be in online. I’m not trying to be well known. My blog is not designed for that, my temperament is not designed for that, my goals are not that. So it’s nice, in spite of that, to have made a bit of a ripple.

This has been a great way to sunset (in its current form) my main creative project for the last year. Thanks for being a part of it. And for anyone else who made it to the end of this post who has been reading Letters or participated in it, thanks for being an important part of my 2023 / 4.

Jason

I’m not sure I’ve hated a product upgrade more than Zoom’s decision to try to become a chat app.

Today, I woke up and Elsa had a whole day planned for us. We went to a new coffee shop together, where I did some writing and caught up on some reading. We then walked to Cross Street Market for lunch followed by Protean, a used books and record store (among other things) I’ve heard a lot about it but never went to.

We then came home for a bit before I went out to play volleyball. I learned once again how much my whole mood can be lifted by playing sports with friends. I keep writing about it here because I keep finding myself struggling and forgetting how physically transformative sports are.

We play sports. Play is fun.

It melts away my anxiety.

When I got home, Elsa had ordered Thai and.now we’re watching some TV. In an hour or so, I’ll take a shower, read for a couple of hours, and head to bed.

Mundane? Maybe. But it’s the kind of day I really needed. I needed time away from work, away from stress, away from responsibility. I just needed some low key fun.

Tomorrow I’ll put away laundry. I’ll go food shopping and probably do a little food prep. I’ll worry more, and play (too little) ¹ volleyball again. But today was pretty good.

I think Outlook is a better calendar than Google. Without using Gsuite for work going forward, I might need to drop Fantastical and Mimestream.

I think it’s a sign of my age that most of the new “bangers” I discover each week come from my Chill Mix on Apple Music.

One thing I’ve learned time and time on the internet is people have some really wild opinions. Even professionals with real expertise in an area can come to wildly different conclusions about things that seem objective and not just a matter of preferences or taste.

I keep getting older, and the text size on Daring Fireball keeps staying the same.

Max and Prime routinely just fail to transmit video due to HDCP/DRM/something crap. I have a modern TV and receiver (both from the last 5-6 years), new HDMI cables (this year), and a Apple TV 4K (one generation behind). This is just absurd.

it’s really hard to find good, new stuff.

It really is and it’s frankly amazing that we’re still facing this issue. It’s not rare for me to mindlessly browse the web not knowing which sites I should actually visit.

I don’t do social media and outside of those platforms there really aren’t many places useful to discover new content. I think that’s one of the unfortunate consequences of people moving on social platforms: old-school forums died, for the most part.

And forums were neat! If you had an interest in something specific chances are there was a forum for you out there. And since forums weren’t stupidly huge over time you could become friends with a bunch of regulars and it was such a cool experience.

That’s something I personally miss and I don’t think social media can really recreate that. And it’s one of the best aspects of small communities. I love small online communities, especially weird and niche ones.

I wrote about the topic a few times before and I suspect I’ll touch that topic again in the future because the way is changing and I think people will slowly move back to more distributed spaces. We’re seeing a resurgence of personal blogs and maybe forums are gonna be the next type of sites to come back online.

A completely unrelated question but is there a place in your life for exploration? I’m not talking about intellectual exploration but rather physical one: going to new places, walking random paths. I’m asking you because I was doing my morning walk with the dog earlier today and decided to go up on a path I often see while driving, and after a short hike on a snowy path I stumbled on this tiny cavern, and on the other side of it there was this gorgeous view of the mountains and everything was lit by the morning sunrise.

Not sure if you do pictures on your blog but I’m going to attach one I took from that spot.

And it got me thinking about how many things we’re missing simply because we don’t explore more often. I lived here for almost a decade not knowing about that wonderful place and who knows how many others are out there.

This is something that also happens when I click links at random, now really knowing where I’m going to end up. That’s one of the reasons why the indie web is fun. You start clicking and you don’t really know where you’ll land.

Hi Manu,

Forums were neat. I can’t believe how much community they could build. I still speak nearly daily to someone I first “met” on forums when I was about 15. He lives half or more a world away right now. We’ve never met in person. In various ways, our careers and interests have continued to follow similar paths. In some ways, he’s my original “letters” pen pal. It’s strange to have known someone that well for nearly half my life and having never met. But I think that friendship is a testament to the fact that forums do create community and connections that are meaningful.

I agree that today’s social media doesn’t really recreate that magic. The closest thing was early Twitter. I first joined Twitter at a conference in 2010. It was using a hashtag at this multi-track conference and being able to follow the conversation in other rooms (and have a conversation with folks at the same talk) that felt electric. In a way, those hashtags for real world events were like pop-up forums. I don’t know that I regret being on Twitter for so long, but it’s pretty wild how it took using Twitter as an augmentation to a real world event to make me “get it” and what Twitter usage became by the end.

I’ve also written about community at least a few times. It’s really why I participate in the web at all.

I personally love exploring. What I like to do whenever I travel is just move through a city on foot. We do “urban hiking” where we purposely choose two points pretty far from each other on the map for lunch and dinner and spend our day in the spaces in between, learning what it feels like to inhabit a place. I honestly wish we did more exploring and more “nature” hiking, which is something we’ve picked up and down depending on the year and our overall energy level. I think it was Annie, who I wrote letters with earlier in the project, who used to post a photo of her hike every weekend referring to it as “church”. That’s how I feel when I get to go outside for long periods and really shut things off. Lately, this is has been really hard to find time for. I’ve been pretty busy preparing for some big changes in my work life which has subsumed all the energy I have.

A little more exploration would be a nice thing for 2024. I’m going to think about how I can make that happen.

Sorry for the late letter— as I mentioned earlier this week, on Monday we announced that Allovue— the start up I’ve worked at for almost a decade— was acquired by a large public K-12 software company, PowerSchool. In some ways, this is going to change a lot. In other ways, nothing at all will change. But this week, especially, was a hectic one with a lot of emotions to process and people to support as my team and I transition.

Hoping we can still slip one more of these in.

Jason

Crazy day. More to come.

The NY Times crossword is just too hard for me. I can normally do Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. The Apple News+ crosswords are all in the realm where I can complete them. When I see some people’s NY Times Sunday crossword times it blows my mind.

Wow. I’m glad I didn’t decide to pre-order. Turns out, I cannot use an Apple Vision Pro, or at best, would have a very different experience with it.

Finally had the time to watch The Abyss (which I bought day one it was available in 4K).

Now that’s a movie.

I had been looking forward to going to bed for hours, as I was just totally exhausted. Of course I’ve been in bed for an hour now and cannot fall asleep. Sigh. I’ve had two weeks of very healthy sleep so I really can’t complain.

It’s all connected— partisan gerrymandering and non-proportional representation leads to a sclerotic legislature, ending Chevron guts the capacity of the regulatory state to do anything, essentially forcing a level of detail into legislation that cannot be achieved— it’s the planned destruction of the state by the state.

The problem of dual staircases is one I first learned about in planning nerd circles maybe 4 years ago. Mind blowing how much handbooks developed decades ago and non-governmental bureaucracies impact housing costs and safety. It’s the same story in transportation.

Has there ever been a better example of Apple falling prey to a strategy tax than releasing Apple Vision Pro with anemic support from major apps while also announcing their ham fisted external linking rules?

I say this as someone who has 0 interest in sideloading.

Nilay Patel blogging about Framing a Frame TV, while funny, is mostly interesting to me because it shows off the success (in my opinion) of The Verge’s redesign. This content should be on The Verge and not just Nilay’s personal social feed!

Gosh this is so bad. I hate losing the local paper of record to this right wing nut.