April 2024

Hello!

Wow, this article marks the start of year five of monthly updates! That’s 48 monthly updates so far.

I think the theme of this month has been “delightful conversations.” I’ve gotten the chance to meet so many great people this month; in addition to some 1-on-1 conversations, there were some fantastic events as well:

I went to Emerging Tech East, which was frankly the best conference I’ve ever been to. I learned so much, and so many of the talks were incredibly inspiring. My notes from the two-day conference were nearly 10,000 words long!

I also threw a birthday party for Philly Tech Calendar‘s first birthday, which was a blast. Shoutout to Josh for bringing a cake!

In video game news, I played and beat the Switch Link’s Awakening remake, with relatively minimal amounts of having to look things up online. It’s a cute game; I enjoyed it.

I wrote up a list of many of the silly playlists I’ve made on a common theme; these are like “electronic music that mentions driving at night” or “some songs by bands with ten syllable names.”

Not on this list is a silly playlist I made of a bunch of songs that use my Fog on Mountain photograph as the album cover — currently sitting at seven!

The only publicly-visible code I wrote was to take some last.fm accounts and find the overlap over the past week. This is, essentially: where does your list of your 100 most-listened songs over the past week overlap with someone else’s list? Here’s that code!

I didn’t watch any movies this month!

writing

Here’s the posts from the leadership blog this month:

books

This month, I finished 4 books:

  • All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster by Joseph Menn. This one was fantastic — I highly recommend it.
  • The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks. This was also really good — two five-star books in a row! I wrote in the Iain Banks review collection: troubling and cinematic, overflowing with atmosphere.
  • Private Equity: A Memoir by Carrie Sun. It was okay; I wasn’t a big fan of the writing style, but the content was captivating.
  • Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow. It was okay; I wasn’t as much of a fan of this one as I was his other work. I probably wasn’t the target audience, to be honest.

I should also mention Fundamentals of Semiconductor Manufacturing and Process Control by Spanos and May, which was a good read, but I skimmed the chemistry and statistics. It’s a great resource if you’re interested!

I’m currently reading The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann — I’m really enjoying it so far.

failbetter

This month, failbetter published:

stats 

This month:

  • I typed 833,792 keys and clicked 85,266 times.
  • I listened to 1,683 songs.
  • I got a perfect month for 6 out of 7 habits, and started logging 7 more habits on top of those.