Howdy!
Well, I turned thirty this month. It’s weird! I’m still having a hard time coming to grips with it, to be honest. All in all, it’s been a great thirty years, and I’m looking forward to the next thirty.
I think I signed up to be on the Boss as a Service waitlist all the way back in 2018. I received an invite this month, and though I’m not sure if I’m still in the honeymoon period or not, I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten this much stuff done. Pallavi is really great to work with, and I’ve already accomplished some really big goals of mine.
Other life stuff happened, too! We went down to Richmond for a quick weekend trip, which was nice — it was my first time being back there in a really long time. We also re-arranged our office and got some new furniture for it; it’s even nicer in here now.
Music
Writing
I did a fair amount of writing this month, and some of it is online!
I wrote the definitive guide to the unwritten rules of playlist creation. I hope this helps you make your perfect playlist.
I also published a little knowledge base of every Iain Banks book that I’ve read, along with my review. Gotta catch ’em all!
After that, I threw together a guide to storing really big strings with Prisma.
Also, we’ve been kicking around publishing a post like this on the work blog for a little bit, and it’s come together! Here’s a post about a fun hardware project rjbs and I worked on that was mostly a software project.
Programming
I did a few kind of miscellaneous things this month. One big one is that I wrote a Mastodon bot that just posts every song I scrobble to last.fm: https://oldinternet.net/@joe_music_stream
The most important project one here, though, is that I was able to write a whole bunch of code for my submission management system, Editorland. I have "phase one" totally done, and now it’s just on to making it prettier, making it read to be shoved onto a to-be-determined cloud hosting provider, and building all the other stuff adjacent stuff that needs to go with providing a service like this. Exciting!
Reading
I read The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd, and I really didn’t like it. Since I take a blanket “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” stance, I’ll just leave it at that.
I’m slowly working through Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks. More to come when I finish it!
I finally finished Getting Things Done. I highly recommend it, though the last few chapters were a little repetitive.
failbetter
This month, failbetter published:
- "The Man Who Ate the World" by Mike Keller-Wilson
- "Ovulating in Church" by Heather Lanier
Stats
- I typed 790,000 keys and clicked 121,785 times.
- I listened to 1,649 songs. (A 72% increase over last month!!)
