Happy Halloween!
What an incredibly busy month. On top of work being extremely busy — with some great results — I got a lot done outside of work as well.
Midterm elections in the US are on this upcoming Tuesday; please vote if you’re able to!
projects
the PHPocalypse, and other vulnerabilities
As many of you are aware, a large number of security vulnerabilities across the web were announced last week. This ended up being quite a bit of a pain for me, someone who has been building things for the web for close to two decades. Though I don’t reach for PHP or frameworks built on PHP anymore, I had quite a few services/apps/websites running that have been happily trucking along, rarely needing a nudge in the right direction.
My strategy for this was essentially a scramble where I shut down everything that was running on bespoke infrastructure. On top of a few minor updates across quite a few active projects, many of my standalone pages that weren’t really getting any traffic are now gone, and my vague plans to migrate two of my most important projects had to be hyper-accelerated: failbetter is now off Drupal and the previous hosting provider, and my blog is now no longer running on WordPress. Instead, these are now static sites using Astro, with Decap CMS mixed in for easier editing for failbetter.
This felt like cleaning the shed by frantically tossing everything out of it while the shed was on fire, picking some things out of the pile and building a quick replacement shed for them, and consigning the rest to the garbage bin. There’s still some more work to do here — particularly to get failbetter back into full production mode — but at least it’s fully handled, and I’m not longer worried about a bunch of servers that have been hanging out for a very long time.
more tooling improvements
I am now fully off Obsidian, having replaced it completely with my own tooling:
I built a new todo system for Conveyor. I used to use a bespoke markdown file for my daily work — both at Mobius and otherwise — with a format that I’ve been honing for years now. Conveyor replaces this with:
- Normal tasks
- Recurring tasks at any cadence
- Tracking upcoming events
- Arbitrary notes for the day, which can be promoted to tasks (or, likewise, tasks can be kicked back over to the notes section)
- Noting project ideas that aren’t quite ready for work to start
And, of course, this all integrates with the rest of the harness so I can easily get started on or fully automate any of these tasks.
Here’s the Conveyor ledger for the month:
hyperspace notecards, my personal writing app, also got some improvements to replace arbitrary text files in Obsidian, as well as a bespoke mobile version served over Tailscale.
polish, my bespoke harness for work, got some quality-of-life improvements, some improvements to the mobile version, and better tracking for our Q4 goals.
plos racer
I spent some time this month working on a game: essentially, a combination of the racing game wipEout and WarioWare. Imagine a racing game where, instead of red shells, you play minigames (“intrusions”) while also needing to focus on the road.
Still early days on this. I’ve honestly run out of steam on the project a bit, but it would be great to keep hacking on this; I’d love to use this as an excuse to record some game music.
other projects
Claude Code “mods” were announced this month; to play around with the new feature, I made one to improve upon the native spellcheck: better-spellcheck.
I added dev-null.sh as a syndication target for excitable.dev.
I hacked on a few other projects that didn’t really go anywhere — like, for example, a small amount of work on every.restaurant, which I was reminded of when the domain renewed (ouch).
music
Please enjoy this month’s new music playlist:
writing
- One new blog post this month: “I don’t think LLMs are making you lazy.”
- Also a blog-post like post on excitable.dev: “Making writing fun.”
- I spent some time writing chapters for a workflow book about what “agile” software development looks like in 2026. I ended up dropping this pretty early on into the project, though.
films
This month, I watched 3 films:
- M and I went to the theater to see the Jet Lag: The Game – Japanorama Finale, which was delightful
- I rewatched The Social Network
- M instigated me into watching Twilight with her, which I had never seen. It was fine!
Have I mentioned that I love Letterboxd? You can follow me there.
books
I read a ton this month. I accomplished my goal of 100%ing the currently-existing works in the Cosmere. So, in order of when I read it:
A batch of Brandon Sanderson:
- I read Yumi and the Nightmare Painter (a Hoid’s Travails novel)
- I came back and read the short story “Mistborn: Secret History”
- I read one of the early Cosmere novels that I’d missed, Warbreaker
- And then “The Hope of Elantris,” another short story.
In parallel with these, I was working through the non-fiction book 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Sullivan and Harvy, which I finished in the middle of my Cosmere quest.
So then, back to the Cosemere — three short stories next:
- The Eleventh Metal
- The Emperor’s Soul, which I really enjoyed
- Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell
Next:
- The graphic novel White Sand (Sanderson et al.)
- A quick break to blitz the final Marty Hench novel, Picks and Shovels, by Cory Doctorow.
After that, wrapping up the Cosmere:
- The Sunlit Man, which was good; I had to reference the Coppermind quite often during this one (in a fun way)
- Hilariously, I got one sentence into the introduction to Isles of the Emberdark and realized I’d accidentally skipped “Sixth of the Dusk,” so I went back and read that short story…
- …only to go back to read a sentence further in Emberdark’s intro, which notes that “Sixth” is fully represented in that novel, with the short story’s chapters interleaved in the exposition of the plot. Whoops! Though I then skipped those chapters, Emberdark was a good time.
- Wrapping things up with The Fires of December, which is now possibly my favorite Sanderson work.
Then, finally, I just now finished Red Rising by Pierce Brown.
So, all told: eight books, six short stories, one graphic novel, and I’m now waiting ’til late next year at the earliest for more Cosmere.
Obviously I spent very many evenings and weekends this month reading, which I definitely needed.
photography
This month, I added 128 photos that I took to my photo library. Here’s M from when we went to “Garden Glow” at Maymont:
failbetter
This month, failbetter published “Don Simms and the Invisible” by Darren Morris. (We should be back on the regular publication schedule soon, after the migration.)
stats
This month:
- I typed 764,239 keys and clicked 105,822 times.
- I listened to 1,243 songs.
- I posted 21 times on excitable.dev.
