September 2026

Whew, what a month!

It’s been a very busy one for me. Work has honestly taken up a lot of my mental capacity, so not as many outside-of-work projects to report this month.

Mobius won the rvatech/ “Team Excellence” award this year, which is an honor; it’s great working with a dedicated team of folks who are all pulling in the same direction.

Outside of that, I’m delighted that the weather is turning colder; my walks into the office have been great, as well as evening walks with the family as well.

projects

Not as busy of a month as last month, but there were a fair number of updates to my tooling. This month, I completed 363 tasks with Conveyor; compare 317 for its first month. (Those stats are padded a bit due to me adding more recurring tasks.)

A lot of that work was to improve Conveyor — my bespoke “harness” tool for my projects. Some notable improvements include:

  • Incorporating demo recordings directly into the app
  • Sequential tasks; marking tasks as blocked by others, and automatically picking them up when the blocker is shipped
  • A “pause immediately” button for when I need to change networks

…and many more small tweaks and improvements.

Polish, which is a similar app for working through our work queues at work, got a large number of improvements too: pulling in Sentry and PostHog artifacts, a remote view for my phone, tracking token usage and carbon offset purchases, a demo mode, time tracking, more spec management, more visualizations and management tools, and even more smaller improvements.

Also this month, I created two new tech calendars:

…mostly for work-related reasons.

Some improvements to other existing projects:

  • Hyperspace Notecards got some more card management tooling, and I’ve also added a “time writing” goal in addition to the extant word count goal,
  • excitable.dev (“Joecial media”) got some syndication improvements and preview images

I hacked on a few new projects as well:

  • A version 2.0 for my newsletter tooling, to pull all of my newsletters onto one platform and to stop using other services,
  • A personal learning tool that I just didn’t take the time to use more and iterate on.

That’s all on that front; there were a few more false starts for projects that I won’t get into here.

music

This month, M and I went to Iron Blossom:

SKORTS, with a guitarist leaning over the basist
Phantogram, shrouded in fog, with Sarah doing a cool kick
LCD Soundsystem, below their disco ball, with James kind of gesturing toward Nancy
Angine de Poitrine, with inflatable dice flying above the crowd

It was a fun time; it was great to see LCD Soundsystem again, as well as some new favorites, like SKORTS. I also greatly enjoyed the opportunity to mildly embarrass myself by running into the folks from SKORTS and telling them they rock.

Of course, here’s the new music playlist for the month:

books

This month, I finished 6 books:

  • A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett
  • Devil in a Blue Dress by Kevin Ryan, Walter Mosley
  • Fight Me! by Austin Grossman
  • The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
  • Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey
  • The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin

You can probably tell that I’ve been reading more in my downtime instead of watching YouTube or whatever.

I’m currently reading:

  • 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Benjamin P. Hardy, Dan Sullivan
  • Yumi and the Nightmare Painter by Brandon Sanderson

photography

Here’s some other photos for the month:

The inside of an architectural surplus container, with chaotic shelves of pipes and lighting fixtures, and a big "4" painted on a door in the background.
M wearing sunglasses in front of the displays full of pizza in Zorch in Carytown

failbetter

This month, failbetter published:

stats

This month:

  • I typed 756,587 keys and clicked 111,554 times. (I did pass 100 million keys on Whatpulse this month, after 21 years of logging these stats.)
  • I listened to 1,241 songs.
  • I posted 12 times on excitable.dev.