July 2022
Updates
This past month I worked on a few house projects, fixed my van, and became a maintainer of Simple.css.
The house projects have had me crawling in the attic and under the house while the weather has been in the upper 90s with 80% humidity, which isn’t fun, but once I’ve peeled off my soaked clothing, showered, and rehydrated, it feels good to knock out some longstanding items on the list.
My van had transmission issues, but it ended up being a simple fix. The linkage from the shifter lever to the transmission fell off when the bushing that kept it on deteriorated, and it turns out there was a recall for the issue. The parts were less than $10, but thanks to the recall, they were hard to find. My father-in-law is a mechanic though and found the parts for me, and things are working now! I plan to write more about this later.
I’m excited about helping my friend Kev with Simple.css. I’ve been handling issues, fixing bugs, and working on some starter kits for static site generators such as 11ty, Hugo, and Jekyll. Improving documentation is on the roadmap as well.
🐱 Cats

It’s hard to photograph cats in action, but I managed to snap this shot while Serena was going bonkers.
📝 Blogging
I published 8 posts this month, which close to my average this year and way over my goal of 1-2 a month.
The Good Ones
📖 Reading
I read no books, but I did buy Pragmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt, based on a recommendation from Wouter Groeneveld, and the companion book Practices of an Agile Developer because Scrum is something I’ve been learning about lately.
Articles I liked this month
- Better RSS Categories
- You should take more screenshots
- The Great Fiction of AI - great article about novelists using AI writers, and I like the article’s design.
- Thoughts on the potato diet
- Crappy Wiring
📚 Learning
I contributed to OpenInTerminal while knowing nothing about Swift/macOS development. I probably spent an hour trying to figure out signing issues, just to get the source to compile in Xcode before changing anything. And my contribution was a few lines to add support for WezTerm, but I’m proud that it got merged anyway 🎉. I want to do more macOS development for fun.
I’m reading up on Scrum and Agile practices. My first thoughts after reading about the roles of the Product Owner and Scrum Master is that it must be rare to have a product owner who actually knows both sides of the business/development coin, so I theorize most Scrum setups devolve into pitting the Product Owner against the Scrum Master.
Waterfall is another development practice on my list to look into, because I’ve read that a lot of teams end up with a hybrid of Scrum/Waterfall.
It’s all incredibly boring stuff, but useful to know while job hunting.
My friend Kolton helped me discover that some parts of site reliability engineering (SRE) fits what I do for hobbies—configuring things, keeping services running, working with Linux on servers, tracking down errors, benchmarking, optimizing, etc. I like that it’s a jack-of-all-trades kind of job, where you need to know a little bit of everything.
💪 Fitness
I started walking around the block most days—to the muffin shop. It’s a start.
🎮 Gaming
I fired up the Xbox a week ago after listening to the Hades soundtrack and getting the itch to play it again.
Some other games I’ve been playing:
- Naraka: Bladepoint - The battle royale genre got old for me after PUBG and Apex: Legends, but this one has a unique take that I like. It’s got swords, fluid controls, inaccurate muskets and bows, and while being a total noob I completely wiped a squad of 3 by myself. But this led to me being too confident.
- Halo Infinite - While I haven’t finished the campaign yet (the achievement tracker says I’m 28% through) I started playing multiplayer and it’s been enjoyable. In particular, I like using The People’s Elbow and the energy sword.
- PowerWash Simulator - reliving summers spent power washing apartment breezeways
🎵 Music
I’m scrobbling to Last.fm again, since I found a scrobbler for macOS that doesn’t suck battery (NepTunes). And I like the fancy numbers Last.fm gives me, which gets even better when you plug your profile into Last.fm stats (github repo).
This month was mostly video game soundtracks:
- Album Hades: Original Soundtrack by Darren Korb - excellent album that gets me PUMPED UP and in the zone, both at my desk and while playing the game. A sign of a good video game soundtrack.
- Album Faster Than Light soundtrack by Ben Prunty - it will be 10 years since FTL came out in September. Kind of want to install it and forget to close some airlocks.
- Album Portal 2: Songs to Test By - it’s been 11 years since this masterpiece came out. Every time I hear a track from the soundtrack while I’m shuffling my library, I have to listen to the whole thing. Great for focus, too.
- Album With People by Diane Coffee - Diane Coffee’s latest album is great, and it looks like I discovered them in 2016. Thanks Last.fm
📺 Movies and TV shows
Shows I’ve been watching
- What We Do In The Shadows - started watching this one after watching the movie. Only seen a couple episodes, but it’s pretty good so far.
Movies I’ve seen
- What We Do In The Shadows - every time our cats get into a hissing fight I am reminded of this movie
- Everything Everywhere All At Once - “Just be a rock.” I think I’m done watching movies, I’ve seen the best movie ever made. And Son Lux did the soundtrack.