July 2022

Published — 5 minute read

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

Serena looking crazy

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

📚 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:

🎵 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:

📺 Movies and TV shows

Shows I’ve been watching

Movies I’ve seen