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This email was going to be about the band Stars.

It was going to be about how I discovered Stars and then downloaded a bunch of their songs on Limewire (some of which having turned out not to be songs after all, which of course is part of the authentic Limewire experience).

First:

I published my annual end of year post, with nine hours to spare! (I still haven’t rebuilt my blog since getting my hard drive wiped a couple months back, which meant the feedback loop of “manually uploading it to S3, seeing what looked weird, then fixing it” was especially painful. Maybe that’ll act as a forcing function to finally get Hugo back up and running.

There’s been a lot of dialogue this week about how to spend your holidays. There are some terrible takes:

Whatever you’re hustling for, take note: most people/companies are shut down until ‘18. That means you get 2 extra weeks to outwork your competition. That’s 3.8% more time. For perspective: Usain Bolt won his gold medals running 1.2% faster. These 2 weeks are a gift. Get to work.

— Nathan Hubbard (@NathanCHubbard) December 18, 2017

I moved apartments this weekend.

Here are some thoughts on moving:

• I am the kind of person whose identity is very much wrapped up in his living space, which makes moving exciting but also extremely stressful. It is a chance to change my values, my routines, and the little pieces of day-to-day existence that make up a life! But the actual of moving is so exhausting. I draw energy from my habits, and being in a place where I can’t reconstruct them easily is draining, whether its the big things like not being able to make myself breakfast because I haven’t put away all my pans or the small things like the cognitive friction in figuring out what lights I need to turn off before going to bed,

I think it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of jazz ever composed. Listening to it is like watching snow through a window. The room is warm, something is roasting in the oven, and outside the flakes are falling faintly through the universe and upon the trees, the hedges, the rain gutters, the telephone poles, and the rooftops of a thousand apartment buildings in a very big city. This is where you want to be forever. This is Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here.” It opens with a trembling bass, like someone coming out of the cold, stamping their feet, brushing the snow off their shoulders, hanging up their winter coat, rubbing and blowing on numb fingers, and entering the living room where there is a window for watching the flakes falling faintly upon all the buildings of the living.

— Charles Mudede

I have not written about Buttondown in a while, because of two reasons:

1. I have been very busy! The maelstrom of a year’s end is at times all-consuming, and with no small degree of self-restraint I’ve been sidelining a lot of side project work in favor of ostensibly more important things.
2. Writing prose about Buttondown is almost always more difficult than writing code about Buttondown. If I have an unexpected hour free at the end of the day, its much easier to pick an item off the backlog and hack on it for a little bit than it is to commit to writing.

I flew back from Richmond on Friday. There are many things I dislike about flying, but they are all redeemed by flying giving me the ability to read without interruption (be it from internal or external stimuli).

I finished The Screwtape Letters, which I had been working on throughout the week, and since I had more time I ended up going through Camper English’s history of the gin and tonic which I had downloaded a year or so ago but never cracked open. (Or whatever the digital equivalent of cracking something open is.)

Last week I talked about the primordial joy of building technology. Today, I’m thinking about the opposite: the mountains of quiet frustrations that come from using technology.

As an experiment, I thought it would be interesting to compile a list of grievances that I have encountered while using technology over the past few days. Here it is:

Your growth as an engineer is mostly defined by your climbing of the ladder of abstraction. Everyone’s road is different, but the landmarks are pretty similar: you start out implementing facts, then features, then architectures, then ideas. The line of code begins as your primary currency, the artifact by which you know your job is done, but it recedes into the horizon.

This isn’t to say that I write less code than I did when I was a younger engineer; I probably write more. But the code is less important — implementation is more of an afterthought than a going concern.

Sure, the code is important. Correctness is important; readability is important; technical debt is important. I’m not saying any of these things aren’t, but I’ve recognized them more as lagging indicators of other aspects of engineering: things travel downstream, and leaky abstractions in code come from leaky abstractions in real life.

I’m asking myself “why doesn’t this code compile?” less, and asking myself “what don’t I understand about the underlying domain?” more.

I mentioned last week that I was in Santa Ana for work.

On my way back to Seattle, something on right on the edge of remarkability happened.

I was flying back through the evocatively named John Wayne Airport. John Wayne is small, for an airport, not quite a mere regional outlet but it only has a couple dozen terminals. It is the kind of airport that you can’t get lost in.

I was going through security, which is usually a non-event. I have TSA Precheck — the thing that lets you go into the faster line and keep your shoes on and all of that stuff.

I was in Santa Ana for the week for work stuff, and as one does in Santa Ana I found myself spending a lot of the time on a boat.

I was talking with a broker — not the one who owned the particular boat we were on, but one who owned a boat — about how he liked the area. He’d lived in Orange County for eight years now: before that he’d lived in San Diego, and before that Oklahoma City, and before that Santa Fe. And in each of those places he found things that he loved — and he loved the time he spent in those places, he assured me, and wouldn’t change them for anything in the world — but each of them were marked by a certain nagging feeling that something was missing.

He didn’t know if it was the area, or how he was spending his time, or his relationships with others. He tried changing all of those things, like an algebra student messing with different variables in an equation: nothing quite ever resolved itself. And he had a good life in all of those places, he said, and he’s never really considered himself unhappy — just afflicted with something like an itch on his back.

Here are two tweets that have been stuck in my head since reading them:

The Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair was in town this weekend, and naturally we went.

I’ve found that momentum in my side projects is easy to gain and easy to lose, especially for a project like Buttondown where there are a bunch of things that I could be doing on it.

(And when I mean a bunch of things I mean that Buttondown currently has 74 open issues on GitHub, all neatly organized into “marketing” and “technical debt” and “features”. …Okay, and “bugs”.)

It is overwhelming for me to be back home after time away.

Overwhelming in a good way, I mean. My favorite part of any trip is the first two hours back in the apartment: when I can drop my bags, kick off my shoes, and idly sort through mail or listen to a podcast and breathe in Seattle air. Sometimes I’ll light some cedar or make a cocktail. It feels good to belong again to your own space.

But then the work and the readjustment begins. I am a creature of habit, and it takes time to get myself back in a space where my habits thrive.

There is the household work: the taking out of trash and recycling (and, once I’m a better person, compost), culling the pantry and fridges, the unpacking and cleaning, the mopping and vacuuming, the grocery shopping.

A quick email this week, because I promised myself leisure and I still have a few hours left in Paris:

I picked up Ex-formation at a small bookshop in the third arrondissement. It is a book about many things, but mostly about design alteration: about taking forms and images that we know intimately and building upon them in a way where the change brings insight not only with the new form but to our understanding of the original form.

One of the concepts the book provides that has been stuck in my head is the idea of a :

One of my favorite possessions is 172 things to do in order to increase your level of accomplishment, a tiny booklet I picked up in The Regional Assembly of Text, the most charming shop in all of Vancouver. It sits on my coffee table and I flip through it whenever I’m feeling restless. Here are some examples of things to do:

This Sunday marked the annual shift in Sunday habits:

Out with a productive morning filled with a bike ride and maybe an omelette followed by reading in Cal Anderson or just puttering on a side project for an hour or two.

with me parking my butt in front of my computer for five hours straight and watching .

I turned 25 this week. I wrote about it a little, and now I am tempted to write about writing about it.

It was hard to write about turning 25 this year because, well, I did not have particularly much to say: I am older and in slightly better shape and besides that, it’s been more or less steady. (Albeit a very fast-progressing steadiness.)

This time last year, there was lots of chaos, lots of newness: living with my partner for the first time, working from home for a new job for the first time, consistently going to bed before midnight for the first time.

I mentioned last week that this month was my one-year anniversary at TenantBase: I have officially been living the startup/work-from-home lifestyle for a year.

This has gone by exceptionally quickly, but also slowly, to the extent that I can hardly remember the cadence of my weekdays before this life. There was more public transit. There were more badges and org charts. It feels distant, which is I think a sign of my current comfort level and also how life tends to be absent of convenient touchstones after college.

Another exciting milestone at work happened this week, though: I fixed a bug. Not any bug: perhaps the longest-running bug in the codebase, one that was notoriously hard to reproduce and impossible to pin down. A bug.

How do you do your best work?

When I was at Amazon, there was a running joke that your IDE changed as you progressed in your career (or, to use the Amazon parlance, as you leveled up):

The haze lifted yesterday, and with it came the first great summer day in a while.

My partner was in New York this weekend, so I got to live like a bachelor. Because I am an extraordinarily boring person, and because the haze lifted, I went for a long bike ride. Getting to the Burke-Gilman from the apartment is a little treacherous: its around five hundred feet downhill, across a bridge, and then you find serenity. (Because I am lame, I take the light rail back. Biking twenty miles and then going back up Capitol Hill is not my idea of a fun afternoon.)

One of my favorite things I see on the trail are people eating berries. There are, I guess, a bunch of raspberry and cranberry bushes spotted on the sides of the trail, and you’ll see entire families hop off their bikes to examine a bush, to see if there are any berries ripe enough to eat. I watched somebody’s grandmother force-feed somebody’s grandchild a berry. It was very Seattle: not something I’d necessarily want to do, but I’m happy there’s someone who does, and can.

I.

The Ringer wrote an interesting but mostly flawed piece arguing that television seasons are in general, too lean:

We don’t take enough trips.

“In an old house in Paris / That was covered in vines / Lived twelve little girls / In two straight lines.”

If you’ve been around me for the past week, you have likely suffered through my initial attempts at learning — and butchering — French. (For that, I apologize, but only because “Désolé” rolls off the tongue so nicely.)

I’m learning French through .

This week is a reminder that when you live in a place for long enough, you have to watch some of your favorite parts of it fade:

1. The Sundance on 9th is now apparently an “AMC Dine-In Seattle 10”. This is apparently not a new thing — Sundance’s sale to AMC went through last year — but the conversion process got kicked off in earnest in the past few months, and now suddenly this perfect, cozy theater that had an excellent blend of pop and independent films (and served Sazeracs the size of your head for $10). Now it’s AMC: the cozy chairs are there, but the drink menu has been replaced with things like “Blue Raspberry Margaritas” and the movie pre-rolls are just like every other mainstream theater. The building is the same — hell, even the staff is the same — but it’s no longer an escape.
2. Clever Bottle was the only perfect bar on 2nd. To explain this, you have to understand what 2nd is: it is a maelstrom, a chaotic barrage of smoke and booze. Dive bars next to more dive bars next to barcades next to sports bars next to Clever Bottle, which was this tiny little place of refuge amongst the chaos, all candlelight and tasteful cocktails. It was the first bar in Seattle that made sense to me: the drinks were strong (but not too strong) and the music was good and everyone was quiet and pleasant. And now it’s being replaced by “Mr. Darcy’s” (which, to be fair, is from the folks who run Bathtub Gin, which is a good bar!)

It is hard to go from a four-day weekend to a two-day weekend. It is literally half of the previous weekend.

You get to Sunday, your hands are tired from bouldering and your legs are tired from your new bike (okay, I biked like four miles, so its less of a physical soreness and more of an existential one: your body going, ah, I see how it is, this is a thing we’re doing now), you make a burger (feta, mustard aioli [okay, this is a fancy way to say “mustard and mayo”] , arugala, hot sauce), it is six pm and you finished re-reading The Folded Clock and you are thinking about watching a movie.

I was in California this week for work, from Wednesday to Friday. The office is in Orange County, which is not what most people imagine when I say “I was in California this week for work [at my software job]”.

Three noteworthy things happened this week in California:

• I spent twenty-four dollars on a half-pound burger. It was an aggressively mediocre burger: nothing about it was particularly terrible, but nothing about it was good. It was perhaps the worst burger ROI I’ve ever received. (This is why Five Guys remains so unimpeachable: even if you have a not-great Five Guys burgers, it’s such a small investment.)

Boeing offers a tour of their production facility (the largest building in the world by volume!), which is one of the auxiliary Seattle things that I never did when I first moved here but finally did this weekend when a friend was visiting from out of town.

It was awesome.

The coolest part of it was something not easily describable over email: the sheer scale of the facility. It was pointillism writ large: anywhere you looked there was an entire ecosystem of parts and rivets, engines and tubes and cranes in varying states of use, completion, and disrepair.

A generalized answer to the optimal stopping problem (which is sort of a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem, which in my opinion is an infinitely cooler name for the problem, but I digress!) tells us that, barring all other variables, you should spend 37% of your time evaluating options before deciding on your best.

Got two weeks to spend apartment hunting? Spend the first five days (just about 37%) just browsing, and then the last nine ready to sign a lease.

1.

Anna Weiner is one of my favorite tech writers: you probably remember her from last year’s earnest and perfect piece Uncanny Valley.

Later in 2016, she published a piece for about her passion for reading old issues of magazine (aptly titled ). I think about this piece often, specifially this paragraph:

Some weeks have through lines: I can remember things like “this is the week where it became unbearably apparent that Seattle needs more air conditioning” or “this is the week where my hair was on fire because of work” or “this is the week where I spent three hours every night falling in love with Breath of the Wild.”

This week’s through line was perfect porch weather.

I spent almost all the time I could on our porch, mostly reading but also spending some time doing crosswords (and, in fairness, some time on my laptop trying to pretend I could concentrate on productive things despite the perfect weather.)

What I’ve been working on

It is Memorial Day, and feels like it. It’s eighty two degrees in Seattle: we opted to stay in town for the weekend, catching up on television and chores and taking some time to breathe.

I’ve spent the weekend (which, I’ll note with glee, is only half over) cultivating a sunburn, reading Dorothy Parker poems, and working on (which is how I’m sending this email.)