After 13 years of daily Twitter usage, I bit the bullet and switched to Bluesky (urbanism stuff, mostly) and Mastodon (computer stuff) full time.

I made friends on Twitter, I learned a lot, and I was part of a few communities that would not exist without Twitter. I’m proud of my small contributions to Vancouver urbanism over the years, and they mostly happened on Twitter or adjacent to it.

Leaving was sad but unavoidable; the site’s really gone downhill since Musk purchased it. The quality of discourse has plummeted now that the replies to any popular tweet are dominated by bluechecks. Twitter has a critical mass of shitty resentful people who wouldn’t be out of place on 4chan, and the site shoves their opinions in your face.

Anyway, it’s a few months in and I’m glad I made the change. I don’t love Mastodon, but Bluesky feels a lot like an earlier, more pleasant version of Twitter.

Been a while since the last update, I’ve been busy with the new job. Things have been going well!

I went to New York in March for my first week at Datadog, which was a good way to start the job; I met other new joiners, met people on my team, saw a bit of the city. And the view from the office is alright:

Datadog operates at a much larger scale than any company I’ve ever worked at, and that has some upsides and downsides (but mostly upsides). I feel lucky to work with a lot of smart, enthusiastic people.

Last week I was in New York again, for Datadog’s annual DASH conference. I was helping run a booth for my team and it was good to talk to users (and potential users) in person. I got to see a bit more of the city outside of work; the Intrepid Museum was a highlight (an aircraft carrier! a Space Shuttle! a submarine!).

Outside of work, I’ve been spending a little bit of time on Nushell (but not as much as I would like). I’ve been driving some changes to the explore interactive pager (which reminds me, I need to update that documentation). I’m trying to get it to a point where I’m happy with it for version 1.0; I’m not quite there yet but I’ve made a lot of changes under the hood.

Nonfiction I read recently

What Goes Around Comes Around… And Around… (⭐⭐⭐⭐) Michael Stonebraker’s back for another opinionated overview of databases, this time with Andy Pavlo. The whole thing is good but I particularly like their take on vector databases:

They are single-purpose DBMSs with indexes to accelerate nearest-neighbor search. RM DBMSs should soon provide native support for these data structures and search methods using their extendable type system that will render such specialized databases unnecessary

On a related note, I like Simon Willison’s point that maybe you don’t need vectors for RAG:

The more time I spend with this RAG pattern (ed: one using full-text search) the more I like it. It’s considerably easier to reason about than RAG using vector search based on embeddings, and can provide high quality results with a relatively simple implementation.

Fiction I read recently

Lonesome Dove (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) This was described to me as “the Western novel to read if you don’t normally read Westerns” and yeah, it was great.

Glorious Exploits (⭐⭐⭐⭐) Funny + touching story about 2 unemployed potters in 412 BC who decide to put on a play with imprisoned Athenian soldiers as the cast.

Microserfs (⭐⭐⭐⭐) Strange that I hadn’t read this before, but Douglas Coupland has a not-entirely-positive reputation in his hometown. He’s kinda known as the guy who got too many undeserved public art commissions around here. Anyway! It was a really fun read and it felt like it could have been written yesterday (surprising for a book about the tech industry written nearly 30 years ago).

A bunch of Horatio Hornblower and Richard Bolitho books (⭐⭐⭐) I was looking for something along the same lines as the excellent Aubrey-Maturin series. These weren’t quite it. Hornblower isn’t very fun as a protagonist and Bolitho is a boring one, I couldn’t make it very far into either series.

So, big news: I’m off to a new job at Datadog, working on their CoScreen screen sharing tool 😎. I’m gonna be working remotely from Vancouver, which will be interesting because I’ll be dogfooding CoScreen as I work on it.

It’ll be good to work on native software again. It feels like the vast majority of jobs today operate at a level of abstraction where the OS doesn’t matter much; when you’re writing REST services it’s rare that you actually interact with the OS itself, right? CoScreen is very different in that it’s native software that needs to do lots of interaction with the OS to provide a great UX. Which is exciting and fun and cool, at least until I get bogged down in the details of GDI or whatever 😅.

It’s been a good summer so far. Some things I’ve been up to:

systemctl-tui

I got annoyed that I couldn’t find a decent GUI for systemd services, so I built one:

It was partially an excuse to experiment with ratatui for terminal UIs in Rust, and I think I like it quite a bit. ratatui gives you tools you need to do immediate-mode rendering efficiently, but the broad strokes of your application’s architecture are up to you.

Gardening + Patio

I spent more time than usual on our little outdoor space. Lots of flowers, a new planter, pressure washing, etc.

I’ve organized a fair number of get-togethers/dinners on the patio, it’s been really nice meeting new people and catching up with people who I haven’t seen since before the pandemic.

New ‘Puter

I finally took the plunge and bought a Framework Laptop:

Intel’s multicore performance has gotten a lot better in recent generations, so I figured I could replace my desktop for Rust work. So far, so good!

I like the hardware a lot. There were some teething pains getting Linux working properly, but that kinda comes with the territory.

I find working on my personal website to be soothing. It’s one of those never-ending projects in a good way, and I work on it in small bursts of energy whenever I have the time and inspiration. I’ve added a handful of new features in recent months and, uh, I’m sorry.

Some of these features are an attempt to revisit the glory that was the Geocities-era web; you might have noticed the glittery cursor trail (based on the excellent cursor-effects), or the animated snowy background that only shows up in December.

I’ve added custom emoji that I can easily use throughout the website (with Hugo shortcodes), here’s a small sample:

I use a lot of custom emoji on Slack and Discord; adding them to my website was the logical next step. I’ve also been toying with the idea of letting readers emoji-react to my blog posts but haven’t quite come up with a design I’m happy with. Speaking of emoji…

Whoa, what’s this?

I also added these, uh, Socratic dialogue bubbles between me and arbitrary emoji heads. These are heavily inspired by “Cool Bear” but with more characters because why not?

Got it. I’m sure everyone will love this and nobody will find it annoying.

These features are pretty dumb and they’d never make it past design review in the real world. In a way, that’s the point. Let’s make websites fun again.