A while back I put together a computer history reading list of books I thought looked particularly interesting. Life being busy, as usual, it took me a while to get around to picking up any of the books on the list. But I finally managed to find some time to read again recently, and picked up Brian Kernighan’s recent memoir.
Continue readingThe Practicing Stoic, by Ward Farnsworth
Over the years I’ve read a number of different books on stoic philosophy, including some of the “modern Stoic influencers” like Ryan Holiday as well as a few translations of older philosophers like Marcus Aurelius. While I’d hardly call myself a follower of the philosophy, I do think it includes some helpful ideas, and it’s occasionally been a useful lens for dealing with some problem I’ve been dealing with.
I struggled with both sets of writing, however, for different reasons. The modern writers often made me roll my eyes, often clearly pitching at entrepreneurs and CEOs, and billing an ancient philosophy as a life hack. The work of the ancients, I found more interesting, but difficult to contextualize and navigate.
Continue readingfirst dog walk of 2024
Twitter, social media, network effects, and me
Back at the end of October, when Elon Musk announced that he was really actually going to buy Twitter, I did what a lot of other computer nerds did. I spun up a cloud VM, bought a domain name, installed a Mastodon-compatible “Fediverse” server (Pleroma), and started exploring the wide world of federated social media.
Continue readingSome personal themes for 2023
Good riddance, 2022
This started out as me trying to write a “year in review” post, but to be honest I don’t have it in me. 2022 was a pretty difficult year for me, and I don’t terribly want to relive any part of it. Various family health issues loom large in that, but a ton of things went wrong.
Instead of looking back at all that, I want to spend some time thinking about how I want the New Year to go. Not in the form of specific goals, though I certainly have those (e.g., I’d love to get in more practice time at curling, and get a better grasp of programming in Rust). But this post is about some general themes I want to try and keep in mind moving forward.
Continue readingAdam’s weekly (-ish) update, 2022-12-20
What’s new
The past few weeks have been on the intense side at work, so I completely lost track of the blog and haven’t had a chance to write much in that time. However, I’m now on a holiday break, and finally have time to sit down at a keyboard to write more than code and Slack messages.
Continue readingAdam’s weekly update, 2022-12-04
What’s new
This week was really intense from a work perspective. Not “bad intense”, but the kind of week where every day was spent with such a level of focus, that at 5 PM or so I found myself staring off into space and forgetting words. I think I got some good things accomplished, but my brain also felt like mush by the time the weekend came.
Continue readingAdam’s weekly update, 2022-11-27
What’s new
The first thing that’s new is… this post! I’m going to try to do at least a weekly post on the blog now, just a general update and some links. This will hopefully help me get back into the habit of writing on the blog regularly, and maybe inspire me to write a bit more in general.
Continue readingthe podcasts I’m listening to these days
I listen to a fair number of podcasts these days, but I still follow way more feeds than I actively listen to. I recently went through and cleaned up the feeds I don’t listen to anymore, and I thought I’d share the ones that made the cut.
Continue readinghappy living close (-ish) to the metal
For various reasons, I’ve been doing a little bit of career introspection lately. One of the interesting realizations to come out of this is that, despite in practice doing mostly software work, I’ve been happiest when my work involved a strong awareness of the hardware I was running on.
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