What I've been writing and reading lately
Hi there. I hope you’re well. This is the first newsletter I’m sending since I opened signups in January — I hope to continue sending these once or twice a month.
Before I begin this, I’d urge you to support a cause like NAACP LDF if you’re able to. Black lives matter and the United States desperately needs structural change to combat 400+ years of racism. I’ve personally been able to use employee matching at the company I work for to triple my donations — please consider doing the same if you have something like that.
Writing
Sheltering in place has been difficult for me over the past few weeks. This month, I’ve started writing more. Upgrading my blog with a new colors and font faces went a surprisingly long way to motivate me to create content; the ironic simplicity of this isn’t lost on me.
I started with documenting my recent explorations with lacto-fermentation. Fermentation has been a high water mark of quarantine. It’s nice having something to look forward to and projects to think about.
Next, I documented a couple of “publishing” experiments I’ve been doing over the past couple of months. I first wrote about my new “bookmarks page”. I used to publish my bookmarks a couple years ago and revived this recently.
My second post details the bot that tweets all my credit card transactions that I’ve been running since leaving Stripe in October. It’s been a fun experiment that I plan to keep on running, and the blog post lays out why I did it and how it works.
Finally, I wrote about how Apple treated me similarly to Basecamp in the whole “Hey” fiasco. Hacker News liked it. The comments there aren’t super interesting but it was the first time anything I’ve written has been even slightly popular, so that was fun. I think the next challenge is to write something interesting that doesn’t touch on the controversy of the week :)
Reading
Web
I enjoyed Craig Mod’s essay “Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump”. Mod does a really great job talking about how software is currently failing us. My dream job probably involves making computers more powerful to use; it’s weird to me that the way we interact with computers doesn’t improve at a similar rate as the hardware powering them.
Books
I’ve started reading The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale; I think normally I’d wait until I finished a book to mention it here, but since it’s topical and the eBook is currently free, I’m throwing it in. Vitale does a really great job of explaining how modern policing is harmful and I’m learning lots so far.
That’s it for now, thanks for reading. I’ll have another update in a couple of weeks. Feel free to email me with any thoughts or questions.
Luke