Lets start with the big news: I made an album of #music! Natural by Sub Alpine Drift on Bandcamp.

If you like this, check out some of the music I recommended last week.

Anyways, Thank you to Kate, David and the #Art14 crew for having me at L.a. Studio! I don't think I would have been able to make this art without the comfort and space their studio provided. The space is quite remote and rural, but that isolation does help the artistic spirit. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out my week one and week two posts.

I was so proud to have completed an album in the time. Sure it's only thirty minutes long, but releasing the album feels like a true success. I want to thank my dad, and many others, who reached out during my time to provide words of encouragement. Apparently my week two post came off a bit more negative than I expected. I definitely was a bit depressed, but the act of learning, experimenting and trying new things is hard, and I'm glad to have the support and time to do it.

Besides finishing the album, I also wrote some code. Not a ton, but it continued to be a good distraction when I was stuck with music. I cleaned up the headers and footers across a bunch of my sites and did some other content creation on other things I maintain.

Finally, on my way home from the residency, I stopped at toured Fallingwater, the famous house by Frank Lloyd Wright. It was beautiful and inspiring. Seeing how the house was made to blend into nature was really cool. I highly recommend visiting if you get a chance.

In terms of content for inspiration during the week, I got lost in skate videos, particularly from Andy Anderson. His stuff is so creative and awe inducing. I have shared his The Shape of Paris before, but I also highly recommend his earlier Crazy Wisdom. Both are unlike things I had seen before from skate videos and just really stretched my brain¹.

I also spent some time rewatching one of my favorite anime of all time: Bocchi The Rock and thinking a lot about Andrew Huang at the GRM Residency.

Finally, here's some photos from my last week. Thanks for reading.

/Nat

I was talking to my mom, and she wanted some examples of the kind of #music that I am trying to make. To do this, I wanted to pull together three example albums for her to listen to. It's worth noting that the #ambient and #experimental genres are huge. Just check out The Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp, April 2026 or The Best Ambient Music on Bandcamp, March 2026. Each of the albums are pretty different. Some commonalities, but in general very unique.

All of this to say, I picked three things here, but they do not summarize the genres.

1. hypervisibility by tehn

https://tehn.bandcamp.com/album/hypervisibility

This is a relatively new album that I love a lot. tehn, aka Brian Crabtree, is the designer and creator of Monome and also just an incredible artist. I've been following his work since around 2018, and it has always inspired me in some way.

2. Dani Derks + Jonathan Snyder (220924 @ luck dragon)

https://youtu.be/yi5bkzskNHU?si=48IRp81jzrH1Xszq

Related, Brian and Kelly Crabtree also operate luck dragon in Delhi, NY. It's an art store and general space. I attended a weekend workshop there in 2022 run by Dani Derks and Jonathan Snyder. This performance was in the evening and I really enjoyed it. My only complaint is I don't think the recording properly captures Jonathan's performance in all of its details well. I remember lots of breathing sounds, which I don't hear as much on the youtube.

3. Selected Jambient Works Vol. 1 by Cowboy Sadness

https://cowboysadness.bandcamp.com/album/selected-jambient-works-vol-1

I picked this because it's a local band. They are from Kingston, NY. It's more fast paced then what I usually want to make, but I do like it a lot. It highlights the more jazz based influences of these genres, mixing guitars and other instruments into the creation.

Honorable mentions

There's a bunch of other stuff that I don't think quite fits into what I'm trying to make, but I do think is nearby. Often in the categories of Jazz, Deep House, etc. Here's a list of some of that.

• https://floatingpoints.bandcamp.com/album/promises
• https://kiasmos.bandcamp.com/album/ii
• https://goldpanda.bandcamp.com/album/lucky-shiner
• https://moby.bandcamp.com/album/live-ambients-improvised-recordings-vol-1
• https://nicolasjaar.bandcamp.com/album/space-is-only-noise
• Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno

Second week at #art14 complete! This post is a little later than I'd like, but here we are.

Up front, the only #music I published this week was one song in drifts. I did finish two more songs and make progress on another though, so I'm making good headway.

At the beginning of the week, I was spending a lot of time thinking about "what's the point". That thought was a bit in a depressed way, but mostly in a "what am I trying to say" or a "why am I making this art" way. I haven't really come up with a good answer. Something about wanting to share my love of nature and technology or something? I am still not sure.

A point I've mentioned to people is I struggle with the fact that I am bad at making music. My two creative outlets for so long have been coding and writing. When I wanted to stretch a creative muscle or just make #art, that is what I did. I'll write in a notebook or code up some dumb little app¹. It's not good writing or good code, but I can write it and I can properly traverse a flow from "idea" to "I wonder if that's possible" to "oh look, a basic thing".

An example of doing this happened yesterday, which I'll technically put in Week Three territory but since I was late on this post, I guess I'll shove in here. I wrote a little Discord bot. I took timball/Careen, song.link, and a few other ideas (including past discord bots), shoved it into Cursor, made some tweaks, and ended up with linkbot. I wanted it because I am debating moving off of Spotify, and wanted something to genericise links I would post in music channels for communities I am in. It took about five hours to go form "idea" to "I'm done, this works".

Music has not been that way. I am too new. I struggle at every step.

• With idea generation, I don't know what's possible so I can't doodle as easily as I can writing or with code.
• With execution & crafting, I struggle to turn an idea into something finished.
• With finishing, I don't know what's good, so I don't know when to stop.

Coming to terms with that being OK has been a journey these last two weeks. And in good news: I think I am finally accepting that. Friday I feel like I had a bit of a break through. I listened to all of the sounds I have recorded over the last two weeks. Random nature sounds. Bleeps. Bloops. Songs. Me singing about bugs. A lot was trash or useless, but I could see progress, and there was stuff that I liked. Things that I created where I was like, oh hey, I made that and I like it.

F U Mr. Bug

Download audio

Recorded outside

Drums

Download audio

Just some eurorack drums

Neither of these are masterpieces or anything, just snippets of audio that I kind of liked.

Things that helped me get there, beyond just spending time making music, included:

• An interview with Flying Lotus where he talks about how some people prefer his music from when he knew nothing.
• Alan Tudyk Eats His Last Meal, because of his descriptions of how not every artist's life turns out well.
• Bâan and the making of documentary. Both are very moving stories and was interesting to think about control and design.

I also consumed a lot of music. Some of the albums that stuck out to me included:

• Trying Times by James Blake
• Time Heals Everything by Blu & Exile
• The Great Divide by Noah Kahan
• Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails

I continued my distractions of writing code, fixing up robot.villas more, building another midi script for norns: pauper, and cleaning up my personal website and this blog.

I also watched a lot of TV... more than I'd like to admit. I think because I was depressed, and we had a cold snap, so I stayed inside a bit more.

Finally some photos of my time this week are below. I did go on a few more hikes, and I did some recording in various places around the town and in Prince Gallitzin State Park.

Thanks for reading!

Wow, it has already been a week. That's kind of nuts. Don't know how I feel about that. Time keeps on slipping.

For context, I am currently in the small borough of Patton, Pennsylvania. I came here to attend the Art14 Residency. My goal over these three weeks is to create an album of #music and to make some progress #writing locative.garden, my long unfinished collection of fiction. I am here from 2026-04-11 to 2026-05-02.

I am also trying to recover a bit from some general work burnout. I am able to do this residency because Laurel historically has had a one month sabbatical once you reach five years of employment. Sadly after this year it's going away, so I'm taking advantage of it while I can.

This week I did a bunch of stuff. One thing I'm fighting against is when I get stuck with writing or playing, I dive back into general code stuff. I do like this from a pure dopamine hit, but often it also makes me frustrated. My point of this time off is to focus on skills that I am not great at, or regularly don't focus on because of time. So going to things that I do during my normal day to day feels good because I am good at them, but most times it's happened I regret it.

In the category of random coding stuff:

• Put a landing page at subalpinedrift.com.
• Made some improvements to robot.villas.
• Cleaned up my github, archived 240 old repos.
• Made some pull requests to wayback to fix a GitHub Action I have on this blog.
• Fixed some GitHub Actions for the norns-community repo.

In music making, I made music every day! A lot of it was general experimentation and teaching myself more. One area I am particularly learning a lot about is MIDI, something I historically have avoided... why I have no idea. Other things I have done:

• Published my Modstock 2025 performance on Bandcamp.
• Made and published a Norns script for generating MIDI: grurder.
• Published the first track of my weekly sound experiment, Drifts. This is something I've wanted to do since the new year, but this focus time got me off my ass.
• Finished first track of my album.

I didn't do too much writing. I journaled every single day, a habit I used to have that I want to get back. I also wrote 320 words in locative.garden... and deleted 664... Next week more writing!

I have also been doing a lot of active listening, trying to learn and analyze artists that I like a lot. From major artists, things I listened to included:

• Women of Ambient Spotify Playlist
• Sexistential by Robyn
• Fred again..: Tiny Desk Concert
• clipping.: Tiny Desk Concert
• Fred again.. & Thomas Bangalter (USB002, Alexandra Palace, London 27 February 2026)
• Ogazón @TheLotRadio 03-16-2026

And in more independent artists, I have been listening to lots of good Bandcamp stuff:

• Somewhat the Same by Jameson Nathan Jones
• thoughts persist by fields we found
• hypervisibility by tehn
• pola meets lyrica by pola
• Monocoastal (10th Anniversary Edition) by Marcus Fischer
• Perpetual by Ryuichi Sakamoto / Illuha / Taylor Deupree
• Unmapping The Distance Keeps Getting Closer by Ezekiel Honig

I also have been listening to The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. I've been listening to this for the last few months, and I regularly restart chapters or sections. It often takes me a little bit to get into, as Rubin's spirituality has always felt performative to me. He's been buddhist since he was 14 though so who am I to judge? Anyways, the book is great. Has inspired me a bunch in how I think about creating, and I really connect his point that everyone is creative and can be an artist.

Finally some photos of my time this week:

Sending love from the Allegheny Mountains,

/Nat

#art #art14

I was tired, didn't think anything of it. Just technology being dumb. Took it as a sign to stop working.

Twenty minutes later, I was paged for an incident. Apparently my laptop stopping connecting to the internet was because it had tried to connect to a known compromised domain. Our two #security tools: Crowdstrike and RedCanary, had detected it and isolated my machine. This incident was run without me as the team told me what was up, and started to investigate deeper.

Social media was already talking about it: Axios, one of the most popular NPM packages for Node.js, had been compromised. Over time, it came to be clear that I had installed axios@1.14.1 and pushed it to one of our in development projects. Thankfully everything auto-locked down. Nothing had been exfiltrated. No data breach. All machines that it touched were wiped and replaced. All credentials on all of those machines were rotated.

If this had been my personal machine, I wouldn't have been so lucky. And maybe that's why the timing lined up. There's lots of timelines about how sophisticated this attack was:

• How the developers were social engineered
• How the computers were compromised
• Who perpetrated the attack
• A full postmortem from the Axios team

And all I can think about is how lucky I was. At work, we have invested a ton in tooling and providers to catch this sort of thing. And it worked. I don't have this kind of infrastructure for my personal things. Nor do most people. Sure folks might have antivirus installed. But actors are getting more and more sophisticated, catching attacks if you're not on top of your game is getting harder and harder.

I am embarrassed that I got compromised. And I am mostly writing this to share that it's not your fault if you also get compromised. Yes you should be prepared. Yes you should lock your stuff down. But this happens. And we need to talk about it.¹

/Nat

I had been thinking about what I wanted to say this year, and then I came across alanza on lines suggesting a framework for thinking about goals at the end of 2025.

how was 2025 for you?

what concepts / principles are you thinking about for the new year? how do they relate to the world around you? (locally? globally?)

what old things do you want to shed? what new things would you like to cultivate?

what would you like to accomplish?

do you have a plan for making it happen?

does your year ahead have a ‘theme’ that you’d like to give it?

how about the next three months? the next month? the next week?

I like it, and so I think I'll take a stab at it later in this post. The first bullet shall be my first section though. How was 2025? in a word: meh¹.

When I started this post, I was depressed. 2025 didn't seem like a good year. In fact, I felt it was straight up terrible. Two facts had soured me on the year:

1. The political realities in the US, which is causing deteriorating living situations for friends and others.
2. The fact that my wife and I were living apart for most of the year.

Having worked on two political campaigns that lost to Trump², I feel pretty weird about watching the rights of fellow citizens be destroyed and erased. A strong feeling of depression and lack of wanting to engage, and just a general feeling of hopelessness. There were weeks where I was able to completely ignore the news, and weeks where I was deep in it. While many of my friends have been enraged by everything going on, I have found it hard to feel anything besides depression when thinking about the future of my home country.

On top of our societal issues, I did not handle Mel being so far away for so long well. I've always had theories that I wouldn't handle long distance relationships well, and boi did I validate that theory in 2025.

It wasn't all bad though. I got more involved in my local community, played lots of board games with friends, and had a very successful year at work. As time has drifted from 2025, I've found it easier to remember the good times, and the negative feelings have decreased.

Which is why I really like doing these years in review. The act of going through each month's photos highlighted a lot of great times though the year. So lets hop skip and jump across twelve months of memories and then get into the goal stuff.

2025 in photos

January

January, like always, was pretty quiet and chill. It snowed. I hung out with Mel before she went back to school.

February

February was great. Two trips back to back. First I went to San Antonio, TX for work where we did our winter offsite. Historically our winter off-sites are not great. We discuss how we didn't do as well as we needed to last year, etc etc. This year though, we had knocked it out of the park in 2024, and it was just a big celebration.

Afterwards I went to London for my birthday and hung out with Mel. It was great. Lots of art, food and good times.

March

March, not a lot happened. Continued playing lots of Dungeons and Dragons and music. General hanging out and recovering from a busy February.

April

April, the flowers were out and Spring arrived. Niket visited briefly, and my mom came by for a long visit where we went into the city, and visited some friends in Providence, RI.

May

May had two people visit: Chris came for a long weekend where we wandered the Hudson Valley and had a grand ol' time. And then Mel visited! She had a brief spring break and hung out for a week. It was wonderful.

I also performed music in front of people for the first time ever! I performed five minutes of music at Recurse Center during Never Graduate Week, the annual alumni event.

June

June I got to finally meet one of my favorite authors, Craig Mod. Some friends and I went to a baseball game. I also continued going into the city for work every Tuesday (sometimes going out to dinner with coworkers).

July

July I saw Alanza perform at Quinn's in Beacon. I also performed for the second time in front of people with New York Modular Society in Woodstock, NY. I played for half an hour. I put a recording of my set from Modstock 2025 on my website.

I also had a work trip to Vail, CO. I actually really disliked this trip. Vail is gorgeous, but I had to work so much I couldn't enjoy the scenery. I only left the hotel for dinners.

August

August I went back to London to begin helping Mel move home! We did some touristy stuff, including visiting Cambridge and Brighton. I took like half of her stuff home with me, which was an interesting navigational challenge (so many bags), but I made it.

September

September was a great month. Mel returned to New York. Laurel had an ad in Time Square. Niket came to visit again. Two of our good friends, Katie and Megan, got married in State College, PA. Just a great month of celebration and good times.

October

I made a trip out to SF for work, where I got to hang with my brother for a bit. John and Lauren got married in Brooklyn! Mel and I celebrated Autumn.

November

Jesus visited! Spent an afternoon wandering Brooklyn Heights chatting and drinking and having a great time.

We spent Thanksgiving in the Bahamas with Frankie, Mckenna and a bunch of other friends. It was a delight. I particularly enjoyed going to Clifton Heritage National Park and learning a bunch of history about the Bahamas and also enjoying an early Junkanoo (the normal celebration is closer to the New Year).

December

December was a weird one. We got some very sad news that Beasley's health had taken a turn for the worse. We had originally planned on spending a few weeks in SF but instead turned it into a whirlwind three day visit.

But December was also the month of some incredible food. Mel and I celebrated my five year anniversary at Laurel by having dinner at Oiji Mi. Then to celebrate Christmas, the whole family went to Single Thread. Both were some of the best meals I have ever had and would highly recommend if you get a chance.

2025 Goal Review

In my 2024 year in review, I had some goals.

• Improve Mental Health
• Make Art Publicly
• Decrease Debt
• Get out of the house

I did very well on two of these: mental health and debt. I drastically decreased our debt (by about 70%). I started seeing a psychiatrist along with my therapist to adjust my meds, which led to a discovery of some very severe vitamin deficiencies which were affecting my mood.

To get out of the house, D&D was my real success here. I started this in 2024, but I kept it up. By basically having a social event once a week, it helped my mood and also made me feel part of a community which was great.

In terms of making art, I had a spat of writing for locative.garden. I am still not making enough progress, and debating merging it into a single novel. But I did make a lot of music, and performed publicly twice, which felt like a huge win for me. I originally felt like I didn't do a good job here, but in hindsight I'm actually pretty happy with my accomplishments. My therapist regularly tells me I judge myself much more harshly than my friends, and looks like this was another case of that.

Looking forward to 2026

Ok, so 2026 has already started. It's a new year, so time to think about the future.

what concepts / principles are you thinking about for the new year? how do they relate to the world around you? (locally? globally?)

Community has been deeply on my mind lately. As a society, I think we've forgotten how to be empathetic towards our neighbors and others. I regularly see people making decisions that are good for them, but ignore the effect they will have on others. I am all for being selfish when needed, but we've reached a point where people just don't think about their community and how it's affected by their decisions anymore. I am not immune to this, I catch myself doing this all the time. There are few incentives to prioritize thinking about how others are effected by your decisions, and it's often hard to even know what the effects are.

what old things do you want to shed? what new things would you like to cultivate?

I want to hoard less stuff. Get rid of things that are unneeded. I have started this already: donating and getting rid of old clothes that don't fit, throwing away unused boxes, donating things that I haven't used in years. Part of this is because we plan to move in 2026, but also I just find myself with too much stuff.

I also want to cultivate spending more time in nature. I spend too much time inside. I need to be in nature and outside every day if I can.

does your year ahead have a ‘theme’ that you’d like to give it?

Moving forward.

how about the next three months? the next month? the next week?

Create more. Work less.

Goals

What would you like to accomplish? Do you have a plan for making it happen?

I have three goals / objectives for 2026. I want these to be connected to my general manifesto³.

1. Be in Nature
2. Create Art
3. Improve Health

1: Be in Nature

To accomplish this I've got two things I will be measuring and doing:

• Walk for more than 30 minutes every day
• Try a new trail or go fishing once a month

2025 was a bad year for me getting outside, so I feel like I need to rekindle my connection to nature. I need to walk more for my health, but also my days are drastically better when I spend time among the trees and birds, so I want to set this as a goal.

When it comes to nature, I find myself revisiting the same trails and places. I want to explore more of the Hudson Valley, and fishing basically always sends me to new places. New trails would do the same, so that's where that comes from.

2: Create Art

Creating art brings me joy. I do not think I am good at creating. This is something I have been fighting with for... most of my life. It's an issue with confidence, and just not being able to accept that sucking is ok. That being said, I am a lot more confident in my creativity than I was in 2024. I made a lot of progress around sharing my art in 2025, and got a lot of good feedback. In 2026, I want to create more and share more.

• Write something every week
• Make music every week
• Finish locative.garden
• Put out an album on Bandcamp

This year I am particularly excited about this goal, as I will be attending a three week artist retreat in Pennsylvania. I've been practicing being thoughtful about my artistic output to hopefully be as successful as possible at the retreat.

3: Improve Health

There's some diet and vitamin deficiencies I need to deal with in 2026. I haven't figured out what that's going to be yet. But along with getting out in nature⁴, I am going to try and do something new.

This something new is inspired by my friend and coworker @kh3dron. He's trying to do 100,000 pushups in 2026. A photo of his progress is above. He's a swole dude⁵, so I'm not really trying to set my goal at a level that I know I'll fail. Instead I am trying for a much smaller goal of push-ups and sit-ups.

• 10,000 push-ups in 2026
• 10,000 sit-ups in 2026

I've created a spreadsheet like his, so we'll see how it goes. His one piece of advice which kind of blew my mind is that you don't have to do all of the push-ups at once. You can do them throughout the day. And I'm like, I can do five pushups ten times in a day. That is totally doable. Reframe the issues! Focus on total output!

Conclusion

We had some very sad news at the beginning of the year, our cat Beasley died at the end of January after a beautiful and happy seventeen years. It definitely pushed us into a pretty deep depression that we're still coming out of.

Despite that, I am optimistic about 2026. Mel got a new job in the fall, my work is being very successful, and Mel is applying to PhD programs. I tend to like even years, so here's to a successful 2026. 2025 was better than I expected, and I hope 2026 will be too.

Lots of love from our home to yours,

/Nat

For podcasts

• Search Engine

Search Engine is always doing interesting things about the internet.

• The Verge

The Vergecast and Decoder are fantastic long form podcasts that I generally find interesting and funny. Vergecast for commentary on tech news, Decoder for discussions on business.

• NPR

I listen to a lot of NPR's podcasts. They are so good, so interesting, and so well done. Favorites are Up First, The Indicator, Pop Culture Happy Hour, and Short Wave.

For reading

• NYT

I pay for a family subscription for my parents and my wife to NYT. It was cheaper than the four of us paying piece meal for the parts they used. While NYT has some problems (especially their opinion section), they still do good work.

• ProPublica

ProPublica is my favorite journalistic outlet.

• The Highlands Current

The Current is my local paper.

• Craig Mod

Craig Mod is one of my favorite writers.

For watching

• Netflix
• AppleTV

I get these two for free through T-Mobile. I don't use them often, but with F1 moving to AppleTV this year, I imagine that'll change.

• Plex

I pay for this because it lets me download shows to my laptop while traveling...

• YouTube

I'd rather not have ads on my videos. Some of my favorite creators/channels are gigguk, Mother's Basement, Auto Focus, Andrew Huang, Eater, The Lot Radio, and others.

No idea if this was useful, but :shrug:.

/Nat

In 2026, I want to make a lot more music. Two areas where I really want to explore are composing, MIDI and sequencing. I feel I have sound creation down, but putting those sounds together to make songs and compositions is not something I understand. So for my last #decemberadventure I figured I'd try and make a midi generator for the command line I could use. I wanted it to be like babies first midi. I wanted it to tell me what was happening over the wire that was going from my computer to a mmMidi which then went to my smaller Eurorack system.

I wanted the code to be in Go and run on the cli. I wanted it to be a simple eight step sequencer. Each step should send an envelope (basically a voltage that defines what volume of the note is), and a note (A, B, C etc.). I also needed to define a clock signal, basically how fast the sequencer moved to the next step.

I decided to use Cursor's new Agent mode to generate this. The code it created is at icco/genidi. It did not create anything that worked. Some pieces it generated worked, mostly some of the UI, but it did not do the following:

1. Properly send Midi
2. Generate steps as I wanted

So now I've started fixing the code and am heavily debating rewriting from scratch. That will be a project for January.

/Nat

The last few years those projects have landed in the GitHub repo icco/etu. The current iteration of Etu is a command line journal that uses a Notion database as its backend.

I bet you're wondering why the heck I would build something like this. Time Tracking is a classic nerd snipe. Check out merveilles/Time-Travelers or Feltron Annual Reports for others lost in this rabbit hole.

In reality etu has been a long project. The first commit was in 2019, and randomly an idea catches my brain and I code it up.

Its current evolution is Go project that uses Bubble Tea for a simple to use CLI. In past iterations I just launched vim and captured the output buffer, but I found the UX to be faster if I just launched the UI myself. The downside of my design is the Notion API is incredibly slow.

I did this work as a part of #decemberadventure, and a general want to fix complaints I had with the tool. The biggest complaints I had was after I made a post, viewing them was best done by going to Notion. I disliked that. So I rewrote the entire UX to use more off the shelf components, and added new list, view and delete abilities.

I also created a homebrew tap to make installing on multiple machines easily.

Anyways, just wanted to write this up. Hope you're having a happy holidays.

/Nat

I know there is a strong anti-LLM bend to a lot of the Fediverse and the art-communities that I belong to. I have very complicated feelings about the term AI and AI's affect on human creativity and creation. I deeply understand the arguments around both training and usage, but I still use it heavily at work and occasionally in my personal life. Given I use it so heavily at work, I have found myself exploring LLMs more and more as a tool for creation. I use it regularly for coding and image generation. I have not used it for writing or music creation, as I find both of those the lack of humanity is visible in the creation¹.

Anyways, I used Github Agents to create a dumb little discord bot almost entirely using the Agent in the Github Mobile App on Android. This was neat because I basically gave the agent tasks while I helped cook Thanksgiving Dinner. Since then I have made some manual changes, and added some features, but it has now been stable for a few weeks and I wanted to share what I built.

Essentially, I keep an archive of images and artists I like online in a folder on Dropbox. It's gotten very large over the years. It's organized by creator and platform they posted on.

It has gotten so large, I don't really know what is there anymore. So I wanted to post 10 or so images to my private Discord server once an hour. I also added a reaction to each image. If I click on the number, it copies the image to a Favorites folder. I often edit these images and make them wallpapers for my laptop.

I really enjoyed this process. I've had a lot of problems trying to interact with the Dropbox API in the past, but copilot got the querying correct the first try. If you want to see the generated code, it's at icco/artgrabber.

/Nat

This year I am #thankful for...

• The health of my family and friends. It's not always great, but we keep trying.
• The Ocean and all of its creatures.
• Wikipedia. Shared knowledge is invaluable.
• Emergency and disaster first responders. The only constant is things will fail, and people will need saving. Thanks for your hard work.
• The folks who grow our food. We can't stay healthy without it.
• My job. It's a complicated pile of stress and chaos, but it's still one of the best jobs I've had.
• The tzdb and Paul Eggert.
• All of the small communities I am apart of on the internet. RC, Merveilles, Gunks, Time Owls, Ops Party, The Waystone, Nerd Chat, etc. Y'all make the chaos bearable.

Thank you for reading. Lots of love.

/Nat

This was not true six months ago. The tools are improving at a speed that I am impressed and also kind of scared? This week was the first week where I started to worry a bit about how AI is affecting my output, my coworkers output, and our company as a whole. This worry came from just a stark realization of how much code volume we're putting out compared to what we used to put out. Some of that is due to company growth (since January our engineering team has doubled in size), but a lot is also due to tools just getting better.

I don't think I know yet how I feel about all of these changes, so I decided instead I would just talk about the tools that are having a positive impact on my day to work, and how we're adjusting to it. I also want to write this as a snapshot. My good friend @pliable asked me "do you think there have been any significant advances in AI over the past few months?" I responded yes, but also don't have a great snapshot of where I was three months. It's a crazy time, I used to be able to hold opinions about tech and tools for one to two years. Now if I hold them more than three months, I find I am regularly wrong, based on how fast things are changing.

First off, context: I currently work at Laurel. I am an engineering manager for Infrastructure and Security. Coding is about 20% of my job. We as a company are investing heavily in trying to find ways to make AI useful without it being dangerous or distracting. We have two people dedicated to doing that full time. One of them wrote about his work with "Force multiplying with AI at Laurel ".

Coding Tools

How I write code. I code in Typescript, Go, Terraform and occasionally Python. https://wakatime.com/@icco claims my time on these languages is... less than I'd like but also doesn't include Claude time.

• Cursor
  • This is actually the tool I use the most. My workflow is regularly z $project, then git co -b $issue and then cursor .. I don't write long complicated prompts. Instead I usually just click clear all chats to give me a clean workspace, then post a log message or stack trace into the chat box and ask "why is this happening." 95% of the time it finds the place the issue is coming from, I then read the code. If I see an easy fix, I make it. If I don't understand, I ask Cursor to suggest a change.
• Claude Code
  • I use this for more automated tasks I don't need to think about. I have a directory (currently my desktop :facepalm:) of common prompts I use sitting in plain text files. So I run cat ~/Desktop/migrate.txt | pbcopy, then z $project, then git co -b $task and then claude where I paste the prompt. Press enter and let it run until it has questions, where it causes my terminal to beep. I address and let it keep running.
• copilot.vim
  • My main coding tool is still vim. I have this plugin configured to do smart tab complete suggestions while I am coding. If I know what I want to do, this is how I code. No prompting. Just coding and sometimes copilot saves me a little typing.

z : This is zoxide. It jumps to most used directories.

git co : This is an alias for git checkout.

Example Claude prompt:

Upgrade as many of the packages in yarn outdated as possible. After each package upgrade, build, test, lint, make any changes needed, commit and push.

Do not upgrade anything related to Jest. Also do not upgrade reflect-metadata or class-validator.

My general policy is if writing the prompt takes more than one minute, I should be doing it myself.

Code Review

We are still evaluating tools for AI code review. We currently are getting code review comments from Cursor Bug Bot, Github Copilot, Sentry AI. Cursor is by far the best of these three so far.

Analysis Tools

These are technical tools I use when I want to understand how a service is doing, trying to understand a claim from another engineer, or investigating an incident.

• Observe AI SRE
  • This has been a game changer. When I need a graph of something, need to analyze some logs, I can just chat with it. I dislike the name (implying SRE is just someone who analyzes observability is offensive) but for doing analysis, especially giving me a starting place, is great.
• FlightCrew
  • Does a great job of telling me and my team when their services are running... poorly. It does things like configuration analysis, long term metric analysis, and creates PRs to change configuration to make the service better. Not a chat interface like the above, but does a lot of pattern matching.
• Weave
  • We use this to analyze how much code our developers are outputting with AI tools. I like it, but I am not sure if I trust it yet.

General Work Tools

This category is for outputting things like docs and stuff. This is the category I hate the most and use the least. Right now, I really hate the tone of all writing I've seen come out of LLMs and other AI tools. So instead I just use tools for researching what I want to say, not what I will say.

• Claude, Gemini & ChatGPT
  • All of these I use the same way, which is usually "generate me some ideas around X". Gemini I use for personal search stuff some times as well. I mostly have been unimpressed with all three, and prefer to search with Google and do my own research. Occasionally, they do give me good leads or ideas, but it's about 10% success rate currently.
• Dust.tt
  • I have had mixed success here, but when it does work, it is impressive. The types of questions that seem to work are questions about document summaries. We have Google Drive, Confluence and our public help pages integrated, and often it finds the right information across all of those. That being said, when the information is missing, it often makes stuff up, and I need to correct it.

I have tried a ton of other tools which have failed me greatly. The above I keep coming back to though, despite issues I have had, which says something.

Two issues I do want to solve with AI that I have not put time into is natural language local device search and an AI for suggesting CLI tools. Doing both from the command line (I mostly use zsh from iTerm2 on OSX) would be nice.

I also would love a good AI diagram tool, but I am coming to the realization that I am bad at describing diagrams, and probably should just stick to drawing things.

I hope this was interesting, very curious to see how all of this will change in six months.

/Nat

#AI #tools

Last month I said I would need to write one thousand words a day. I did not do that. My current word count is 15,337, up from last months 14,225. My only saving grace is I did delete one story that made no sense, and was pretty short (around 500 words written), and replace it with something I like a lot so far.

Shout out to Tracy and Carl for the encouraging text messages around writing. Receiving those did get me to write more those days than I probably would have normally.

Let's do some rounding and say I need to write 55,000 words before July 1st, 2025.

That's what I said last month. That's essentially still true, just ~30 days have passed. So now there are 29 days until July 1st. That's almost two thousand words a day... which I'm not going to be able to do. I am going to try and keep to my goal last month of one thousand words a day, and see where I am on July 1st, and evaluate from there.

In terms of distractions last month, I had two guests: my friend Chris from High School visited for five days, and Melissa visited for seven. Both of those were visits were wonderful, but definitely impeded writing.

The other thing I am incredibly proud of is I performed music in front of people for the first time since... Elementary school? That was a blast, and now I have another show to perform July 12th. Making, composing and performing music has been a good creative outlet, and it has been inspiring to help me write. It is a competing use of time outside of work, but the positive feedback I received made me more excited to create and share more.

Given that, I think my goal for this week should be to finish one story (i.e. writing not editing) and then share it. Partially because it's a better milestone for me than raw output numbers, but also so I can get some feedback.

Thank you again for your encouraging words of feedback, please keep it coming.

/Nat

#kickstarter #writing

Bench my mom saw while hiking. #nature

Just out for a walk along the Hudson. #nature

In my last post I net ~3k words in March. In April I net ~1k words. I can attribute this to two things: remaining very busy at work, and having my mom visit for two weeks.

Given in January I declared I would be done writing in July, I really need to step it up.

I am currently at 14,225 words total. My guesstimate is that the final version will be 70,000. That's pretty daunting to realize how far behind I am. Let's do some rounding and say I need to write 55,000 words before July 1st, 2025. That's 54 days from now. That means I need to write a little over one thousand words a day.

I also need to stop self-editing so much during writing. This is something I am pretty good at when writing non-fiction, but while writing fiction I find myself editing, deleting and revising constantly. This habit needs to stop. The goal should be words on page, as I have purposely scheduled editing time post July.

So my ask to you is to be annoying to me and hold me accountable for these 1k words a day. Text messages, DMs, sky writing, whatever would be appreciated. I will get this book to you all this year.

Lots of love from the east coast,

/Nat

#kickstarter #writing

First, some context. See my previous post on my Homelab for what the system was before this month. It hadn't had too many changes in the last few years. The only big change was adding Glass to split the workload that Storm was doing, and moving most of my websites from Google Cloud to Storm.

But, over the last few months:

• Gallon had its RAM fail, and two separate hard drive failures.
• Storm had a hard drive fail.
• I ran out of space on Gallon.

So I put some investment into fixing things.

flowchart LR;

subgraph AA [House]
    Glass;
    Rope;
    Gallon;
    Mist;
    Brook;
end

Human-->HTTPS;
Human-->Plex;
Plex-->Glass;
HTTPS-->Mist;
Mist-->Gallon;
Rope-->Gallon;
Glass-->Gallon;
Mist-->Brook;
Rope-->Brook;
Glass-->Brook;
Mist-->Rope;
Rope-->Glass;
Brook-->GCP;

Rope and Glass have no changes in this update. Lets walk through how the other three servers have changed.

Gallon & Brook

The first failure was a RAM failure on Gallon. It had a 16GB single RAM stick in it. Thankfully I had the original 4GB stick that the QNAP came with, so I was able to swap that in and get the server back up and running. I then ordered a new 16GB stick, and put that in.

As for the drive failure, that was less easy. I did a stupid thing when I setup Gallon. I put a 2TB SSD in slot 0, and used it for the OS. That part was fine, but I also included it in the storage pool, which was the issue. For QNAP, that means that the storage pool has two vdisks:

1. A single 2TB SSD
2. 11 20TB HDD in Raid 5

If one drive fails in #2, it doesn't matter. I put in a new drive, rebuild the raid, and everything is copasetic. If the SSD drive fails, the whole storage pool is gone.

So, of course, the SSD failed.

Talking to QNAP support was helpful, but it was pretty clear that because I did this configuration poorly (aka completely wrong), I was basically fucked.

Support helped me get the system into Read Only mode, but basically said backup the data as fast as possible, as the SSD could completely fail at any time, and there's no way to rebuild or replace that SSD without deleting everything.

So I decided to backup everything except for one folder which contained my archive of TV shows. I knew I could rebuild this from other sources, and it was so large (~120TB), I could never back it up in a reasonable amount of time.

So first I backed up things that were uber important to GCP (about 4TB), and then came up with a plan for the remaining 60TB.

After a lot of research, I picked up a refurbished Dell R730xd from TechMikeNY. I originally found them on Craigslist, but got a better deal buying directly from their website. They kindly shipped it to me for free.

I named this new NAS brook.

I had 13 10TB drives in various states of health in my basement, so I started working on getting them into the R730xd.

Some things I learned while setting up the R730xd:

• Most NAS software these days tells you not to use Hardware Raid. Partially because they are apparently a common failure point, and partially because they often don't have open source drivers for reading state data off of them.
• This R730xd didn't have a backplane, so I had to buy one aftermarket to add extra operating system drives (which I wanted in RAID 1). Sadly I bought two 2TB HDD off of Amazon and one was DOA. I returned it to Amazon, and for now the OS is on a single disk :facepalm:.
• I spent a bunch of time investigating different operating systems. I was looking for something that would let me use the RX730 as a NAS.
  • Home Media Server Operating System has a good overview of the different options.
  • I first went with OpenMediaVault for the OS. It was pretty easy to install. But drive and storage management was a pain.
  • Next, I went to TrueNAS. I could not get this to boot following their directions.
  • I was going to try UnRAID, but was annoyed at the idea of paying a subscription for my OS, so decided to skip it.
  • I ended up with OMV and the OMV ZFS extension, which allowed for ZFS and thus solved the drive management issues.

As for recovering Gallon, my QNAP server, things I read and learned from:

• Surviving QNAP RAID failure talks about the proprietary software for working with QNAP.
• openmediavault-zfs
• RClone SFTP Settings

Using RClone to copy everything to GCP and Brook I wanted to was ~65TB. The entire process to replicate data took six days.

I then deleted everything on Gallon, took out the SSD, replaced it with a normal 20TB HDD and rebuilt the system as two six disk RAID5s. This was the recommendation of QNAP support over a single 12 disk RAID6. I do not know why, but followed their advice.

I am now slowly re-archiving the TV content I had. I imagine that will take a long time. But that was the only thing lost for now, and everything in the storage realm is backup and serving.

Storm & Mist

Storm had a hard drive failure. This drive was an external drive, which is still readable, but not writable. This server is also very old (~12y), so I decided to just replace it with a new server. I got another server similar to Glass, but used. I named this server Mist.

I moved all of the data from Storm to Mist and configured it with just what it needed. It is serving all of my websites and databases, and is now also backed up, which it was not before.

I have yet to do this, but I plan on wiping Storm, recycling the external drives, and set it up as a desktop computer. I haven't had a desktop Linux machine in a while, and am excited to have it setup again. I am keeping it in its current state for a few more weeks in case I discover I need something that is not backed up correctly. I've already had a few occurrences where that's been the case.

Hope you enjoyed this little postmortem on my home storage setup. Things are mostly running along smoothly now. Backup your data folks, hardware failure happens.

/Nat

#homelab #infrastructure

Early morning meditation spot. #coffee #cafe

Was super warm this evening after snow on Saturday. Went for a walk and got a burger for dinner. #bird #flowers #spring

This made me think a lot about where I wanted to be buried. I understand the idea of wanting to be remembered, and how that affects decisions about burial. I also understand the ecological and economic impacts of it all. This episode made me want to follow the British and make filled up cemeteries into parks. When I lived in London I lived next to a cemetery that had been turned into a park, and it was regularly frequented by folks who wanted to stop and have a quiet place to sit. There were still headstones and grave markers, but some had fallen down and been turned into paths and surface. It always seemed quiet and peaceful, and it was a nice way to remember the dead while also allowing the living to enjoy the space.

I think I would like to be buried in a park. A place where people can play and enjoy themselves, rather than isolated away.

#death #podcasts

March is out the door, and it went by so fast.

Some updates:

• I did some research on publishing to make sure my understandings of cost and shipping times and things still line up with the research I did in... 2022. It does! So that's great.
• I wrote 3843 words in March. This is a net change, so very possible I wrote more, but I deleted others.
• I migrated my work from Markdown to Typst. It seemed like a better format for working towards printing.

This is a shorter update this month, thank you all for the support. If there are certain things you would like to see in these updates, please let me know!

Thanks!

/Nat

#kickstarter #writing

Hints of #spring.

#nature #photography

I have two pieces of content for you to consume:

1. Search Engine: What should we do about teens using AI to do their homework?

2. John Cleese's 1991 speech on creativity

Both focus on creativity in ways that inspired me. The first is a podcast investigating how different generations think about Generative AI and how it is affecting how we communicate, educate and create. The second is an older piece, focusing on how we can't create without taking the time and space to think and make things.

There's a lot of great quotes in both, and while they are long, I highly recommend a listen.

The things I took away from them and am thinking about:

• Evaluating the output of AI is where the skill comes from, if you don't know how to make the thing, you probably won't be able to know if it's any good.
• Forcing yourself to disconnect and make time longer than one hour is needed to get your brain spinning.
• Dedicated space is often useful for separating work types.
• When you don't understand something, turning it off is a common response. That's not a good way to understand it.
• Address the problem, not the solution that you don't like.

One thing in particular I thought about after this was in the AI podcast, one of the interviewees mentioned "Message Audience Purpose" as the basis for evaluating how you should write. The context is talking about how US schools don't regularly teach this when it comes to writing. But it made me think about how I create creative works. I often ignore the message and the audience, focusing on the purpose. I think this is a mistake, and I'm going to try to focus on the message and audience more in the future. I hope it helps my creative practices.

In particular, my goal and take away from these two posts when thinking about my creative output is taking the time to create, and during that, thinking a bit more about the work itself and my goals. Those goals should theoretically include message, audience and purpose. Similarly, I need to practice more, and make time and space to just practice my crafts.

Cheers,

/Nat

#creativity #AI

Morning commute past NYPL. #nyc #architecture #library #streetphotography

Team, a few weeks ago, I decided to stop eating eggs for breakfast. There's two main reasons for this:

1. Price. A dozen large eggs is currently running around $10 here.
2. Fear. Bird Flu is kinda freaking me out.

Historically, my breakfast for the last five or so years has been two eggs, and sometimes some toast, prepared in basically any way. I've gone through omelet phases. Hard boiled. Fried. Scrambled. With hot sauce. With Avocado. With Spam. With all sorts of stuff.

That means I'm buying and consuming one carton of eggs a week at least. Money is a little tight, so while ~$520 a year isn't oppressive, it isn't nothing.

As for bird flu, I don't know if I am being irrational or not here. But podcast episodes like NPR Up First March 1st, and Why scientists' fears about bird flu are intensifying and articles like CDC releases data signaling bird flu spread undetected in cows and people have got me concerned.

So given all of that, I decided to stop eating eggs for breakfast.

I first tried going back to my youth and having cereal for breakfast. This did not work well. A bowl of honey nut cherries in oat milk is delicious, but with a cup of coffee, I found myself running out of energy quickly, and much more irritable than normal.

So! I reached out to the internet. I asked four communities that I feel close to and posted some variation of the following:

Hi friends, I need some breakfast recommendations. With bird flu in the US, I'm going to change up my morning routine of two eggs, toast and coffee.

Suggestions for other protein sources for breakfast? I can't have peanuts and I am lactose intolerant.

The communities I asked are Merveilles.town, Gunks Gaming Guild Discord, The Waystone Discord and Time Owls Discord.

Some of the responses I got (edited for clarity) included:

• Protein powder
• Some kind of grain (cereal, toast, bagel etc) and then just nomming on a piece of corned beef or sliced pork belly
• Breakfast Sausages
• Protein Muffins
• Trader Joes Protein Pancakes
• a hummus wrap with vegan protein crumbles and veggies
• Locally produced eggs are less likely to be contaminated
• Impossible breakfast sausages in a sandwich
• Smoked salmon or other fish paired with capers and other pickled items. Can do them with sliced cucumber and a bit of hummus
• Just Egg
• Sandwich with sliced firm tofu and coleslaw or fresh cabbage. salt/pepper/onions/hot sauce to taste
• Oats or granola with modifiers¹
• Good bread, toasted, and spread with plain yogurt, and a salty/savory topper
• Oatmeal porridge with fresh berries or jam and an apple
• Tofu scramble (use a pinch of Kala Namak, black salt), nut butter, hummus or any other bean spread
• A bagel with onion and chive cream cheese + bacon
• Cottage cheese with fruit and a slight drizzle of honey

These are all fantastic suggestions, and made me a bit excited to experiment.

I made a trip to Adams which is our local green grocer. Not as cheap as other grocery stores in the area, but have the best produce by far.

My goal was to put together a list of things that would be close to or cheaper than eggs, taste good, and allow for experimenting. I bought two large containers of hummus (each about $4), sprouts ($2), radishes ($1), a pound of raw breakfast sausage ($3), good sourdough sliced loaf ($6). I tried to find good egg substitute, tofu and vegan breakfast meats, but all were either too expensive or sold out (also tried Target a few days later and had same experience, need to go to another grocery store and/or Walmart and try again).

Outcome:

In the first photo I have radishes, sprouts and hummus on toasted sourdough. In the second, sprouts and hummus on toasted sourdough with a side of breakfast sausage. To save more money, I'll definitely need to switch to making my own hummus. I also still want to try the fake egg things. But so far, this was delicious.

Let me know about your breakfast habits and if you have any tips on egg replacements.

Cheers!

/Nat

#food #health

For those of you who are not following my kickstarter, this year I am committing to posting updates every month. Here are the first two months:

• January
• February

I will try and remember to post them here as well, because they tend to look like blog posts :D

/Nat

#kickstarter #writing

Snow on Sunday

Welcome to my fourteenth annual year in review post! The tradition continues. Yes, I definitely missed 2022 and 2023, but I put up very delayed versions recently.¹ So maybe not truly annual, but what can you do. You can read past years at #yearinreview. I have been thinking of doing a look-back on past years posts, if you have ideas on what that could look like, please let me know!

2024 was a weird year. Work was incredibly stressful as 2023 ended with layoffs and some startup drama. As the year got going though, we pushed through and had a lot of success, especially in the back half of the year. But don't let movies or pundits sugarcoat it, startup life is exhausting. Some days I definitely miss working for large companies. In those places it is easier to just focus on your own work and be disconnected from the businesses success. Other days I love the excitement and challenge of being part of such a small team. It is a whirlwind of stress, excitement, failure and experimentation.

Mel started a Masters program in Criminal Justice, focusing on Prison Food Reform at the London School of Economics in September, which also lead to a very unusual Autumn. Before that she was working for a few local businesses and doing lots of college application stuff.

Beasley continued to be in good health and turned fifteen! She spends most of her time in bed keeping tabs on the neighborhood squirrels and dogs.

That's it for the overview, here we go!

January & February

We arrived home from a month long road trip traveling to the west coast and back on New Years day. We were ragged and exhausted but glad to be home.

The next two months we mostly laid low, recovering from our long adventure. Briefly though, I went back to the west coast, California and Arizona, for a work trip. During which I hung out with my cousin Jared whom I hadn't seen in ~20 years. We also had two guests, my brother Travis and our good friend Carl.

March

In March, we went on a trip to the Bahamas for our friend Sue's birthday. Mel has been before, but this was my first time, and it was wonderful. I normally am more of a mountain guy than a beach guy, but this trip was just delightful.

I felt more relaxed on this trip than I have in a very long time, which was truly wonderful. A week not thinking about work, the world, agendas, etc. was liberating.

April

Melissa was accepted to the London School of Economics and Political Science. We wanted to figure out where she might live if she accepted, so we made a quick weekend trip to London. It was a whirlwind weekend, but we had a blast and learned a lot. We saw our friend Emma, explored the city, looked at lots of sketchy dorms, ate some really good food, and then flew back home.

Also, we stared at a solar eclipse as it passed by us.

May

Oh my, May. In May my brother Travis broke his leg while rock climbing in Yosemite. It was a real bad break (multiple compound fracture). With the help of my friend Xander, I flew to SFO and drove to Fresno. Then helped Travis get checked out of the hospital, get all of his stuff and shuttle him to my parent's house in Santa Rosa. Shouts to Yosemite Search and Rescue, Travis's climbing partner Nick, Niket, Xander and Fresno Community Hospital who all helped making taking care of Travis possible and helping make sure he didn't lose anything. As a side note, Travis is almost fully healed less than a year later, because modern science is amazing and young fit bodies heal like magic.

I ended up staying in California for a week or so to help my parents take care of Travis. I also got to see some friends and celebrate my mom's birthday while I was there, which was a nice coincidence.

When I got back to NY, Mel and I celebrated our sixth anniversary! We went out to dinner at a new restaurant in Kingston, NY at the recommendation of our friend Frankie and had a great time.

June & July

June and July were a whirlwind. Melissa went to the Montreal Grand Prix with our friend McKenna. I went to California to go fishing with Travis and my Dad at Lake Almanor.

Both of us went down to DC for Audrey and Pat's wedding. They are such wonderful friends and their ceremony was small and beautiful. While there we caught a Washington Nationals game with Phoenix and wandered the Smithsonian, as you do.

It isn't mentioned anywhere else, but over the last two years we have gotten pretty addicted to Formula 1. I feel like this isn't uncommon among my fellow Americans, but it's been fun to pick up a new sport and learn all of the drama and rules and everything.

August

I went to Palm Springs, CA for work, which was the hottest place I have ever been to. It was over 110 degrees Fahrenheit most days. Not my kind of place.

Mel and I made our yearly journey to the New York Renaissance Faire, which was a blast as always.

I had dinner with a bunch of colleagues in NYC, as we now have almost ten people in the area.

Mel did a lot of packing, because she would be leaving for London soon.

September

In September, we moved Mel to London for a year. I went out with her for a week to help set up her flat and get her settled. The flat she ended up renting remotely was... problematic. It's in a great neighborhood but the flat itself had all sorts of problems. We put a lot of work in and got it livable for the year though. She ran into a lot of the logistical and bureaucratic problems I had when I lived in London, plus a few new fun ones. My past trauma made it easy to be able to sort some of them out quickly, which was a good feeling.

Before the move, we did another quick trip to the Bahamas for McKenna's birthday. After the move I hung out with Will at the New York Modular Society 5th year anniversary.

October

October was quiet. I kept playing D&D with my new group at the Gunks Gaming Guild in New Paltz. I started going into the city weekly to see colleagues, as we opened a new office near Bryant Park.

McKenna and I went to a Halloween painting class. Niket, Anthony and I went to Keens Steakhouse, Sumana and I went to the Queens Night Market. All three events were a delight.

November

In November, I went to London for Thanksgiving to see Melissa. It was a great trip, we spent a lot of time just hanging out, and I got to wander London while she was in class.

In my memory, that was the biggest thing I did, but looking at photos, I'm reminded of two other big things that happened:

First, I did a weekend trip to Philadelphia to see Carl and Sam. We ate food, played boardgames and hung out with their adorable cats.

The second was a bit longer. At the end of October I spent two weeks volunteering remotely for the Kamala Harris campaign. I did various SRE and programming things for the campaign. I then spent the first week of November in Williamsburg at the campaign HQ helping out. It was a very sad ending, but I'm proud of the work we did. I miss working in Politics, and this reminded me how hard and rewarding it is. As we lost, I did kind of block the three weeks out.

December

I weirdly took barely any photos in December... but I arrived back from London and then didn't do anything all month. Melissa arrived back in NY for the holidays and we just stayed home and relaxed. Beasley was incredibly grateful all three of us were back together, and lots of snuggles on both the couch and bed were had. We went to bed at 9:30pm on December 31st.

Goals

How did I do on my 2024 goals?

In my 2024 goals post, I set out the following goals:

• Keep a public culture consumption diary
• Blog once a month
• Finish locative garden
• Make music once a week
• Go fishing once a month
• 30 minutes of exercise three times a week
• Remove all credit card debt
• Find a monthly in person social thing

I posted an update in July. Since then, some improvements were made.

Writing: Keep a public culture consumption diary, Blog once a month, Finish locative garden.

No major update here since I posted my update, but I am happy with the progress I've made. I wish I had better news about locative garden, but overall, I'm happy that I'm regularly writing.

Mental Health: Make music once a week, Go fishing once a month, 30 minutes of exercise three times a week, Find a monthly in person social thing.

I'm regularly playing D&D at the Gunks Gaming Guild in New Paltz. I'm regularly making music. Exercise and fishing I did ok with, but in general not great.

Finances: Remove all credit card debt

I need to write more about debt, my struggles and my feelings about it. My shame around debt is something I'm still working through. My spending habits haven't really been in a good place since around 2014, and they really caught up to me in 2023 and 2024. I want to write more about this at some point, but not until I feel a bit more success.

That being said, I made some really good progress in December after lots of research and talking to various institutions. Shoutout to r/debtfree for providing me some needed inspiration, and my therapist for helping me through the shame portions of debt management. I am not out of credit card debt, but I am making progress.

Goals for 2025

My goals for the year are below. I am going back to my old style of using the OKR Framework to define my personal goals. It's a bit much, but I've found I meet my goals more consistently when I group them by objective and a measurable action.

One thing to note is that I didn't put any professional goals in here. 2025 will be my twentieth year as a professional software developer, which is a bit of a trip. I started getting paid to code in the Spring of 2005 by the County of Sonoma Information Services Department. Since then I've done a lot of interesting work, and achieved a lot. My overarching goal for the next few years is the same as it has been since 2020: to eventually lead an engineering department at a tech company. Right now my focus towards that goal is to just do the work and help the company succeed. We'll see if that plan pays out, but currently doesn't have too many short-term achievements needed beyond working.

So with the context out of the way, here are my goals for 2025:

Improve Mental Health

• Measure mood every day
• Take meds every day
• Do some push-ups and sit-ups every day

I have long fought with depression. Therapy and drugs have helped a lot, but mental health is not something you cure. I wanted to be explicit in my daily tasks for helping my mental health, even though most of my goals are around managing my mental state already.

Make Art Publicly

• Write something every day
• Make music every day
• Ship locative.garden
• Ship Sub Alpine Drift Album One

I have two art projects I want to finish:

1. locative.garden, which is a collection of short stories that friends and family backed on Kickstarter in 2021 (🤦).
2. Sub Alpine Drift #1, an electronic music album I have been working on in my spare time.

Both of these projects I want to continue making in public. I often feel weird about that, as it requires a decent amount of energy to bare your unfinished work to the public. When I was younger, I found this a lot easier, but as I've gotten older, I think about it more. So this year, I want to make sure I'm working on my music and writing muscles every day, to improve my confidence and also my skill, and hopefully get myself publishing progress, if not finishing, these two works.

Decrease Debt

• Close majority of credit cards
• Keep accurate budget daily

This was the year I realized I can't be trusted with credit cards. I should have probably realized this a decade ago, but here we are. By the end of the year I want to close the majority of cards open in my name (there are currently five).

I also want to get better at budgeting. I do an ok job of this currently, but I mostly think about it monthly. The last few months of 2024, I started doing daily roundups of spending, and I found it really helpful to make me understand my habits. I want to make this a part of my daily routine to continue down a better financial path.

Get out of the house

• See a friend once a week in person
• Play D&D once a month
• Go fishing six times
• Take a walk every day

These are all things I love to do, and I want to track them. The weeks I get out of the house (I work from home, so inertia definitely keeps me there) I feel a lot better. More connected to the world, and less stressed.

Summary

Ok so daily I need to do the following:

• Write
• Music
• Go for a walk
• Take meds
• Check budget
• Some push-ups and sit-ups

This seems doable, but also a lot. I'm bad at taking time for myself.

Conclusion

I'm not sure if 2024 was a good year. It feels like it flew by with a lot of ups and downs. Looking back, it was enjoyable, even if it was very stressful. No regrets though, so that's good. To paraphrase Chuck Yeager, "any landing you can walk away from is a good one", and I'm still walking.

I'm grateful to all of the friends and family I saw in 2024, and I hope I see you in 2025. We're still in Beacon, NY, so if you'd like to come visit, please let me know. I love it here in the Hudson Valley. Great people, food, nature and art. There is a possibility of Mel and I moving in 2026 after Mel graduates, so I'm hoping to make the most of my year in this beautiful place.

Best of luck and lots of love to you and your family,

/Nat

Yesterday afternoon at a service station.

#cats Beasley paws

Init

Listening

• Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch is celebrating their 25th anniversary and is putting out a list of the most sustainable fish, and recipes for them, with a new fish out every month: The Super-Green Fish List. I learned about this listening to Short Wave: how to know if the seafood you're eating is sustainable.

• Money Can Buy You Everything, Except Maybe a Birkin Bag from The Atlantic is a great dive into Hermes, the Birkin bag and a weird lawsuit happening in California. If you like the business of fashion, this is a great listen.

• Why We Bleep: Befaco does a great deep dive on how to run a super small business and the history of Befaco.

• Polk Award Winners: Brian Howey taught me about an incredible story of messed up policing in California, my home state. Also was just a very interesting guy.

• Four Tet @ TheLotRadio 12-01-2024 is great. I learned about this from a post on Mastodon that I can no longer find. Thanks to whomever recommended it!

• Fatboy Slim - Elevator Music is a high energy set. Just a fun time all around.

Watching

• Sleater-Kinney: Tiny Desk Concert is beautiful. I love their music, and in this setting they are wonderful.
• A bunch of Anime, but DandaDan is the one I want others to watch!
• Tottenham v. Manchester United has an amazing goal by Son, and has my team winning, so it's great. Yes, a lot of terrible goal keeping, but #shrugs.

Reading

• Make resilient Go net/http servers using timeouts, deadlines and context cancellation taught me about how to set timeouts in Go, and also showed me I had a bug in almost all of my personal sites written in Go!
• The Ghosts in the Machine and The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed are incredibly depressing, about some sketchy stuff Spotify is doing to take even more advantage of musicians and artists.

Playing

• onedr0p/exportarr is a cool piece of software which scrapes a variety of Servarr type services and surfaces their data in a prometheus endpoint.
• I've been hooked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It's got a lot of people complaining about it, but I'm loving the story telling. I particularly love how much of the story is hidden in side quests. I feel like I have to really search to understand what is happening, and am always rewarded for it.

/Nat

#happy #media

2023 was a weird year. I talked a bit about its chaos in Three years at Laurel. But it was exciting if not tiring. The year ended with a lot of drama, which lent to 2024 being incredibly hard at work.

But outside of work, it was still a good year, family, friends, etc. The big thing was we drove across the US in December. Mostly to see if we could do it, and to see how Beasley was with traveling that far. We did it, Beasley hated it. Mel graduated culinary school, we went to two fantastic weddings. Life was good.

Lots of love,

/Nat

Lots of love,

/Nat

I am in a strange mood, and after reading Gothamist's thankful for the MTA, I wanted to list a few things I am #thankful for in my #life.

• I am thankful for public art and museums.
• I am thankful for video chat applications letting me see my wife every day, even when we're an ocean apart.
• I am thankful for my family and our cat.
• I am thankful for coffee and the prevalence of fake milks at coffee shops.
• I am thankful for investigative journalists.
• I am thankful cell phone networks letting me have data around the world.
• I am thankful for work, and time off from work.
• I am thankful for nature, especially when it survives in cities despite humanities attempts to thwart it.
• I am thankful for smaller online social interactions. Blogs, Mastodon, Zulip, Slack, Discord, etc.

/Nat