After another year of reading it’s been fun to review my list from 2023 since I had forgotten a few of the books I read. I wanted to highlight my favorite and least favorite books of the year. Non-Fiction My favorite non-fiction of the year was Algorithms of Oppression and it wasn’t even close. There are so many ways to criticize Google and other big tech companies, but the focus on search engines as a vehicle to enforce racism and sexism was fascinating.

Work This has been a good year for me at work. Because I started at CHOP so close to the end of 2021, I spent most of 2022 learning. In 2023 I’ve taken on significantly more responsibility and started to function as more of a leader on the team. I work on the Arcus team at CHOP, whose primary goal is providing a virtual environment for CHOP researchers to have the software tools and data they need to do their research in one place.

I hadn’t broken anything in production in a while until last week, so it seems like a good time to write about that. Last week I deployed an upgrade to one of our services containing two changes: A several thousand line refactor of the entire service A few dozen line removal of a redundant authorization check Which one of those changes do you think introduced a problem that caused me to roll back this attempted upgrade, not once, but twice?

I was at one point in my life a pretty good trombone player. Had I wanted to, I probably could have gone to college for music but I decided against it for various reasons. Mostly, I was afraid having to make a living as a musician would kill the joy I found in playing music. I still played regularly in college, through Scranton’s Performance Music department, which is shockingly large for a school that doesn’t have a music major.

I did something this week I never do on purpose: I clicked on an ad. Shameful, I know, but I had a reason. My wife and I had talked about getting some Philly sports apparel because we don’t have much and we’ve been going to more games. Pro sports apparel is expensive, which is a large part of the reason I haven’t bought any recently, so when I saw an ad on Instagram with a coupon code for Eagles appparel, it seemed reasonable to check it out.

This originally appeared as a post in the fediverse, which I have copied here for longevity. So I go into Philadelphia once a week for a rehearsal and I used to drive because the train schedule looked inconvenient despite there being stations near my house and my destination, plus parking was the same price as the train so I may as well drive right? Recently I’ve been getting more frustrated with car-centric infrastructure, so I decided a few weeks ago to take public transit.

For a long time I mostly only read books at the beach or on a plane, but in 2022 I started intentionally reading more. The decision was obvious: I liked books, missed reading consistently, and it gave me something enjoyable to do before bed instead of endlessly scrolling on social media. Partway through the year, I started a public reading list to track all the books I’ve read. Over a year later, I wanted to reflect on how it’s been so far and talk about why I do this.

Earlier this week, Ethan Marcotte’s new book You Deserve a Tech Union came out and I read it immediately. I didn’t know what to expect as someone who, until recently, hasn’t seen the point of unions for generally well-treated tech workers. There is a widely held notion that tech workers are somehow different than workers in other industries. There’s the idea that the tech industry is made up of individual stars and success comes from an individual’s merit.

This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, a monthly challenge to write on a specific topic. For this month, Mark Sutherland selected Gardening. I used to despise gardening. I hated every part of the process: pulling weeds, planting, watering, pulling more weeds. None of it appealed to me. The flowers that came out of it were nice to look at, but that never outweighed the work I didn’t enjoy.

I wrote this in June, 2014 as part of a college course about civic responsibility. It came up today in this fediverse thread so I decided to dig it up for some reflection. Looking at it again 9 years later, I was right. I’m still a hypocrite, and the privacy situation has absolutely gotten worse. Below is the text I wrote for the assignment, unedited from 2014. Sam Seaborn is not a real politician.