Posts on Broken Intuition

New Theme

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 22:15:37 -0500

I’ve been looking for a new theme for a while becuase I didn’t love the one I had. I used anubis which looked good enough but didn’t quite have the style I wanted. I also didn’t want to rely on themes with Javascript and didn’t want any analytics included even if they could be disabled. I started writing my own because I wasn’t happy with what I could find, but decided against that because I do very little frontend work so it would’ve taken forever.

I eventually remembered Amin’s readable.css and decided to use the Hugo theme loosely associated with the project. Because I post primarily text I like the intent being easy to read with no distractions on the page. I did a litle bit of customization and here we are!

I took the opportunity to make a few other changes. I wrote a new homepage which includes a list of favorite posts in addition to the most recent posts. It’s even updated automatically by adding a field to the frontmatter of a post! On my reading page, I now show the text of the post for only the current year to make the page less overwhelming. Previous years show title and author with a link to the post for the book. I also brought back the “Broken Intuition” title (which was absent for a few years) instead of my name, honestly just because. I don’t have a specific reason. I added the subtitle “A digital garden by Matt Owens” as a sort of starting point for trying to make this more of a site with pages I update rather than strictly a reverse-chronological blog. That’s an idea I’ve been attracted to in the past and I’m excited to give it a try.

Doing Anything at All

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 22:17:10 -0500

This week has certainly been interesting. In my year in review post, I listed engaging in some form of activism in my goals for 2025 but I didn’t know what that would look like. I wanted to channel my frustrations about what’s going on in the world into something productive rather than just feeling angry and sad. The first week of Trump round two has provided ample opportunity for frustration. I’ve contacted my representative and senators at least three times already, which I believe is extremely important, but it doesn’t feel like doing much. Helpful for getting my thoughts into words yes, but I’m under no delusion that Senator McCormick is interested in his constituents' displeasure about the current situation. With seemingly everything being bad, the feeling of needing to do something kept growing.

When I heard about the OMB memo halting federal aid funding, it was immediately obvious what I could do. I’ve donated to Philabundance monthly for several years, so I called and increased the amount I’m giving each month. If these ghouls wanted to strip funding from WIC and Meals on Wheels, I was going to increase my donations toward feeding people. That’s not to say I think it’s right, relying on the generosity of individuals to prevent people from starving is an abhorrent way to run a society. But, this is the situation we’re in and me giving more money is an easy way to do something to help. It’s so easy to be swept up in anger and frustration and feel like we’re powerless as individuals because we can’t fix the big-picture harms. As an individual, making my monthly donation a little larger is making sure there’s a litte more food available for people who need it.

Recognizing that such a small individual action has an undeniable impact was very freeing for me. Doing something, anything at all, that feels like a positive step helped me clear out some of the big picture fears and focus on what I can actually do. All week I’ve been reminding myself that despair isn’t helpful and feeling like I can’t do anything about it is false. I want to allow myself to feel my feelings, but not let them take over. Any one of us can’t fix an entire problem, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything. I’ve seen many people give the advice to focus on buliding community and looking for ways to support resilience locally. This week I chose trying to reduce food insecurity in the Philadelphia area and next week I’ll try to find something else. Taking any action, as small as this was, empowered me to do a little more. The next one will make me feel like I can do a little more and maybe over time those small actions will add up to something great.

2024 Reading Recap

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 22:15:33 -0500

I love going back over the list of books I’ve read in the past year. Enough time has passed since the first few for it to be a nice reminder and I get to see how the last few stack up against the rest of the year’s reading. I intentionally don’t post a rating of what I read, just a few thoughts when I finish it.

Overview

This was another year of highlighting the pitfalls of counting number of books. On the short end, All Systems Red is around 30k words and the long end has Words of Radiance over 400k, both counting as 1 book. I figure those all balance out in the end. This year I have a caveat to the number of books I read. There are 42 entries on my reading list, but I actually read 48 books. The Giver Quartet is four books, but I bought a version that has all four bound together with a single ISBN. I also grouped Nothing is Promised as a single entry because the four books are so tightly linked. Ultimately this doesn’t matter because I’m not looking for a books-read goal, it’s just interesting to think about. So I read either 42 or 48 books in 2024 depending on how you count.

Compared to 2023, I read 6 more books, but I had a much larger proportion of fiction. I read 13 non-fiction books in 2023, but only 5 in 2024. This wasn’t intentional, I usually had a deep enough list of fiction books I wanted to read that I didn’t seek out as much non-fiction. I will try to bring some of that balance back in 2025 though.

category	2022	2023	2024
fiction	6	23	37
nonfiction	7	13	5

Bar chart of counts by year and category

I also keep track of whether I read the book on paper, read the ebook, or listened to the audibook. Most books I read are ebooks because I get a lot through the library or they’re cheaper than buying the paper copy. I don’t re-read books often so I’m selective about what books I want taking up physical space.

Here are the counts broken down by year:

format	2022	2023	2024
audiobook	1	1	8
ebook	4	21	21
paper	8	14	13

I think it’s interesting that my number of ebooks remained the same from 2023 to 2024, but I listened to signficantly more audiobooks. Thanks library! That contributed a lot to reading more books this year because audiobooks aren’t replacing other reading time because I mostly listen while washing dishes or cleaning.

Looking at the percentages of books read by each format I think the most interesting change is the percentage of paper books falling from 2022. At the point I was just getting back into reading consistently and I mostly read books I already had.

Plot of percentage of books read each year in each format

Favorites and Least Favorites

As a bit of reflection I like to highlight my favorite and least favorite books each year. My big takeaway this year is that I read a lot of really good books. Picking favorites was difficult.

Fiction

After much deliberation, my favorite fiction book of the year was Oathbringer. When I sat down to make the list I thought it would be an obvious winner, but I read a lot of excellent fiction this year. The honorable mentions for individual books are A Memory Called Empire and This is How You Lose the Time War. I loved both of those books, and I know it’s a very basic answer but Oathbringer just edged them out slightly. The Stormlight Archive books are really good and Oathbringer is my favorite so far. For series, I loved Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries books, but couldn’t pick out any single one which stood above the rest. Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut books are also great.

My least favorite fiction book was Black Girl White Girl, which was just bad.

Non-Fiction

I didn’t read a lot of non-fiction this year, but all the books I read were good. My favorite by a massive margin was Braiding Sweetgrass. That books will definitely go on the list of books which changed the way I think about the world. It is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read.

I have to call out two honorable mentions, which is funny because we’re now over half the non-fiction books I read in the year. Paved Paradise and The Order of Time are both excellent.

There’s no least favorite on the list this year, because they were all good.

2024 Year in Review

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 20:19:31 -0500

2024 was an eventful year. The highlight of the year was my wife finishing her PhD in May. The final run up to her dissertation defense was intense, but the payoff was great and we celebrated her graduation with a party at our favorite brewery. Although I wrote last year about it being our last year in the house, she got a postdoc at the same university so we’re staying put for a few more years. That process was stressful, but it is nice to get to stay here for a little while longer. I also wrote about work last year, but nothing particularly interesting comes to mind for 2024, so I’ll just say I’m enjoying my job and working every day at incremental improvement has been bringing good results. There’s some interesting stuff coming up in the pipeline so I’ll probably talk about work more next year.

Our travel for the year started with going to the Netherlands for a friend’s wedding in February. We started off in Amsterdam for the bachelor party and then spent the weekend in the small town where the wedding was held. It was a great time, except most of the groomsmen ended up with food poisoning (amusingly from a Michelin star restaurant). We joked that we had the tamest possible bachelor party for Amsterdam and most of us were still down for the count. Luckily the groom was fine so everything else went well so it was certainly memorable. We went to Disney World in March for my wife’s birthday, which was fun as always.

We wanted to go on a trip to celebrate my wife’s graduation, but didn’t plan anything specific becuase we thought we’d be moving. She found a cheap Alaskan cruise on the Norwegian Jewel that we booked only a few weeks out. We flew to Anchorage and after spending the night there took a scenic train to Seward where we boarded the ship. The train ride was incredible. The first third was along a highway, so there wasn’t much different of a view, but after the train went further away from the highway we got to see so much more than we would have in a car. We saw a few glaciers, a moose, tons of bald eagles, and some incredible mountains. The cruise had a day at sea to visit Hubbard Glacier, and stops in Icy Straight Point (a tourist trap, but we got some great whale watching), Juneau, Skagway (also a tourist trap, but again, great scenery), and Ketchikan before ending in Vancouver. That itinerary was great becuase the ship was basically a floating hotel. We woke up in a new place, spent the day on land, and came back on the ship for dinner. The highlight of the trip was a group canoe trip to Mendenhall Glacier. We canoed from the other side of the lake right up to the side of the glacier, which was breathtaking. Ketchikan was our favorite town because it felt the most like a real place where people actually live. My favorite thing there was visiting the Totem Heritage Center. It was fascinating to learn about the history and preservation of such an important part of the Indigenous culture of the area and heartbreaking to see how much of it was destroyed.

It was also a good year for me for hobbies. I’ve continued playing in the PennMed Symphony Orchestra and our music selection for the fall was excellent. The highlight for me was Florence Price ’s Symphony no. 3. I had a great reading year, with 48 books (or 42, depending on how you count it). I’ll do a separate post about the year’s reading. I didn’t write as much as I wanted to, either on my website or writing fiction. I did write a few short stories, including two finished and one in progress as part of Writing Month after the AI-related implosion of NaNoWriMo. Even though I didn’t write as much as I wanted to, it still felt good to finish some stories. One big hobby change this year was racing in a league in iRacing. I ran the full season of the Crown Jewel Racing Truck Series, which ran full-length NASCAR truck series races on Monday nights. It was really cool racing with mostly the same people every week. I finished 5th in the season standings, with zero wins but four second-place finishes. I’m racing this same series again in 2025, which should be fun. We also started going to trivia at our favorite brewery consistently with the same group of people. It’s great to have a scheduled time to see friends every week.

My goals for 2025 are very similar to last year’s.

Phone Use: I’ve successfully replaced my bedtime phone use with reading books, but I still spend way too much time on my phone during the day. I spend a decent amount of time on Mastodon, which is great, but I also spend a ton of time on Instagram, which I really need to curtail. It’s such a massive time suck and I honestly don’t enjoy it half the time. I’m planning on cutting that way back.
Health: I didn’t ride my bike as much as I wanted to this year, so I’m going to work on that. When I’m not riding outside, I want to try to fit in a half hour ride on the spin bike most days. I think we’ve been doing a pretty good job with healthy eating, especially cutting down how often we get takeout. I want to keep that up and also reduce my alcohol consumption.
Writing: I really just need to start a habit of writing something every day. Whether it’s working on a short story, writing a blog post, or making some notes for a novel outline, making a habit of getting some words on the page every day will get me closer to where I want to be. My goal is to submit a least two short stories by the end of the year. If it’s possible I’d also like to outline and start some serious work on a novel.
Activism: I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do or what to call this one, but I want to do something to try to make the world better in the face of gestures broadly at everything going on. I want to start being more active in the things I care about, whether that’s contacting my representatives, starting to use my bike for transportation, doing more to cut consumption and waste, or volunteering. I’m leaving this open ended.
Friends: I want to focus on relationships with friends and making time for seeing people. Trivia has been great, but it’d also be good to have more game nights and just generally hanging out.

With everything going on in the US, it’s difficult to be excited about 2025, but I’m going into the year thankful for what I have and looking forward to finding joy wherever we can. Happy new year!

Weeknotes Dec 9-15 2024

Tue, 17 Dec 2024 22:58:53 -0500

It was a week of family, with a funeral and a wedding on my wife’s side of the family. On Wednesday we drove a few hours in a very unpleasant rain storm to the funeral for her great uncle. It was an interesting experience going to a funeral for a family member I had never met. He was a pediatrician and active volunteer in his community, so he was very well known and very well loved. At lunch after the funeral mass, various family members and friends got up to tell stories about him, some funny, others just heartwarming. It was great for me to get a sense of who he was and how great of a person he was. The whole experience felt more like a celebration of his life, which is how I think funerals should be.

On Saturday, we had a cousin’s wedding in Connecticut. They had it at a brewery which has an event venue, which was neat. The room was all decorated for Christmas and we all sat at big long tables. It was a lot of fun and the beer was great.

Not much this week, I’m just thankful for family.

Weeknotes Dec 2-8 2024

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 22:56:10 -0500

I’ve decided I’m going to try the weeknotes thing that’s common among indieweb writers. For my first one, I’m covering last week, albeit a little late.

On Tuesday, I had the final rehearsal for my orchestra concert on Sunday. I play trombone in the PennMed Symphony Orchestra, an amateur group made up primarily of medical students and healthcare professionals at Penn Medicine and CHOP, among other healthcare institutions in Philadelphia. The final rehearsal is always a bit stressful because anything that isn’t going well probably won’t be fixed before the concert, but this one was good.

I honestly don’t remember what I was doing at work last week, and that’s a different computer than where I’m writing this so I can’t check. Maybe I’ll talk about work next week.

On Friday I went to see the ballet for the first time. Despite loving music and live performances, I’d never been. My wife and I saw the Philadelphia Ballet perform the Nutcracker. Previously I have had a somewhat negative opinion of the Nutcracker from playing awful arrangements of the music in school band, but it was incredible. The dance and music were both beautiful and I’d happily go again.

My main task for Saturday was replacing the caulk in our tub, which I expected to be a quick project. An hour to remove the old, an hour to put in the new, and I’d move on with my day. It turns out, getting the old caulk out was difficult, even with a chemical remover. I had done a terrible job last time so there was just so much scraping to do. In that process, I unfortunately chipped some of the finish of the tub, so that had to be patched before I could put the new caulk in. I went to Lowe’s to get a repair kit and accidentally bought the wrong color. Thankfully I realized on the way out to my car so I could return it and buy the right one. I got home and discovered the second one had entirely hardened so I couldn’t use it. So much for a quick project. Dinner didn’t turn out right either. I tried to make shepherd’s pie, but put in too much liquid so I ended up with more of a chunky potato soup. I was really looking forward to that meal, so I was not having a good time. It’s pretty funny in hindsight how miserable it is to have a bunch of minor things go wrong.

The concert on Sunday was great. My favorite of the pieces was Florence Price’s Symphony no. 3. I had never heard of her before, but she was the first Black woman whose music was played by a major orchestra. It was cool to learn about her and perform her work. These concerts always make me feel fortunate to have this group. Amateur music groups are an incredibly special thing because we’re coming together for the joy of music and doing something it’s impossible to do alone. It’s a privilege to play serious orchestral works with such a talented group of people.

That’s all for this week. I’m not sure if I’ll start using a template for these posts or just keep winging it. We’ll see!

Suffs, Post Election 2024

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 06:13:53 -0500

This past weekend, my wife and I went to Manhattan to see a few Broadway shows. The first show we saw was Suffs, which tells part of the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the US, from the Woman Suffrage Procession in 1913 through the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. We had planned the trip and bought our tickets before the election, but it hit very differently after the election than it would have had Harris won.

I have never cried so much from a piece of art. There are so many moments in this show that are inspiring and heartbreaking and so very relevant today. Doris Stevens, in the middle of describing how marriage is effectively a prison sentence for a woman, remarks “it’s 1916, how are women still treated this way?” That line got to me, in the middle of the erosion of women’s rights and constant attacks on trans people. It’s 2024, how are women still treated this way?

This show touched on many of the things I’ve been feeling for the last year or so about being a bystander. During the procession, there was a constant refrain of “I want my great-granddaughter to know I was here”, “I want my sister to know I was here”, “I want my mother to know I was here”, etc. It really made me think about the future and wonder if I was really comfortable telling my future children and grandchildren when they learn about the history of the 2020s that I sat and watched from the sidelines? At another point, Dudley Field Malone said the whole thing would’ve been so much easier if men stood up and did something at some cost to ourselves. This brought up a lot of feelings of wanting to do something, but having absolutely no idea what to do. I honestly have no idea where to start. Things I think I could do feel too small and things that seem important enough I don’t know if I’m capable of. I don’t know where I’m going to channel this, but this feeling will lead me to some action.

I really like that Suffs doesn’t hide from the issue of race in the suffrage movement. It brings up the intended exclusion of Black women from the 1913 procession, criticism of NAWSA for using Mary Church Terrell as a shield to avoid accusations of racism, and numerous times when Black women were told to wait their turn and let the white women have their progress. Toward the end of the show, there’s a great scene where Mary Church Terrell and Ida B Wells work through the conflicting emotions of celebrating the success of the passage of the 19th amendment while recognizing they still won’t be able to vote.

The feeling in the theater was something I’ve never felt before. There were so many instances where the crowd cheered in response to something particularly relevant that a character said, sometimes making the actresses pause before continuing. The best moment of this was during the Silent Sentinels protests, they decided they couldn’t be arrested for unpatriotic statements if they were quoting the president and unveiled a banner that said “We shall fight for democracy - President Woodrow Wilson” (in reference to entering World War I). Seeing that banner and cheering with a theater full of people, facing the threat of Trump’s second term and Project 2025, was incredibly moving.

The show ends with some discussion of the Equal Rights Amendment and a recognition that the work fighting for equality and progress will never be finished. The tagline of the final song is “progress is possible, not guaranteed”, an incredible summary of the show and call to action. It’s a shame this show is closing on Broadway in January, but there is a national tour starting late next year. We need this show as a reminder of what it takes to achieve progress and the power of building movements together.

Ten Years

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 15:19:17 -0400

As of today, my wife and I have been together for ten years, a third of our lives. It’s an arbitrary milestone, especially compared to the usual celebration of wedding anniversaries, but nonetheless fitting time to reflect. We met our first year of college and started dating the following year. In ten years, we’ve navigated challenging math classes, graduating from college, living two thousand miles apart for a couple years, buying a house, getting stuck in the middle of a kitchen renovation at the outbreak of a pandemic, getting married, and her starting and finishing her PhD. It’s wild thinking about how we’ve spent a third of our lives at each other’s side (not literally during the 2000 miles apart thing but you get the picture) and how in between all those big things there are so many wonderful moments of everyday happiness. We’ve travelled to seven countries and thirty-one US states together. We had our own wedding (twice) and attended eleven others together. We’ve seen eight shows on Broadway and seen the Avett Brothers live five times. There’s also countless hours watching movies and shows, hours spent on the couch drinking our morning coffee, hours of board games and yard work and cooking dinner and just hanging out with a glass of wine. Having a partner who makes a normal day just as special as the big events is simply incredible. Ten years seems like such a long time, but so many of these things don’t seem that long ago. Undoubtedly the next ten years will bring just as many changes as the last ten and it’s comforting to know we’ll face them together. Marriage is great.

Hobbies

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 16:16:05 -0400

I have a lot of hobbies, to the point that I even describe myself that way on my About page. Many of these are carried over from childhood, others I picked up as an adult, mostly from seeing cool things on Reddit and deciding to try them.

Music was my first love. I started in elementary school with trombone and piano. I didn’t keep up with the piano lessons, but trombone became my primary instrument. My freshman year of high school, my band director told me I was pretty good at it and I should get private lessons outside of school. That trombone teacher was the first person to install a real desire to practice and get better at the craft and I will forever be grateful to him for that. His guidance brought me to many auditioned ensembles in high school that are still some of my favorite memories. I’ve had some struggles keeping up with that, but I still love the instrument and play in a wonderful amateur orchestra that keeps challenging me. Over the years, I picked up other instruments with various levels of success, including guitar, alto sax, bass, and a particularly fun stint teaching someone to play tuba as I was playing the instrument for the first time myself. I went through phases of songwriting and composing, trying to record music and develop that skill. The goal was always to put those recordings out into the world, but that never happened and that’s ok. I had a great time doing it, although it was often frustrating.

For a long time, motorsports were the only sports I watched. I started watching NASCAR on a whim in 2007 and was immediately hooked. It didn’t take long to find Grand Am sports car racing (now IMSA), Indycar, Formula 1, and all the other random racing they showed on SPEED Channel before it was folded into FS1. I loved the competition, the engineering, and the spectacle of speed at the track. This love of motorsports got me into simracing after I was frustrated with the arcade-style racing games I was used to playing. This was probably the first hobby I found on Reddit, where I discovered Assetto Corsa and Project Cars 2. A desire for more competitive online racing brought me to iRacing which is where I spend almost all of my video game time today. Don’t listen to the people saying “It’s not a video game, it’s a simulator”. It’s still a video game.

Reddit also brought me to a few other hobbies. A minor interest in houseplants lead me to r/gardening, which lead to r/nativeplantgardening and r/nolawns where I learned to love the concept of individual gardening action to support biodiversity and fight habitat loss. Me thinking I should ride my bike again in 2020 lead me to cycling (with everyone else early in the pandemic) as a hobby and excercise, watching the Tour de France, and learning about public infrastructure, the disasterous influence cars have had an our society, and public transit. I had multiple attempts at getting good at photography, rekindling an interest in amateur radio, and an attempt at getting into inline skating. (That one was around the same time as a back injury, which didn’t go well) I got into homebrewing hard cider (because beer seemed too difficult), coffee, and cooking. These were all driven by seeing cool things online (mostly Reddit) and wanting to try it for myself.

I’ve spent a lot of time on r/homelab and r/selfhosted and setting up a bunch of services I run myself. This, among other things, led me to learning about the absolute mess that is Big Tech and their influence on society. That influenced me setting up this website as a place I own for me to write and getting into Mastodon and the Fediverse, interacting with some really awesome people there.

In the last few years, I rediscovered a love of reading that I’ve thoroughly documented here. I basically replaced scrolling on my phone before bed with reading, which has been an incredible improvement in my life. As of this writing, I’ve posted about 67 books I’ve read. Reading has gotten me interested in writing fiction which I’ve been doing on and off for the last year. I don’t have anything I’d consider successful yet, but I’m trying to get better and the process has been enjoyable.

I often feel like I don’t have enough time for all my hobbies, which is frustrating. Even worse, when I’m spending a lot of time on one it feels like I’m neglecting the others. This is most common with music because it’s very noticeable when I haven’t been practicing. I used to give myself a hard time about this, but I’ve come to reject that. One of the great joys of life is doing things that make me happy just for the enjoyment of it. Involvement in each of these hobbies comes in waves that capture my attention for a while before I’m drawn to something else. That’s perfectly fine. It’s ok if I don’t spend a minimum amount of time on a particular hobby each week and it’s fine if I don’t touch some for months or years. It’s not work and it’s ok for me to just enjoy what is bringing me joy today, knowing the others will be there for me when I need them.

Including Audiobooks

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 19:32:52 -0500

Until today I hadn’t included audiobooks I listened to in my reading list. While I gather it is a hotly contensted question whether listening to audiobooks counts as reading, I never had strong opinions about it. I didn’t include them mostly because I didn’t listen to them that often, but I guess I also considered listening a different activity. That was probably because most of my non-music listening was podcasts rather than books. However, why wouldn’t I include them in my reading list? Although I mentioned some minor gamification in my Why I Track My Reading post, I don’t have a set number of books I’m aiming for so it’s not like I could use audiobooks to cheat. I’m using this as a place to talk about books and keep track of the ones I’ve read so I’ve decided it doesn’t matter what format that book comes in. This will be especially relevant for The Murderbot Diaries because I listened to the first book, but might get a paper copy of the next one from the library depending on when it’s available again. In the end, including audiobooks in my reading list only added 3 books to the list since I started keeping track.

Souring on Electric Cars

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 15:00:00 -0500

I’ve been interested in electric cars since the release of the original Tesla Roadster. After I graduated from college and started my first full-time job I eyed the release of the Tesla Model 3, thinking I’d buy one when I needed a new car. At the time I was driving a 2012 Chevy Equinox which met all of my needs. In 2019 I bought a Chevy Bolt on the last day the dealer was open before the federal tax credit for GM halved. I loved that car. Initially I loved the zero emissions thing and the idea that it was better for the environment. Being able to just plug in at home instead of taking trips to the gas station was great. The car handled well, was fun to drive, and could fit a surprising amount of stuff in the back with the seats down, despite the small footprint (by American standards). I remember one time in the Home Depot parking lot I was loading bags of soil and mulch in the back and some guy got out of his truck and said, “betcha wish you had a truck right about now.” No sir, I do not, thank you very much.

With the first round of recalls for battery fires, GM bought back the car for what I paid for it. It was a frustrating experience, but worked out well for me because I got to drive the car for two years effectively for free. After the Bolt recall debacle I bought a first edition Volkswagen ID4, which is what I drive now. It has some quirks, but in many ways it’s a better car than the Bolt. From a pure driving perpective, I love electric cars.

The thing is, instead of recycled dinosaurs, electric cars run on externalities. Driving an electric car is great for me, not so much for everyone else. My ID4 weighs a hefty 4800 pounds. The weight of electric cars is frequently referenced in the context of additional damage to roads, which is certainly a valid concern, but not where I focus my attention. While all vehicle weights in the US have been creeping up, the significant weight the drive battery contributes to electric vehicles accelerates this trend. Combine this with the lack of pedestrian safety requirements in new vehicle testing, the additional weight raises significant safety concerns for pedestrians and other non-car road users. The ID4 is by no means the worst offender in the weight category. That title held by the comically ridiculous Hummer EV at over 9000 pounds, beating out the F150 Lightning at 6500 pounds and the Cybertruck (don’t even get me started) at 6600. In addition to safety issues, the additional weight contributes to excessive tire wear and excessive tire wear means more pollution.

Continuing on the pollution front, the idea that electric vehicles are zero-emission is naive at best. It is true that electric cars are more energy efficient than gas cars, which helps with emissions even if the electricity isn’t coming from a renewable source. However, carbon emissions at the time of the drive are nowhere close to the whole picture. The desire to convert all personal vehicles to electric power results in a massive increase in demand for lithium and other metals. The large-scale mining of these metals has a horrific environmental and human impact, which takes place largely outside of the countries where electric cars are sold. Transitioning to electric cars simply moves some of the pollution of driving to another location, making it somebody else’s problem.

Although battery-only cars catch fire significantly less often than gas or hybrid cars fires are still a major concern. Fires can be an issue both on the road and at production facilities. EV fires are particularly nasty because they are hot and difficult to put out, taking significantly more time and water to extinguish than other car fires. That, combined with the toxic gases put out by burning batteries, presents another problem that’s pushed off to somebody other than the driver. Fire departments and municipalities are forced to deal with this problem.

While the average time Americans keep their car is rising, many people keep their car less than 5 years, including between 20 and 26 percent of new cars being leased. I doubt the popular lifestyle of getting a new car every few years will change drastically when the majority of new cars are electric. Certainly many of these cars stay in use through the used market for years after, but the insatiable demand for new cars invevitably leads to the question of what happens with all of these batteries after the cars are no longer used. I was surprised to find this isn’t as bad as I expected. Many batteries can be repaired and put in another car and recycling lithium-ion batteries is something that is already done and could potentially recover around 95% of the useful materials for use in new batteries. If battery recycling takes off a large scale that could reduce the demand for new metals and lessen the environmental impact of producing batteries. That would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath given how expensive buildling new recycling facilities could be.

Finally, the biggest problem with switching to electric cars is that it doesn’t solve any of the issues that arise from being a car-centric society. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 people die in car crashes every year in the United States, a number which almost certainly won’t go down because of a different propulsion method. Construction of highways destroyed communities of color often because of and certainly perpectuating racism and inequality. Electric vehicles travel on those same highways and won’t do anything to address rampant traffic congestion, a problem that seems to dominate every part of the country and contributed to the death of a vibrant streetcar system. Focusing on electric cars rather than more sustainable mass transit, especially massive government subsidies for cars and roads, is a theft of a potential future in which we fix the rampant inequities of a car-based society. Access to safe, affordable transportation is unequivocally a social justice issue that electric cars do nothing to address.

What does this mean for me? In short, not much. I’m still dependent on driving and my ID4 is paid off, so it doesn’t make much sense to switch to something else. I’m taking public transit when I can and trying to reduce car trips as much as possible. Longer term I want to start taking trips by bicycle, but that’s difficult because almost nowhere around me has a safe place to store a bike when I’m there. This is more of a mindset shift than an actual change in my life. I was distracted by the messaging of the auto industry’s push for electric vehicles as the future, but now I see through the fog to the reality of the situation. Electric cars may be cool, but they aren’t a suitable solution for any of our transportation problems.

2023 Favorite and Least Books

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 22:16:16 -0500

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. It’s a great example of the myth of apolitical tech.

Honorable mention: Racing to the Finish

It was really interesting hearing about Dale Jr.’s experiences with concussions and what the treatment looked like for him to get back in the race car.

Excluding The 12 Week Year, which was the only book I DNF’d last year, my least favorite non-fiction was Smarter Faster Better. It started off pretty interesting, but it feel off pretty quickly and I struggled to finish it.

Fiction

Favorite: Hero of Ages

I loved the conclusion of the first Mistborn trilogy. The payoff of the buildup and foreshadowing through the entire trilogy was fantastic and I’d recommend this to anyone.

Honorable mention: Dune

It was really tough to decide between Dune and Hero of Ages for the top spot. I loved Dune because of how rich the world is and how different it was from anything else I’ve read.

Least favorite: Paper Towns

I enjoyed this enough to read it in one sitting, but soured on it after reading Looking for Alaska because it felt like a worse retelling of Green’s earlier book.

2023 Year in Review

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 15:46:07 -0500

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. One of the main things I was hired to do was build our infrastructure for genomics research projects and midway through the year we achieved a significant milestone: we ran an automated pipeline to go from a data request to deidentified variant call files delivered to the disk in the team’s virtual lab. Although day by day it didn’t always seem like we were making much progress, looking back it is a great accomplishment in a year and a half. There’s still ongoing work in that space and I also have other responsibilities for tools related to research data management and the web apps our researchers use, so there’s plenty to be excited for in the next year.

Hobbies

As usual, I think I have too many hobbies because it never feels like I spend enough time on each of them. It can be frustrating but it’s a nice problem to have.

Reading

It has been a great reading year for me. I’ve read 34 books as I’m writing this and I’m still hoping I can finish Children of Dune tomorrow to get to 35 (Update: I finished in time!). I don’t have a set goal for reading, but I like to keep track of what I read. Counting number of books can be and interesting metric. Early in the year I read a bunch of shorter books, so the number kept going up quickly, but then I read some Brandon Sanderson and Dune which really slowed the progress on that count. I wasn’t reading less, but the graph wasn’t as steep. For a large chunk of the year I successfully replaced sitting on my phone before bed with reading, which has been awesome. I’m happier doing that, have less trouble falling asleep, and don’t have issues with eye strain or headaches anywhere near as often (even though I read ebooks on a regular tablet so it’s still lit, I think it has something to do with the flashing watching short form video). Of the 35 books, there were 22 fiction and 13 nonfiction. I think that’s a good split for me. I love reading nonfiction to learn things, but I generally find fiction more relaxing as an activity. I read a bunch of fantasy which has been great along with a smattering of other genres. I’ll probably do a post next week about my favorite books from the year.

I haven’t just been reading books either. I subscribed to Harper’s Magazine, which I had remembered from an assignment in college. I hadn’t subscribed to a magazine since NASCAR Illustrated in middle school. It’s fun getting a new issue in the mail and reading it as a collection instead of reading individual articles online. There are a lot of interesting things to read across a ton of topics so it’s been enjoyable. Online I’ve made a point to try to read more long-form articles rather than short social media posts. I’ve added a bunch of peoples' sites to my RSS reader and that’s a fun daily check.

Writing

I haven’t written as much as I’d like this year, but I’ve written more than in the past so I’m still considering that a victory. I sporadically wrote in a journal and even read two books about writing. This is my 14th post on this site this year, although one was a homework assignment from 2014 and another was a Fediverse post I copied here so it’s questionable whether those really count. I have a few more drafts that are more substantial that I should get around to finishing sometime in January. Even though it was less than I wanted, it has been nice to write more and get in the habit of putting my thoughts into words. It was helpful to abandon the idea that my website had to be polished and focused, instead just letting myself write about what was on my mind. I’d like to keep this up for next year.

A new thing for me this year was writing fiction. Early in the year, I started reading a few writing and publishing subreddits and liked the idea of trying it out. In March and April, I wrote about 8000 words for what was originally intended to become a novel. I stopped working on it because I felt like I hadn’t gotten enough practice turning the ideas I had into words on the page, so it was difficult to make progress. I decided I’d try to practice with smaller projects before attempting a novel. Since then I’ve written one complete short story and started a few others. I may pick up that same project when I decide to work on a novel or I may go with a differnt idea, I’m not sure. It’s been fun and I’d like to keep it up for creative enjoyment even if I never do anything with what I write.

Music

I’ve played trombone a lot more than in recent years because I joined an orchestra in the fall of 2022. It’s a treat to be able to practice and perform with such a talented group of musicians. My two favorite pieces we played this year with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony. I love orchestral music and I’m hoping I can find a similar group wherever we end up (more about that below). Even though I posted about my struggles with practicing a few weeks ago, I was able to practice a decent amount before our winter concert and I played well. I definitely want to build up a practice routine again. I haven’t played much of any other instruments this year, which is disappointing, but not too bad. There’s limited time in the day and I’m generally happy with how I’ve spent my time. At some point I’d like to get back into playing guitar and writing music but that doesn’t need to be right now.

Life

It’s been a great year for my wife and I. In June we finally got to go on our honeymoon to Portugal after it had been rescheduled twice because of the pandemic. We had an amazing time and it was worth the wait. We also travelled to Cape May in the summer and Hawaii in early fall, which were both great trips. A friend’s wedding in Denver in November capped our trips for the year.

My wife is finishing her PhD and has been applying to professor jobs, which means we’re almost definitely moving next summer. Because of that, it’s felt different at home this year. We’ve felt almost in a holding pattern because it doesn’t make sense to do new projects or build new gardens if we’re moving in less than a year. That’s an odd feeling, but it’s also been nice to just enjoy our home and make the best of the time we have left here. We bought this house when she started grad school, so we always knew this would be temporary. We’ve put so much time, effort, and money into this house and it has been good to us, so it’s bittersweet approaching the end of our time here.

Goals

I still don’t do new years' resolutions, but I do like to have some general goals for the future. Many of these are ongoing from my 2021 post.

Amateur radio: I did get my General class license like I had intended and have done a POTA activation. I haven’t done much since then because I don’t have a permanent radio setup and it’s difficult to operate from our yard. I’d like to do more POTA activations next year
Cell phone use: I still struggle with this one. I have replaced a lot of my bedtime phone use with books, but it’s still a problem. I was hoping after ditching Reddit after the third-party app fiasco I’d beat the habit, but I mostly replaced Reddit with Instagram which is at best neutral, probably a net negative. I’m working on breaking the habit of always picking up my phone and want to make big progress with that in the next year
Writing: I’m going to keep posting here and try to be more consistent with my journalling. I want to write a few more short stories next year
Moving: trying to find a new house and sell this one is going to be chaotic. I’m trying to go through things now and be merciless with what’s kept so we don’t carry over clutter to our new home. My goal is to manage the stress of moving well so we have a seamless transition to our new home.
Health: I really slacked on regular exercise this year. I’m going to try to get in a routine of regular strength exercises and cycling (both indoor and outdoor). I think having a schedule will make it easier to be consistent because it’s so easy for other things to take priority.

It’s nice to have another year over and I’m happy to have sat down to reflect on the year (especially since I forgot last year). Happy new year everyone.

Failed Deployment

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 16:28:48 -0500

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? The second one, unfortunately. The first was well tested, as the refactor made it significantly easier to add automated tests, and had been running in our lower environments for some time without issue. The second I was confident was a minor change because it was clearly duplicated behavior.

I upgraded the service in production and ran through my usual checks - various web pages worked and I wasn’t seeing any errors in the service logs. I marked the changes as deployed, closed the ticket, and was going to move on when I realized I hadn’t checked a particular webpage. Clicking on that page triggered something that looked like our auto-logout behavior, which didn’t make sense because I had just logged in a few minutes prior. My session shouldn’t have expired yet. I logged in again and was able to replicate the behavior. At that point I decided to roll back the change while I investigated. After doing so I checked the staging environment and saw the same issue. What had happened was the supposedly redundant code I had removed behaved slightly differently than the version I thought was handling it: the now-deleted version would read the access token either from a cookie or authorization header but the new version only read from the header. This webpage depended on the cookie version and after the change, the service thought the request wasn’t authenticated and the 401 response triggered the auto logout behavior.

The code change to fix that was simple and another team member gave a thumbs up so the next day I attempted the deployment again. Like the first time, I didn’t see any issues in the lower environments and my usual checks after upgrading the prod service revealed no issues. Again I closed the ticket, marked the change as completed, and noticed something weird. After I logged out, I returned to the landing page and then was immediately logged in again. It turns out the fix wasn’t complete and I had completely broken our logout functionality. Another rollback, another patch, and scheduling another attempt to upgrade.

Luckily in both cases I noticed the issue right after making the change and was able to roll it back before there was significant impact to users. That outcome definitely wasn’t guaranteed. This experience highlighted an over-reliance on manual testing. In both cases, I discovered the issue doing manual tests after upgrading the production service, but the same issues were present in the lower environments. So I wasn’t just relying on manual testing to catch bugs, I wasn’t doing it thoroughly enough or consistently making the same checks in each environment. If I’m going to do manual checks after making a production change (which I still think I should) I need to use a checklist to ensure I’m validating the same behavior every time.

This broken change was introduced after the refactor that added lots of automated tests. Why didn’t the tests catch the problem? It turns out I hadn’t written any tests that provided the access token from a cookie. Setting up the tests with the authorization header was easier and I hadn’t thought of validating that endpoints behaved the same way with both versions. This is a good reminder that it’s not safe to assume the automated tests are covering the real behavior you’d see in production. Unit tests are a human-created model of reality and that model won’t always capture all the relevant details. I added some tests that use the cookie and will keep that in mind when writing tests in the future.

Although it wasn’t a factor in the observed errors this time, I also want to reflect on the long lead time between writing and deploying the refactor change. I wrote that change in August and just last week attempted to put it in production. That change was huge and shouldn’t have been bundled with any other changes in an upgrade. In this case it was easy to tell the errors were related to the second change but that wouldn’t always be true. Running into an issue with the refactor or one without an obvious cause was a more likely outcome and having the two changes deployed together would have just increased confusion looking for the issue. It’s unacceptable that I allowed so much time between writing and deploying the refactor and that I deployed it alongside other changes.

These issues had a limited impact and the biggest damage was to my own ego. I’m obviously frustrated by the experience but in reality, it’s practically impossible to never introduce bugs. Instead of holding onto frustration, I’m taking the time to figure out what I did wrong and applying those lessons to improving my work going forward.

Trombone Practice

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 22:44:39 -0500

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 got to a pretty high level of playing, unsurprisingly, by practicing a ton. Of course as a child I had the usual distaste for required practice for school, but in high school I started taking private lessons at the urging of my band director. Something changed: I discovered I could be good at the instrument and practice became something I wanted to do. I could hear and feel the improvements in my playing. Because I was auditioning for festivals regularly, I always had something challenging to work on. Work on fundamentals was always present, but what I needed for the pieces I was learning at the time drove a lot of the specific skills I practiced. Because I had a lot to work on, it was easy to be diligent and this continued into college. For the first year I was still practicing at least an hour every day, often going to the music building between classes. During the first winter term I was there for hours at a time on days I didn’t have class.

Unfortunately, as college continued I wasn’t playing as much outside my current skill level. Because I didn’t need to practice as much to learn the pieces I needed to play my motivation to practice plummeted. I was still playing regularly because I was in several ensembles, but the time I dedicated to to individual practice dwindled. My skill plateaued. After I graduated, it got even worse. Between graduate classes and work the weekly rehearsal for a local ensemble was the only time I had to play. I eventually left that group, thinking I’d find another one easily when I moved, but the pandemic made that impossible. I didn’t play in an ensemble for over 3 years and played very little at home the entire time.

I’m writing this during an orchestra rehearsal and my playing tonight has been absolutely dreadful. Playing a piece written in alto clef, I kept switching to tenor clef in the middle of phrases. I’m just not used to reading alto clef so I kept making mistakes. The would be a trivial problem to fix with 20 minutes in a practice room, but I just haven’t made the time. I had tied my motivation for practice to a need to get better for specific pieces I needed to play. That evaporated when I wasn’t regularly challenging myself to meet external goals. For years now I’ve had almost no motivation to practice and when I do, I don’t have the patience I used to. Long tones, slurs, and scale exercises that I know would help feel too boring to do regularly. Where I used to practice for well over an hour at a time, now getting to 30 minutes is a miracle.

It’s been a slow and frustrating, but entirely traceable decline in my playing over the last 8 years or so. I want to reverse it, which will require finding a different source of motivation to practice. Maybe I shouldn’t rely on motivation and instead rely on discipline and force myself to stick to it. Maybe in pushing through the boredom I’ll rediscover the joy in the experience of improving my playing that lead me to the level of skill I enjoyed years ago.

Advertisers and Leeches

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 16:48:06 -0400

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. It took me to the Eagles store (store.philadelphiaeagles.com), I looked around for a while, didn’t buy anything, and moved on with my night.

The next day, I saw another ad, this time for Phillies jerseys, with a higher percentage off. It looked like an ad for the Fanatics store, so I decided to see what they had marked down. The first few items listed were from the 2022 Phillies playoff run, which seemed reasonable. They were probably marking things down to get rid of old stock. After looking for a few minutes, I noticed a few of the product images were…less than professional. That was the first red flag, so I looked at the domain: fanaticshopline[.]com, which is obviously not the real Fanatics domain. A whois lookup showed this domain was registered on May 15, 2023 for just one year and the contacts were all protected by a privacy service. For comparison, the real fanatics.com was registered in 1998, doesn’t expire until 2027, and clearly marks all of the contacts as Fanatics, LLC. I don’t know if this website is just a scam or if the shop is real but sells knockoff products, or something else, but the red flags were everywhere.

Over the next few days, nearly every ad I saw on Instagram was a variety of this. Philadelphia sports jerseys with huge markdowns from websites nobody has ever heard of. I had clicked on an ad from a legitimate store running a legitimate sale (to the extent a perpetual 30% off sale is legitimate, but that’s that’s a different discussion). Then the leeches showed up, a seemingly endless stream of grifters trying to catch people out on the coattails of real businesses. I looked at the Instagram/Facebook pages of a few of them and they were all similar. Instagram put up a banner that said “This Facebook advertiser isn’t on Instagram” and when I clicked through to the Facebook page, they were effectively empty. A token set of images and no or only a few followers.

A few screenshots:

Instagram ad and page for the first scam ad I clicked on

Facebook page for the same advertiser

Another Instagram example

Another Facebook example

With any detailed look these fall apart, but it’s easy to momentarily mistake them for a legitimate store. I like to think I’m generally aware of this sort of thing, but I still missed it at first. The exact details of any of these cases don’t matter, but they’re a look into an interesting problem.

As much as I dislike advertising in all forms, it’s the Internet business model we’re stuck with for now. In theory, if advertisers were all legitimate businesses and ads weren’t hyper-targeted, it wouldn’t be so bad. Unfortunately, we have this mess where one interaction with an ad drives what you see for days, meaning you get the ads for the same things over and over again. My favorite example of this was after I bought my wife’s engagement ring. For months I saw ads for the exact ring I purchased and it didn’t seem to matter that I only needed one engagement ring. I bought an item, so maybe if they kept putting the same item in front of my face I’d buy another one. The opportunity for scams is rampant in this environment. Scammers can target ads to people searching for or interacting with real storefronts and the sheer volume of ads makes it more likely they’ll will fall for the fake ones.

This is just one example of the many things wrong with targeted advertising as a business model and one I hadn’t thought much about before. While I hate the business model and I hate seeing ads, not all ads are hated equally. Let’s say I’ve learned my lesson.

Sports Traffic Jam

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 21:28:02 -0500

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. It worked great the first week, so I decided to keep it up. Last week, I got to the train station and waited. After the train was a few minutes late I checked the SEPTA website and saw it was 15 minutes delayed. No problem, I’ll be a few minutes late but it’ll be faster than walking back home to get my car. The delay kept creeping up and eventually it said 30 minutes late and there was an alert the train was stopped for an unruly passenger. I gave up and drove, which was a good choice because the train hadn’t moved by the time I got there. I can’t complain there. Stuff happens and there’s not much you can do about it. I’m happy I have the option of driving when the train doesn’t work out.

Fast forward to tonight. I planned on taking the train again because the Phillies have the NLCS game tonight, Flyers were also home, and Mexico/Germany men’s soccer was also happening and my route goes past the sports complex. Public transit for the win, I can take the train and not have to worry about traffic at all. Except again the train was late. SEPTA website said there would be a 20 minute delay. Knowing it got longer last week, I checked Google maps which said I could drive faster than I’d get there on the delayed train, so I’d only be a few minutes late. I walked back home to start driving and what ensued was a 2 hour round trip in which I did not go to rehearsal, because I would’ve missed almost the whole thing because I95 was a parking lot between the Philadelphia airport and Broad Street.

I eventually made it home without significant issue. I know this is not a big deal and may be kind of whiny, but I think it’s a low-stakes look at the problem with a lot of infrastructure in the United States. Everything is designed around cars, so the public transit is inadequate because there isn’t enough public interest to justify improvements, but in many cases driving isn’t any better. Anyone trying to drive anywhere near South Philly couldn’t easily get anywhere because of the games and I saw tons of people flying Phillies or Mexican flags from their cars knowing they weren’t getting to the start of those games on time. The roads weren’t serving the goals of any of the people using them but there’s not another viable option. It’d be great to see infrastructure that actually serves people.

Why I Track My Reading

Sun, 08 Oct 2023 21:40:17 -0400

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.

With authors like Harlan Coben or Clive Cussler, I often don’t remember which of their books I’ve read. They’ve published a lot, I’ve read a lot, and I don’t remember all the titles. Keeping a list of what I’ve read lets me avoid starting a book and realizing 75 pages in that I’ve read it already. It shouldn’t take me that long to realize I’ve read something before, but nobody’s perfect. Even if I remember I’ve read a book, I don’t always remember what happens in it. Having a short description of the book and what I thought of it helps jog my memory about the rest of the book. This is nice when I’m talking with someone. For example, a few weeks ago someone mentioned The 4 Hour Work Week and I remembered I didn’t like it, but couldn’t think of any specific reason why. If I had it at the time, my reading list would have let me go back and see what I thought after finishing it.

In a small way, having the list has motivated me to keep reading, a kind of low-level gamification. When I finish a book I get to add it to my list and count how many books I’ve read so far this year. There’s a bit of joy involved in seeing the number keep going up for the year. I beat my 2022 number around April of 2023 and in 2024, I’ll get to see if I can beat my 2023 number. It’ll be fun.

Apart from the gamification, it’s nice to be reminded how much I’m reading. I like to look at the list when I add something new and remember what I read in the months prior. A few weeks ago, I was talking with my wife about reading and I remarked how great it was that I’d read twenty-something books so far this year. I loved it because that is so much more than I’ve read in a long time, potentially ever. She said she had no idea how many books she’s read this year, and that’s fantastic, because she’s read enough that she can’t remember all of them individually. We’re getting a similar feeling from opposite processes.

I haven’t attempted to put into words why I do this in public until now. I could keep a list to myself and get all the same benefits, but I chose to put it on my website. Part of it is because I’ve found good recommendations from other people’s pubilc reading lists so this can be my contribution. Another part is just to have something going on my website when I’m not writing often, but I think there’s more to it. Since I’ve gotten into having a personal website I actually use, I’ve wanted to make my website a picture of me. Since I spend so much time reading, including what I read on my website makes that picture more complete. Moreover, because I track when I read a book, it gives a temporal picture of me, showing how my interests have changed over time. Including every book I read just makes my website show more of me, and I think that’s a great reason to keep doing it.

You Deserve a Tech Union

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 21:35:53 -0400

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 book throws all of that out the window.

It starts with two simple questions: what do you like about your workplace and what would you improve about your workplace? The obvious next questions are how you can keep the things you like and fix the things you don’t. Marcotte breaks down how these fundamental issues and others such as job security, pay disparity, and workplace harrassment are just as important in tech as they are in other industries. He presents collective bargaining as the most tenable solution. The reality is the people doing well in the tech industry are predominantly cis white men and the idea that tech workers don’t have any need for a union comes from a place of privilege. As a member of that group, I’m already aware that the current arrangement greatly benefits me, but it is important to not be blind to the entire situation. To that end, Marcotte expands the definition of a tech worker to anyone whose labor contributes to the tech industry, not just the well paid software engineers and others in traditionally technical roles. Often the workers experiencing the worst working conditions in tech are underpaid contractors who don’t have access to the benefits normally associated with tech work.

The book presents a practical look at the process involved in forming a union and goes through several examples of collective bargaining in the industry. The writing style is approachable and the book is short, which is very effective for this subject. He gets to the point quickly which keept me engaged the entire time. Because this book is so new, many of the examples he uses are either extremely recent or still ongoing, which creates a feeling of immediacy that is inspiring. This book is awesome because it doesn’t shy away from the issues our industry has and recognizes the power we have to fix them. I would consider it required reading for anyone working in this industry.

Gardening

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 21:20:57 -0400

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. When my partner and I bought our house, I went down a lawn care rabbit hole because that’s what you do as a new homeowner in an American suburb. I still didn’t enjoy the work, but it seemed like something I was supposed to do. Using herbicides bothered me because of the obvious environmental harm, but I wanted to have a nice lawn (again, new homeowner in an American suburb) and that’s what you do to have a nice lawn.

Then I started reading about gardening on Reddit. I started off in r/gardening, then r/NativePlantGardening, then in the more radical r/NoLawns. Already on the fence about the whole lawn thing, it was incredible how quickly my mindset shifted. I read Doug Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home, which is one of the books recommended all over the place in gardening groups. The general idea is insects are dependent on the plants they evolved with and can’t generally use plants that originated in other parts of the world for food. Since plants and insects make up the base of the food chain and the ornamental plant trade has led to the introduction of invasive species that take over native habitats, this presents a massive problem. Gardening with natives provides habitat and food for insects to support the local ecosystem.

After reading that book and browsing the various subreddits, I wanted to include plants native to Pennsylvania in our yard. With the help of Redbud Native Plant Nursery in Media, PA, we have purple coneflower, black-eyed susan, a few species of bee balm, black chokeberry, creeping phlox, sweet pepperbush, and a few others. The overarching theme in Tallamy’s book is if you plant it they will come. Since cutting out the herbicides and planting some natives, we see so many more bees and other insects, butterflies, and even a few hummingbirds in our yard even though we’ve only converted some of our yard to garden space. Most of it is still lawn.

Gardening feels different now. With climate change seeming insurmountable, especially when individual action feels pointless, it’s comforting finding something I can do for the planet myself. Any piece of land converted to native garden space supports biodiversity, so my individual action is immediately impactful. For the future, I want to convert more of the yard to native gardens. Gardening now is something I do with a purpose, enjoying the process knowing I’m working on something that matters.

My Favorite Politician Isn't Real

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 12:57:02 -0400

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. He is a character on the television series The West Wing, but if he were real, he would have my vote without a doubt. In my opinion, the best line he had in the entire run of the series was this: “It’s not just about abortion, it’s about the next 20 years. In the ’20s and ’30s it was the role of government. ’50s and ’60s it was civil rights. The next two decades are going to be privacy. I’m talking about the Internet. I’m talking about cell phones. I’m talking about health records and who’s gay and who’s not. And moreover, in a country born on the will to be free, what could be more fundamental than this?” Why is this the best line he ever had? Because he was right. The Internet changed the world in ways nobody could have predicated and old notions of privacy simply aren’t going to survive as the world continues to change.

Anyone who followed the news over the past eighteen months has at least heard of Edward Snowden and his disclosure of details about the National Security Agency’s operations. Every news cycle seems to contain more information about the agency and how its operations violate the privacy of millions of Americans. We hear about collection of data from cell phones, Internet traffic, and companies being forced to disclose information gathered from their customers. These companies must comply because of rulings from secret courts and they are held to secrecy in the name of national security and antiterrorism. While this seems like a massive problem on its own, government actions make up only a small portion of privacy issues today. Every major online company collects data from its users. Google records everything its customers search for, click on, and read. Facebook tracks user interests both within its own service and on other websites. Many other sites do the same in order to provide better service or show targeted ads. Nothing you, me, or anyone else does on the Internet is private. And the worst part of all of this? Nobody cares.

When most people hear about privacy issues they shrug them off, asking, “Why should I care if I have nothing to hide?” This attitude is what I want to change. I want people to care about their privacy again. Twenty years ago most people would have been appalled if everyone they knew (and in many cases, people they don’t) could look into their daily lives and see where they were and what they were doing at any given time. Today, we post everything we do on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. We willfully give all of our personal information to Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. We look the other way when we hear about the government invading our privacy.

I must admit I am a hypocrite. I am a Facebook user, I have an Android phone, and I use Gmail. All three of those things involve sending large amounts of personal information to outside companies. Why do I do this while I write so strongly about privacy? My answer is simple and is the same answer you would hear from many other people. I trade some of my privacy for the convenience of using these services. Obviously people aren’t going to completely stop using products that collect data, and frankly this is nearly impossible. I believe businesses should strive for a business model that doesn’t need information from its users so that their users can trust them. If people start to care about their privacy and privacy-minded corporations start to pop up the former will be drawn to the latter and other groups will lose out. I know this is a monumental task but I feel it is possible.

Sam was right when he said privacy would be the focus of the next two decades. What I didn’t tell you is that quote is from an episode that aired in 1999. When the episode aired, the World Wide Web was only ten years old, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter didn’t exist, and Google was less than a year old. Fifteen years later Sam is still right and it looks like the situation will have to get worse before it gets better, but we still have five years left. Think of what we can accomplish in five years if we make privacy a priority.

Beach Towns

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 22:04:19 -0400

Growing up, I didn’t stay at the beach as a vacation. When my family went to the beach, we drove there in the morning, spent the day on the sand, and stopped for dinner at an Applebee’s on the drive home. After graduating from college, I started going to the beach with my partner’s family, who had spent a week in the same beach town every year for the past twenty years. Without that history, I had never really understood the appeal of spending that long at the beach. Last week, we were there for what was my sixth time going and the obvious reason finally hit me.

Beach towns are walkable. Because people don’t want to stray far from the beach, most of the things you want are right there. At dinner time you can walk to your choice of restaurants without worrying about finding somewhere to park. If you want to go out for drink, you don’t need to decide on a designated driver or make sure you don’t have too much to drive. Want some ice cream? Walk to the ice cream shop. Forget something you need to make dinner? Walk to the grocery store. Want some exercise? There’s probably a boardwalk or promenade separated from cars that you can walk or run on. People can ride bikes relatively safely too because there’s less car traffic and strength in the number of people walking or cycling. For myself and many other people who have only lived in the suburbs, going to the beach for a week is a rare glimpse at not being car-dependent and it’s nice.

"Just Learn to Code" Isn't a Real Solution

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 20:10:36 -0400

Last week, I saw a video on Instagram about the WGA strike that stuck with me. ~~I unfortunately don’t remember who posted it, but he has worked as a TV writer for decades and currently writes for a popular Netflix show.~~ It was posted by Michael Jamin, who has worked as a TV writer and producer since the mid 90s. His video was a response to a comment that basically said it was unreasonable for writers who only worked part of the year to expect health insurance. His response was pretty simple: he used to work 10 or 11 months out of the year and had no issues getting health insurance, but now he can only get on the one show so he’s only actually working as a TV writer about 3 months. This means he doesn’t qualify for insurance through his employer. He said the industry has turned his career into part-time work and finished the video explaining he has a book coming out and travels for speaking engagements.

I went to read the comments, which is always a mistake on Instagram, and one especially bothered me. The commentor asked what the writer was doing the rest of the year when he’s only working three months out of the year, then told him to just learn to code instead of complaining. First, he said in the video what else he does to make money. Second, telling people to learn to code because it pays well just isn’t a real solution.

There should be room for people to make a living without having to chase high-paying tech jobs. TV writers do valuable work; they create art that entertains millions of people. Why should we tell these people who do that work that they love to abandon it for a programming job they don’t care about? Setting aside the big tech jobs that actively make the world worse for a multitude of reasons, there are a lot of mundane, bordering on pointless programming jobs. Is it really better to tell someone they should give up their writing career to work on semi-functioning insurance software? Or they should work as a contractor doing QA for some CMS nobody uses?

I don’t think so. People who do good work should get paid a real living to do it, not told they should trade their job that doesn’t pay enough because of corporate greed for another one they’re not interested in that pays better because it fuels corporate greed faster. I like programming jobs, because I like programming and it’s great for me that I can make money doing something I’m good at and enjoy. I want other people who are good at other things to be able to do those things for a living instead of being told to do something else.

Three Months of Work Log

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 20:11:13 -0400

I don’t remember where, but I saw a recommendation a few months ago to keep a written, daily log of everything you do at work. Toward the end of February, I decided to apply this to my own work and I’m writing this after just finishing the third month of doing so. This is my method for tracking my work.

I have a folder on my laptop called work_log and each month gets its own Markdown file. Throughout the day I make short notes about what I’m working on, subject to a few rules. First, everything that takes more than a few minutes gets a note, including meetings, code review, and helping coworkers with something. Second, except for meetings, I strive for every note to have a ticket number associated with it. If it’s important enough to be working on, it should be important enough to have a record of what we’re doing and why. If I’m doing a code review or helping someone, I use the ticket number for what they’re working on. When I end up working on something that doesn’t have a ticket yet, there’s probably a good reaosn for it and the solution is simple: I add a ticket with the necessary details. If I come across something that really doesn’t warrant a ticket, but I have to do anyway, I begrudgingly include it with just a note of where it came from, which is usually an email request for some kind of one-off work. Notably, I do not include how long I worked on each task. The notes are just what I worked on that day, mostly because I don’t find time a particularly useful measurement so recording it feels like unnecessary overhead. At the end of the month, I review this document and write a recap. This is a bulleted list, just like the daily entries, but I group it by project. This allows me to look at the month in the context of the broader goals of what I’m working on rather than the minutiae and confusion of individual development tasks.

After three months, I can say this process has been a massive success for me. It adds practically no overhead to my day, but has shown some notable improvements in my work. First, it takes away a surprisingly large mental load of having to remember what I’ve been working on. Many weeks, come Monday morning, I wouldn’t immediately remember what I had been working on the previous week and needed to take time to reorient myself. With a detailed log of what I’ve been working on already open, this doesn’t take any time or effort. Similarly, we do weekly status meetings for several projects I work on and I don’t need to remember details, I can just look at the last few entries in my notes for what I accomplished. When I forget what ticket number a particular task has, it’s often easier to find it in my current month’s work log than search for it in Jira.

Second, having a log of what I’ve been working on can be valuable career wise. With detailed notes of each day, it’s easy to show accomplishments when progress is going well and just as easy to find where tasks are unexpectedly getting in the way when it isn’t. Even though I don’t record the time I spent, when I see an individual task or similar types of tasks appearing more frequently than I expect, that is an indicator I should look at how we’re prioritizing work or whether I can automate some of the tasks to free up time for what we thought should be getting done. Having the monthly recap organized by project is extremely useful for performance reviews. My annual performance review is coming up and it’s been so much easier to prepare with organized documents explaining what I’ve accomplished and the types of tasks that went into each accomplishment. When I go to write my self-evaluation, I will have this information readily available so I can more accurately portray my work than I could from memory alone or searching through completed tickets after the fact. When I get to the annual review, I will likely combine the monthly recaps into a single document for the year for an even higher-level view of my contributions.

The third benefit is more mental than job related. I frequently feel like I’m not getting enough done or accomplishing tasks as quickly as I want to. This is because I have extremely high and often unrealistic expectations for my own productivity, so any time I’m not getting particular tasks done when I think I should, it feels like I’m not doing a good job. The recap at the end of the month has massively improved this mentality for me. Each month so far I’ve been surprised when I put together the list of what I’ve done because there was more there than I expected. It is too easy for me to get bogged down with current distractions or the things it feels like are taking too much time and I don’t recognize where I’m actually making progress. Going through the ritual of looking at everything I’ve accomplished in the previous month helps remind me I am making progress and makes it easier to ignore the feelings of unproductivity as figments of my imagination.

I’m going to keep doing this because it works for me and I don’t think I’ll drastically change the process, but if I do I’ll share it here.

Complaining

Thu, 25 May 2023 23:24:44 -0400

The last two blog posts I started drafting were just complaining. Both were about terrible UI on company websites and I didn’t post them because I just didn’t want to be that negative. Everyone knows UI on the internet is a mess and I’m not a UI guy, so anything I have to say about it wouldn’t amount to much other than senseless whining. Nobody wants to read that.

Complaining about the same things as everyone else isn’t just not interesting, it actively makes the ecosystem worse. I used to read live comments on Reddit while watching NASCAR and Indycar races, but often don’t anymore because the negativity was just too much. People complained about the sanctioning bodies, the cars, the tracks, the TV coverage, the drivers, other fans, you name it. It was constant and pointless. People argued in circles about all of it, getting outright vicious with each other over nothing that actually mattered. It was impacting my enjoyment of the races, so I just stopped.

I want no part of it. If I have an idea for something to post and it just boils down to complaining, I’m not going to post it. I’m reminded of Derek Sivers' blog post about public speaking and writing where he suggests cutting out anything that isn’t surprising because everything else lines up with what your audience already knows. If I’m complaining about terrible UI, nobody is surprised because they know most UIs can be terrible. Nobody wants to read it and it never makes me feel better about whatever was annoying me. If I want to say something, I’m going to have to find something positive or constructive to say, because complaining just isn’t worth reading.

Self Code Review

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 13:58:08 -0500

When I submit a change for code review, I take time to review it myself before tagging any of my teammates. Of course I look through the code in my editor before deciding I’m finished with the change, but that is only the first step. After I think the change is ready, I push my changes to Github and open a draft pull request. Using an interface designed for code review puts me in a critical mindset and helps me find issues I didn’t notice in the editor.

The first time I read through the changes, I take note of any obvious issues that aren’t related to the functionality of the code. This includes comments that shouldn’t be there, unused code, typos, and debug logging I didn’t intend to leave. I clean up those problems in one commit and push that. With basic cleanliness out of the way, the change looks like a real candidate for merging.

In the second reading, I focus on functionality. Did I miss anything expected from the ticket? Do I see any incorrect behavior or potential performance issues? Did I include tests for everything that should have them? I might only need to make minor changes to comments or logging or I may realize I missed something and need to go back and make bigger changes.

For simple changes I stop here, but for larger changes I review again as if I were looking at somebody else’s work. Pretending I didn’t just write this code isn’t always easy, but it is important to consider how the change looks from the outside. The focus here is on clarity and maintainability. I ask myself if the purpose of each function is clear, if naming conventions make sense, and if there are better ways to structure the code. Frequently I don’t find anything to change in this step, but still find it useful.

Only after completing these rounds of self-review do I request a review from my teammates. There are two major reasons I do this. The first is simply out of respect. My teammates don’t want to get a notification email when I push a commit to fix typos or realize the tests are failing because I forgot to run them before opening the PR. I don’t want to waste their time with spelling mistakes, unused code, or any simple issue I should have found on my own. I owe it to them to make sure the change is reasonable before I involve them in the process.

The second reason is I believe it improves the quality of the resulting code. If the change is already the best I can make it before I ask for help from my teammates, they’re less likely to get bogged down trying to understand the change or commenting on little things I could have noticed on my own. Without that overhead, there’s more opportunity to look for big-picture improvements and general code quality. It shortens the actual review process and helps ensure any comments they need to make are for substantive issues.

This practice certainly isn’t necessary, but I think my teammates and I benefit from it so I’m happy this is a habit I got myself into.

My Awful Basement Lights

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 20:39:18 -0500

My partner and I bought our house in 2019 and it very quickly became obvious that the basement lights were awful. There are six lights, two per switch with one switch at the top of the stairs, one near the ceiling behind a bar, and one on the opposite side of the room. It was annoying trying to turn all the lights on or off without tripping over anything, so we quickly bought some Hue bulbs to be able to use voice commands with Google Home to control the lights.

In 2020, we put a bunch of Lutron smart switches in the house after we remodeled our kitchen. In my opinion, smart switches are way better than smart bulbs, mostly because I don’t need to yell at a smart speaker to get something to work. I run Home Assistant for automations and it’s great. Even with smart switches in other parts of the house, the basement lights remained the same. In the two years that followed, they were a consistent source of frustration, having to either correct the Google Home that misheard me or pull out my phone to turn the lights on.

It did not occur to me at all until the last week that I could just add another smart switch and set up an automation to tie all six bulbs to it. I already had the smart bulbs and Home Assistant. Within a few days I had ordered another switch, installed it, and added an automation to trigger the whole basement from it. Everything works great, I don’t need to yell at my smart speaker anymore, and I’m just shaking my head wondering why this took me so long.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

Sat, 26 Nov 2022 13:29:52 -0500

Nicole Perlroth’s This is How They Tell Me the World Ends is a deep dive into the history of the global cyberweapons market. It covers the origins of bug bounty programs, some history of offensive operations at the NSA, a narrative of well-known cyberattacks, and discussion of the risk the United States faces from digital attack. It is equal parts exciting and terrifying and overall a worthy read for anyone interested in cybersecurity.

The book is built around the sale of zero-days: exploitable software vulnerabilities unknown to the software’s creator. These vulnerabilities are a gold-mine for attackers because defenders have no way to counter them. Specifically, the author focuses on the market of selling zero-days (and in many cases fully functional exploit tools) by individual hackers or private companies to espionage agencies around the world. She tells the stories of hackers who built the exploits, brokers who facilitate the sale with a government agency, and employees of agencies or contractors using the tools around the world. The writing is distinctly non-technical and intended for general audiences, which makes sense from the author’s background as a journalist. Even as a technical person by profession I appreciated the non-technical nature of the book as the political and historical context of the subject tells a bigger picture than technical details of a particular exploit.

A large portion of the book is devoted to a narrative timeline of large attacks. This includes China’s large-scale attack of Google in 2009, Stuxnet, Russian hacking and disinformation campaigns in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, NotPetya, and WannaCry. Although not directly related to the zero-day market, these attacks highlight the dangers of this underground market letting high-risk vulnerabilities go unpatched. Many of these attacks are directly related to the Shadow Brokers' release of NSA tools (including the EternalBlue exploit used in NotPetya and WannaCry).

Perlroth concludes with a warning about the position the United States is currently in - our defensive capabilities are far less sophisticated than our offensive capabilities and we are extremely vulnerable to attacks on critical infrastructure. Russia, Iran, and presumably others have breached many of the systems that run power and water systems and in the current atmosphere there is little we could do to prevent them from causing lasting damage if intended.

One significant drawback to the book is the author’s continual view of the United States as the “good guys”. She describes the moral calculus of selling espionage weapons to good governments versus authoritarian regimes, often insisting there’s a difference between selling cyberweapons to governments that spy on foreigners and governments that use the tools on their own citizens, especially journalists and dissidents. One story stands out, about halfway through the book, when she describes a conversation she had with an Argentinian hacker. The short version is she asked if Argentinians were careful about only selling zero-days to the good guys, and the hacker pushed back on the implication that the United States and its allies are the good guys, given Argentina has good reason to distrust the US. I hoped the pro-US slant had been played up earlier in the book and this was the start of a shift in the author’s perspective, but sadly I was incorrect. Almost immediately after that conversation the slant came back to stay.

I would highly recommend this book for anyone even slightly interested in cybersecurity or espionage. The history of the zero-day market and descriptions of cyberattacks were fascinating. The book paints a terrifying image of the current state of the digital world, which may be hyperbolized, but is nonetheless compelling.

Remaking My Site

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 14:15:04 -0400

I had the idea for this site around 5 years ago (I think I first registered the domain in late 2017) while I was working as a software engineer and partway through a master’s degree in data science. I was convinced it was going to be a data science blog where I’d show off all the neat projects I completed, post tutorials, and all the other cool things people do on data science blogs. We can see the project thing didn’t turn out too well and I didn’t actually put the site up until 2021 so the tutorial thing didn’t happen either.

The problem was I was wrapped up in the idea of a professional site and building a personal brand. Because I was trying to show off all my skills, I wanted everything to be perfect before it became public. This just led to me publishing absolutely nothing. How could I let anyone read anything imperfect? That would make me look unprofessional and hurt my image as a developer!

Ignoring how unlikely it was that anyone would actually read what I would post, this mentality was extremely unhelpful. I wanted to write and get better at writing, but it was impossible to do that when I wouldn’t give myself a space to be imperfect. Making my website career-oriented meant I had to write technically impressive things that other people (especially recruiters and hiring managers) would care about and believing my website had to be professional meant I couldn’t write about my non-programming hobbies.

Source of the change

I don’t remember exactly when I started to change my mindset about blogging, but it may have been when I came across Tom Critchlow’s Small b blogging. He describes big B blogging, saying “Too much content on the web is designed for scale, for sharing, for gloss and finish. It’s mass media, whether it’s made by a media company or an individual acting like one.” He instead proposes small b blogging as an alternative where you write deliberately for small audiences, refine your ideas, and be yourself. Trying to focus on making a blog that could grow and worrying about perfectly polished writing was getting in my way. Follow that up with Joel Hooks' Stop Giving af and Start Writing More, where he says “Everybody is treating writing as a “content marketing strategy” and using it to “build a personal brand” which leads to the fundamental flawed idea that everything you post has to be polished to perfection and ready to be consumed.” Well, I feel attacked. He goes on to talk about how it’s more important to write for himself than optimize for content that performs well with readers. It’s better to curate pages of related topics than rely on a reverse chronological, paginated list of posts.

From there, I found the idea of a digital garden - a personal space you care for and improve over time rather than fire and forget polished blog posts. Another pair of blog posts by Tom and Joel had me convinced. No more attempts at polished blog posts, I’m making this site a place for me to organize my thoughts, keep links to things I find interesting, and share what’s on my mind.

What’s changing?

This shift in mentality is what convinced me to actually post things, starting with The Self-Hosted Hurdle. That post isn’t anything groundbreaking and it’s not really complete, but it was on my mind that day and I thought it was worth recording. That’s good, there will be more of that.

I’ve been trying to read more this year and I’ve really been enjoying it. I had previously considered keeping a public list of the books I’d read. Going along with my interest in decentralized social media, Tom Critchlow’s proposal for a decentralized Goodreads sounded really interesting. I never started working on something like that because it wasn’t perfect and what if what I did wasn’t what others settled on? It doesn’t matter. I came across Chris O’Donnell’s book list after he linked to his site on Mastodon and that inspired me to get going. I’ve started my reading list and put it in a new Links section of the home page. After I finish adding what I can remember from pre-2022, I’m going to add a similar list for board games. Because I like making fun of myself, the Hall of Dead Projects will probably get a prominent place there too.

The Hugo theme I use is great, but very geared toward blogging. I’m starting to fill out the home page with less of a time focus, but I’ll probably look for a different theme that’s even simpler. I want the design of the site to make it easier to organize a mix of shorter posts and curated content that grows over time.

I’m also removing the Broken Intuition title. The domain name can stay since I’ve grown to like it, but the title has to go. I’m not trying to build a brand or make myself seem more important than I am. I just want to be me, but on the internet. Yes, my web site is going to look like a lot of others. I won’t stand out, but that’s ok. This one is mine and I’m excited about it.

Other Inspiration

Here are a few other posts that inspired this change but I didn’t mention in the main post. You’ll notice a lot of these link to each other - that’s really how I ended up here.

Blogging Streaks and Freaks by Tom Critchlow
Indieweb personal library
How the Blog Broke the Web by Amy Hoy
15 rules for blogging, and my current streak by Matt Webb
Re: Tom Critchlow’s proposal for a decentralized Goodreads by Matt Webb

AWS Assume Role

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 19:12:52 -0400

This caught me by surprise at work this week, so I thought I’d make a post about it to hopefully help others avoid the same frustration. I’m very new to using AWS, so if I’m doing something horribly wrong, please let me know!

When running commands in AWS, it is common to assume a role which has permissions to perform a certain action rather than performing that action as your user. The AWS cli provides a handy command for doing so: aws sts assume-role. I ran that to assume the role I needed, ran the commands for the action I was taking, and was surprised when I got permission denied responses back. I had assumed after running aws sts assume-role, subsequent commands in the same shell would be run as the assumed role. The documentation clearly states: “Returns a set of temporary security credentials”. In hindsight, it does exactly what it says on the tin: it returns credentials; it does not use them.

The AWS cli has several methods for configuring what user/role to use for commands. You likely have a default profile and may have other named profiles in a credentials file, which you can use with the --profile argument for most commands. You can also set environment variables to override the default set in the credentials file. I’m going to use that behavior to make assume-role behave the way I want it to.

The three environment variables the AWS cli needs are AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, and AWS_SESSION_TOKEN, which are returned in the Credentials structure of the response from assume-role. We can use the query argument to isolate the Credentials:

credentials=$(aws sts assume-role --role-arn some-role-arn --role-session-name my-session --query Credentials)

and then use jq to pull the values out into environment variables:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=$(echo $credentials | jq -r '.AccessKeyId')

Expanding on that idea, I have the following as assume_rule.sh:

unset AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
unset AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
unset AWS_SESSION_TOKEN

credentials=$(aws sts assume-role --role-arn $ROLE_ARN --role-session-name $ROLE_SESSION_NAME --query Credentials)
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=$(echo $credentials | jq -r '.AccessKeyId')
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=$(echo $credentials | jq -r '.SecretAccessKey')
export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=$(echo $credentials | jq -r '.SessionToken')

echo "New Identity:"
aws sts get-caller-identity

First, I unset the three environment variables in case they were previously set. If they were still set, the call to assume-role could fail if the configured user doesn’t have permission to assume the role or if they are set to temporary credentials and the session token has expired. Then it exports the three variables from the response as above and then calls aws sts get-caller-identity so I can verify the new role was set correctly. This assumes my default profile has permission to assume the role, but I haven’t needed to assume a role from a different profile yet. I’ll add the ability to do that when it comes up.

I use this like so:

ROLE_ARN=some-role-arn
ROLE_SESSION_NAME=my-session
source assume_role.sh

Note, the script must be run with source (or .) so the variables are set in the current shell. When you’re finished running commands as the assumed role, you can unset the three environment variables to return to your default profile.

The Self-Hosted Hurdle

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 18:31:23 -0400

At some point in the last few years, I became interested in self-hosted services, probably via r/homelab and r/homeserver. It serves two purposes: a hobby and a way to have useful things with less reliance on big tech companies. Because it’s a hobby, setting up new services or improving my environment don’t always feel like work. It’s frustrating when there are issues, but the process of troubleshooting and getting the whole setup working is mostly fun.

The second purpose is also important to me, but I don’t believe self-hosting is a general purpose solution. It works for me because it’s a hobby so it’s a reasonable place to allocate time and money. Even so, sometimes I want everything to just work. I don’t want to have to worry about updates¹, backups, and network configuration; I just want my RSS reader to work or get to my HomeAssistant dashboard without any issues. As a user rather than a hobbyist, the difference is the hurdle of doing anything is massive compared to a cloud service I can sign up for. It doesn’t matter how simple the setup and maintenance processes are. The requirement to do something rather than nothing is too big of a hurdle for self-hosting to really take off outside the hobbyist space.

None of these services are accessible from the internet because I’m home most of the time, so running out of date software is less scary than it would be otherwise ↩︎

Hall of Dead Projects

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 00:32:06 -0500

I’ve never been a big fan of spending a lot of time outside of work programming, mostly because I don’t subscribe to the idea that a developer needs to eat, sleep, and breathe code to have a successful career. However, I have on occasion started a project that sounded interesting to me. To date, I have never finished one of those projects, so here I present the Hall of Dead Projects: ideas I was once excited about, but not actually excited enough to stick with building them.

Kalshi API

Before starting my new job at CHOP, I wanted to practice Go since it had been several years since I’d used it. I had recently found the event contract exchange Kalshi and decided to make a Go wrapper for their market data API because the concept seemed interesting and I was used to working with trade data from my previous job (although I would never dream of trying to trade these things with real money). I intended to build the API wrapper and then some application for viewing and annotating historical data. I made a little progress on the API portion before starting the new job and losing interest. This project was abandoned in November 2021.

NASCAR Cautions

I wanted to attempt to build a Bayesian model to predict the number of caution flags in a NASCAR race. I wrote a Python script to scrape season data (which contained number of cautions) from Racing-Reference and apply some transformation to get a simple set of features. I wanted to eventually add weather information and some other data sources that I thought would be useful for prediction. I eventually abandoned the project (probably because I was having issues getting PyMC3 to work) in July 2021, although the scripts to prepare the dataset are on Github and would be usable if I or someone else wanted to pick this up.

VirtualPitScreen

VirtualPitScreen was going to be a web app for decision making in team endurance races on iRacing, inspired by difficulties my team faced keeping track of the strategies the cars around us were using in the virtual 12 Hours of Sebring. During the real-life 12 Hours of Sebring the following week, I started working on a console app that pulled data from the iRacing client and generated events that would let us keep track of lap times, driver schedule, and pit strategy of our team and our competitors. The end goal of the project was to be able to see at any time in the race whether the cars around us were following the same pit strategy and if we could expect to catch the car in front of us based on previous lap times. This would be extremely useful for endurances races and I’d lke to get back to this at some point, but for now it lives in the Hall, abandoned in March 2021.

Minute C#

Inspired by a Reddit post by someone who created daily, one minute videos to explain Python concepts, I decided to do the same for C#. I created Twitter and Youtube pages for the project (with a logo and everything!). The project survived through three videos and planning a few more that I never got around to recording. I abandoned this one around the end of February 2021.

RaceStation

I wanted to build an NLP project to practice some machine learning skills I had let fade away after grad school. I had an idea to download comments from the /r/NASCAR race threads and build a binary classification model to predict whether or not the comment described something happening in the race. The end goal here was to use this to select comments that would provide a live overview of what had happened so far in the race. I intended to eventually pull in tweets as well and build other features to see what people were talking about during races. I got as far as using PRAW to download a ton of comments from old race threads before abandoning the project some time in 2020.

Update: This was originally published as a standalone posts before being added as a List on the homepage. The opening paragraph originally started: “Looking at my 2021 year in review post today, the fact that I never finish big side projects stuck out to me.”

2021 Year in Review

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 21:35:52 -0500

Driving home after Christmas, my wife and I had a quick year in review discussion and I thought it would be good for me to document a look back at the past year. Here is a quick rundown of what this year looked like for me and a short list of goals for 2022.

Work

I started a new job in November working at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, working on tools used for genomics research. Going from options trading to medical research was a massive change, but I’m enjoying it so far. Having not thought about biology at all since high school, I’ve had plenty to do getting up to speed on the domain. I’m working mostly with Go, which I had used in an internship in college but didn’t remember much of. It’s been fun taking my little experience writing Go and starting to learn how to write Go well.

Not Work

It’s been an interesting year in general. After spending most of the first half of the year at home, my wife and I celebrated our wedding reception in June, which had been postponed from last year. After, we took a trip to Burlington, Vermont, which was lovely. In the second half of the year, we resumed working on projects on our house. The major ones were turning the leftover sand pit from the previous owners' above-ground pool into a sitting area with a fire pit and fixing up our basement.

I probably have too many hobbies because I frequently find I’m not spending enough time on any of them, but that seems like a nice problem to have.

First, music. I unfortunately haven’t played as much this year as I wanted to. Toward the end of the year, I picked up trombone again after not playing it much since the start of the pandemic. On guitar, I stopped playing for some time because I was struggling with pain in my fretting wrist that was coming largely from poor technique and excessive tension in my grip. I’m trying to slow down and really focus on technique and removing tension. It’s difficult and will take a long time, but hopefully it will lead to me being a better guitar player than I was before.

One hobby I spent a lot of time on this year was simracing. At the end of 2020, I found a team to race with and we competed in the iRacing 24 Hours of Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring, and 24 Hours of Spa Francorchamps. The 24 hour races are awesome, but having a turn driving the car (in VR) at 2am does interesting things to my sleep schedule for the weekend. 12 hours is more manageable since it’s all in one day, but it’s still exhausting. Great fun, but I’m happy to only run a few endurance events each year.

Like seemingly everyone else, I got into cycling during the pandemic. In March of this year I bought a new bike and rode as much as I could find time for all spring and summer. I participated in my first organized ride in August and had a blast, so I’m hoping to do more of those next year. We bought a spin bike for the basement this fall, and I’m enjoying that while it’s dark when I finish work for the day.

This year I gained more interest in the fediverse and the indie web. I finally got this site set up (I bought the domain name in 2018!) although I didn’t end up publishing much of anything. I’m on Mastodon and also post there infrequently, but that’s improving.

Looking Ahead

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, but I want to set a few minor goals for the next year. I’m in the process of trying to improve a bunch of things right now, so it would be good to write some of them down.

Work: I’m still very early in the new job, so I think it’s worth including a goal for the year to finish getting up to speed and start making bigger contributions.
Cleaning: I know I’m happier when my house is clean and organized, so I’m trying to establish better day to day habits to avoid needing bigger cleaning days.
Reducing cell phone use: I spend a lot of time on my phone, mostly on Reddit. This year, I’m trying to reduce that (especially right before bed!) in favor of things like games and more structured reading.
Online presence: I want to write more, even if it isn’t about big projects I’m working on, since I never finish those. I think it’ll be great for me to organize my thoughts and get them written down. I intend to post more online and get more involved in the indie web.
Amateur radio: I didn’t include this one in the hobbies section because I just picked this up again in the last few weeks, but in 2022 I’m looking to upgrade to my General class license and start doing POTA activations. It’s a cool hobby and I’ve been licensed since 2012, so it seems like a good time to start doing something with it.
Music: I should be starting with an orchestra soon, so I’ll need to get back a lot of the skill and endurance on trombone that I’ve lost from not playing for so long.

I’m writing this mostly for myself and I haven’t posted anything else that would bring anyone to my website, so I’m really not expecting anyone to read this, but if you are, thank you for that and happy new year.

Hello

Mon, 17 May 2021 21:30:21 -0400

Hello! I have wanted to start a blog for a long time, to have a place to pratice my writing, put my thoughts, and share things I’ve worked on. I don’t know yet exactly what I"ll post or how frequently, but this is the start. Posts will mostly be related to software engineering, data science, and other technology. Data related projects will intersect with my other hobbies in music and motorsports. There are a lot of places to go and I hope you’ll join me.

What’s in a name?

I know the name Broken Intuition is a little odd. I came up with the name a few years ago while I was working on my master’s degree. When studying statistics and machine learning, I kept noticing that what I expected, my intuition, was very different from reality. I had to learn to ignore that so I could understand. Figuring that situation would be common among people learning statistics, I wanted to create a website where I could write about working through that feeling. That never happened, but I bought the domain name and have been using it as a username since then, so I decided to reuse the name for this site.